It’s funny you mention Microsoft, because I have a windows machine to play games on. It regularly updates itself and re-enables telemetry I had disabled, shows spammy news in the start menu and ads for Microsoft products in my toolbar, and reinstalls skype every time I try to get rid of it.
Windows 10 "pre-installs" a load of BS Casino/Farmville-esque games. Not install, "pre-install" as in the files to install are there, but it's not actually installed so you can't remove them via the usual method, you have to find the right PowerShell commands.
These are the games advertised/installed from the start menu / tiles.
I wonder if there are some differences between Windows 10 versions (like Home, Professional etc) there. I have never had that happen. I have Windows 10 Pro.
I multiboot Windows 10 Pro and a variety of Unixen. Been doing it for decades and it's been getting harder lately because Microsoft's updates have been acting more and more like they own the place.
The most recent nag-you-to-use-edge update didn't just forget to restore the defaultness of my Arch EFI entry--a mistake I could forgive--it deleted it. Luckily I could boot into Debian and restore the entry because the asshats at Microsoft didn't expect there to be a second Linux lying around.
Also, it somehow discovered that I'm not I'm Greenwich, and changed my hardware clock to local time (thereby confusing the other OS'es).
Not sure what telemetry mattnewton was talking about, but I can confirm that in general, Microsoft updates are not to be trusted.
I just booted Windows for the first time this month earlier this evening. Saw it installing updates when I shut it down. God knows what messes I'll be cleaning up in the morning.
So far as I know, Windows always expects the hardware clock to be in local time. I found some registry hack that fixes this, and I think that the update broke the hack which later triggered a network time sync.
Admittedly the situation was a bit janky in the first place, so I might share some blame in that case.
I have Windows 10 Pro. It is horrible. And, I have no choice in any of it.
Advertisements pop up at random times. I am constantly turning things off, and they get turned back on again. I am diligent about checking for updates at the end of my work day, and then turning off scheduled updates. I cannot afford to wait for a "Do not turn off your computer" screen.
That's McAfee/HP, not Windows. It probably came preinstalled by whoever sold you the laptop. Uninstall all preinstalled crapware or just do a clean windows reinstall when you buy a laptop.
I assure you, being diligent about checking for updates is more than enough to solve that issue and there is no need to disable updates in addition. If you install them regularly, then you will not be interrupted. You will only be interrupted if you don't do that for weeks.
If you don't believe me, then just try it. Don't base your decisions on FUD from tech bloggers about how terrible the update process is.
I assure you, being diligent about checking for updates is more than enough to solve that issue and there is no need to disable updates in addition. If you install them regularly, then you will not be interrupted.
Changing back settings that you already changed once and an update reverted is still an interruption.
Having ads or new social-media-backed login screens shoved in your face when you try to run your software is still an interruption.
Restoring damaged or destroyed data from backups is still an interruption.
Reinstalling a wrecked system because some device driver or anti-virus update rendered it inoperable is still an interruption.
We are far from the rosy future you describe in some of your comments here. You might have been lucky enough not to get caught out recently, but clearly many people and businesses have not been so lucky.
About a year ago, I had some problems with WSL and decided to do a proper dual-boot setup. The net result was that Windows insisted on doing a long update cycle every time I attempted to use it. This resulted in an effective boot time of 15-30 minutes, which turned out to never be worth it.
Why do these devices with almost no moving parts need weekly (or monthly) maintenance? We don’t accept that level of neediness from any other household tool.
It's because more people use chrome than use edge, which is clearly a broken situation. They're determined to fix it though, no matter how many updates it takes.
For starters, that's a totally unrelated issue from what the other poster was talking about. That is clearly a bug and not an expected behaviour.
But consider that you don't use any other household tool for 8+ hours a day, and other household tools are not designed to serve a rapidly moving target of constantly changing application needs.
> That is clearly a bug and not an expected behaviour.
No, it’s just a reflection that the pace of updates exceeded my pace of attempting to use Windows. These all applied successfully, and an immediate reboot was fine.
> But consider that you don’t use any other household tool for 8+ hours a day
I don’t use my household computer nearly that much, either. At a guess, it sees a comparable amount of use as my dishwasher which demands significantly less attention. (My office computer is a different story).
> Other household tools are not designed to serve a rapidly moving target of constantly changing application needs.
Regardless of its design intent, my application needs aren’t rapidly changing: I use a computer for roughly the same things as I did 1 or 2 or 3 years ago. Why should I pay the time cost of upgrades to enable features I have no intention of using?
This is not out of fear, this is my process so that I can do my work:
I use the computer pretty much everyday. I temporarily turn on the scheduled update every night after work. I wait for it to check, and update and restart if needed. After all of the checks, updates, and restarts I turn off the scheduled updates to avoid the risk of updates occurring during work. So far, good enough.
It is not from anything that I have installed. It is obviously from the PC vendor (HP, Dell), Microsoft Windows and Edge, anti-virus software, and maybe some others that I am not aware of. I have tried to turn off everything I can. It is annoying to have click off every option individually as there is no select all, and then click a back button and have everything turned on again by default and to have to turn everything off again individually.
After a while, certain notifications get turned on again without me having turned them on and without my permission.
I have Win10 Pro. Updates put new 'Apps' on very frequently, the number shown on the Start menu have become a lot larger since install.
The updates turn telemetry on, I haven't even bothered turning it off now, not using Blackbird, or scripting with WMI (you cannot use the Task Scheduler GUI to turn it off ('Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser' under 'Application Experience')), you just get an error unlike everything else.
It used to be quite something to watch the Telemetry read your entire hard drive to do whatever it did, and it did slow the computer down. But it seems to be better now, haven't noticed any performance issues with it at least (Windows Defender is the noticeable one now, but not that bad). Maybe it is better because the EU looked specifically at Microsoft Telemetry and the introduction of GDPR laws, I don't know. It has most definitely taught me to monitor my home PC all the time for things like file access and memory usage.
EDIT: Telemetry may been better for me because it seems it has not been enabled by recent updates (all of 2020), at least for the scheduled task part of it. I was so used to updates re-enabling telemetry that I had assumed that one of them would have after a few months. My bad, and my apologies.
