I was chasing this issue with my previous desktop which, at the time, was in my bedroom. I've always preferred sleep/hibernate over shutting it down but when Windows decided it knew better and to constantly wake it from sleep in the middle of the night to do updates, filling my room with light from all the case/fan leds, I was about ready to go Office Space on the thing. What was worse, it wouldn't go back to sleep after the updates were complete.
Even worse, Microsoft made it so very hard to hunt down all the various settings and registry flags to disable that behavior, AND it reverted to those same settings after every major update. I absolutely despised that desktop for a while.
I had the exact same experience. Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update. It's one of the major reasons I decided to switch to desktop Linux permanently.
> Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update.
while i understand the intention behind automatic updates, i feel it's an anti-user design. It is based on the assumption (a bad one) that the user isn't intelligent enough to do the update at a time suitable for them. It assumes that the windows design and dev team knows better. It takes control away from the user.
Rather than forcing automatic updates, it is better to teach the user why updates are important. Education beats subversion.
Software companies designed very intrusive update systems that pestered users. Then they made many updates that break software. This created a culture of hostility to updating. This caused some issues.
Then the software companies and developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the best approach was to force updates on the users. Because when people are already upset with your awful updating mechanisms then forcing them to do so is surely going to improve things. And now we have people crippling update functionality as a result.
They tried that. We're all suffering because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches. Of course, now Microsoft has made it even worse by having routinely broken patches since they no longer do proper in-house testing. End result? Damned if you do patch, damned if you don't.
Windows 10 has been a nightmare in terms of patch quality.
> because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches
No, they were very responsible. They knew the updates are likely going to be UX downgrades, slow the machine down, make it bluescreen more, or possibly even brick it. That was the experience around Vista/7. That's still the experience today, maybe sans the bluescreen.
The cardinal sin of Microsoft and every other company pushing automatic updates is update commingling. Mixing up security patches (which users need and might even want) with generic bug fixes (which users need and like) with feature updates (which users don't need, and rightfully don't like). As long as all of those are mixed, updating is a risky job, and many users will responsibly decide not to do it.
I don't mind automatic updates, but I at least want to know when they're going to happen. There are two important pieces of information that are apparently impossible to obtain: "if I put my computer to sleep, will it wake up and update?" and "if I leave my computer on for the next <X> hours, will it reboot and update?"
Half of the time I read the comments here I wonder why people even use Windows. Kudos on you, your computer randomly waking you up because you have no control about anything is none of your issues anymore :)
Even worse, Microsoft made it so very hard to hunt down all the various settings and registry flags to disable that behavior, AND it reverted to those same settings after every major update. I absolutely despised that desktop for a while.