Or you wake up, get dressed for an important meeting, unlock your door, and suddenly realize you're going to be late because your car decided this was the best time to finish refueling in spite of your instructions to refuel at another time of day.
See update notifications? At the end of the day, restart and install the updates. It's not rocket science. It doesn't just hit patch Tuesday and then reboot immediately, shafting you. And it doesn't screw your workflow up.
Really this has to be done because even the best of us put it off eternally.
The whole point of active hours is that, when updates are pending, they install and the system reboots outside the hours in which I've expressed the desire to have my machine not reboot itself. Yet I've lost count of the number of times where this does not happen - I see an update notification, shrug and assume it'll be applied in the window I've set, and take no action - only to find the next day that the updates haven't been applied, the reboot hasn't been performed, and if I don't interrupt my work day by applying updates and rebooting immediately - which rarely takes less than 15 minutes, not counting getting all my tools up and going again - then I can rely on losing some work, and a lot of time, later on, when something important needs doing on a deadline. And that's insane! If for whatever reason the updates legitimately can't be applied in the window, the right action in response is to wait for the next window, and not to fuck-start my workday. That is always the wrong thing to do.
I mean, I get what you're saying, right? If active hours worked as claimed, you'd have a real point here. But they do not work reliably at all, and that's a whole 'nother issue.
A client had started a time consuming process before leaving the office, came back the following morning with the process having failed due to windows applying updates and rebooting killing the process and losing a day worth of work.
YMMV.
I don't know what you mean by "this has to be done", there is no obligation to apply updates. What if I want my computer to run a windows without updates ? Am I not entitled to use my own property as I so choose ?
> I don't know what you mean by "this has to be done", there is no obligation to apply updates. What if I want my computer to run a windows without updates ? Am I not entitled to use my own property as I so choose ?
If your machine becomes a botnet node and causes problems for other people, which is a big problem, then you forfeit the right. The same thing if your apartment leaks water into another one. Be a good citizen.
Failed updates, now that's the only valid part of your point. I've had a few and they weren't disruptive but this is just my case.
There was no event log or logs of any kind, her system got entirely replaced by win10. For this specific case I would tend to not trust the log anyways. What I do find strange is that the windows 10 installation process should have asked to accept the EULA before installing, it did not and went on as if it was an unattended installation.
Good luck trying to explain people that they have to forfeit their freedom because they have to behave like good citizen. Anyways windows update is barely relevant here as the common vector used for botnet infection is almost always the user, not windows vulnerability.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings
Set DWORD IsActiveHoursEnabled to 0.
I'm nearly resigned to the fact that I may have to segregate engineering workstations to their own network and whitelist their traffic.
IsActiveHoursEnabled is ignored.
At that point you should probably be using windows server + wsus. Which give you a lot more control over updates.
You should assume that windows users doing batch stuff over night are people who have better things to do with their computers during their day or want their computer to work for them while they're not sitting in front of it. Try considering the whole instead of splitting to only address the large majority.
Windows 10 is focused as a consumer os, designed for users to run their applications. Similar to iOS or android.
If you want to run batch operations, use the right product.
Sorry, but this does come across as a bit asinine.
What's the right product for running software written for Microsoft Windows, if not Microsoft Windows?
"Users running their applications" isn't just Grandma on Facebook, or your little sister playing Candy Crush Saga. Microsoft's unquestionable strength has been it's support for enterprise, small-business and professional desktop users. There is a lot of deserved anger thrown their way as a result of deliberate decisions to force flexibility and choice-limiting behavior down the throat of their core market.
My shop is small, but I can count COMSOL, SolidWorks, OrCAD, LabVIEW, various SPICE frontends, and a dozen other small odds and ends for instrument control and data capture without even leaving the engineering suite. All of which are going to be forever stuck on Win 7, at this rate.
You may get the need to have things to run overnight using engineering, simulation, rendering products with some sort of long running process. But these normally have server component that you install onto Windows Server, which the client offloads to.
I'll be sure to let them know that long-running computations deskside are now only an experimental feature /s
In all seriousness though, we've managed over a decade without the need for dedicated compute nodes along with the costs that would entail. The only case I can make for that right now is that current Windows now ships with unpredictable uptime.
However this IS definitely an edge case and it is possible to turn it off. I have run a physical host as a build agent that has uptime of months on Windows 10.
This is administrative competence, not a problem with the product or the use case.
WSUS + Windows server is definitely fine for most workloads though.
I have this dreadful feeling that Microsoft is A/B testing this stuff, making sure that there is just enough inconsistency between sites to sow doubt and confusion.
I wish we used wsus though. M
And if you want your machine to DDoS Playstation Network that's your right too, right?
And if I want my kid to get measles and spread it around, that's my right?
As much as you may argue it's your machine, and your right, sooner or later your choices start to impact other people. What about their rights, then?
Man you're in for an amazing time when you will learn about that stupidity called the Internet of Things.
(and yes, I am well aware of, and utterly terrified/upset/bamboozled by, the Internet of Things)
Still, I see the software you're using as much a part of the problem as Windows here. Needing weeks of solid up-time to complete something is a challenge and doesn't seem like a realistic assumption by a developer for software running on Windows.
Why can't it remember progress and resume after a restart? That would not only make the impact of Windows Updates much smaller, but also power outages and the like.
Definitely gunna use this as an opportunity to resume that conversation though
Mine is that this has never happened to me since I switched to different OSs than Microsoft's, circa windows XP.
However the former has a different security model and the latter is mainly run by experts. The point is moot.