Windows 10 forced updates petition

Anyone had their PC bricked yet? Might want to sign the petition that’s gone up today from the excellent Susan Bradley urging microsoft to do something about the forced updates thing. I can’t imagine the headache of rolling 10 out on a network and having a dodgy update crash and burn a bunch of workstations.

Plus giving us some more damn info about what’s in those updates.

Have at it. Whether they listen though…

5 Likes

Having seen what people do when they can ignore updates I am kinda more on the about damn time side of things for forced updates. On the other hand there should be sufficient testing and better information on the hotfixes. I have yet to hear of a bricked win10 machine from an update though.

1 Like

Give it time but there’s still plenty of BSODs regarding surface pro and the recent cumulative update. Essentially i agree with you, in an ideal world they’d be properly tested but it’s not as if microsoft don’t have a track record of borked updates. And now they are forcing 10 on 7 & 8.1 users who haven’t asked for it. Oh, it was an accident? Fucking hell. Woody Leonhard is another good resource for this stuff.

Anyone who needs to kill the nagware for 10 then run this - http://blog.ultimateoutsider.com/2015/08/using-gwx-stopper-to-permanently-remove.html

Can anyone convince me why these aren’t the actions of a malware pusher?

1 Like

They are? Really? That’s funny my wife and kid are still on win7 just fine and the kids machine is still on 7 and gets scheduled updates. My guess is people were not paying attention the update configuration and opted to automatically install optional updates as well which while poor form from Microsoft it isn’t all their fault either. The surface update was FIRMWARE which is not the same thing as an OS patch. That is a hardware fix and that can go south if you are not paying attention even on the best of days. And failed to install error, that happened in vista, win7 win8, XP… so? A reboot usually fixed it but this looks like there are some bugs they are working out with the process gee imagine that for early adopters,(and this is still early adoption phase even if it is RTM) which is going to happen because as much as you test there are still things you don’t find till you break things when rolling out to the masses as the testers usually have better habit than most people. The same kind of issues I remember from XP, Vista, 7, etc, etc. Heck even with Linux and OSX.

Hell the fact that ALL OS’s need patches should give you a clue this shit will never ever work perfectly. It is a big ugly mess that works darn near all the time though. Lets us send message over the intertubes, play TF2, watch videos on demand.

Or maybe we should leave our machines unpatched and an easy mark for malware and botnets?

1 Like

Would they make it through your firewall?

Personally, I much prefer for my box to be running exactly what/how I expect it to. I need to time system updates with other library and application updates to make sure that everything works. If it didn’t work right and a backup system would only load the same updates again would be a nightmare. No thanks!

1 Like

Firewalls don’t stop the idiots from clicking where the shouldn’t. Firewalls don’t stop ad vendors and websites from hitting you with a zeroday.

And yeah I just had to disable the optional update for win10 on the kids machine, though that could have been checked because we did say yes to the please schedule me question. I wonder if thats what is happening to the other ‘forced’ users.

1 Like

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#straw

1 Like

Well crap that was a dumb move. Thats not an overnight patch. That has to be baby sat for all kinds of reasons.
Yeah that one was a dumb move by them and I am hoping they are backing out of that one.

2 Likes

There was a hell of a lot of scepticism regarding this and sounded like tin foil hattery but the evidence is there unfortunately, and this goes back to before the so called “accident” anyway. Windows update acting very funky with certain nagware updates like KB3035583 (i swear this KB is now burned on my brain for the rest of my days) reappearing after being hidden, automatically having the checkbox ticked, wiping out the registry fix to disable os upgrades etc. Doing everything they can to trick people into installing the nagware. Once users are stuck in the win 10 upgrade loop there’s no way yet to get out of it, you either upgrade or reschedule the upgrade. I do strongly recommend the GWX control panel before getting to this point.

Of course not but we need the option because microsoft updates can and certainly have broken things, a lot of us aren’t installing them with blind faith since we’ve been burned in the past. Susan bradley goes more into her reasoning for the petition here but there’s a concern an update will crash something at the most inappropriate time to troubleshoot it. Not to mention admins losing the ability to vet updates before being rolled out on a network. Though presumably the enterprise version will allow for this, at the moment the public release really seems like insider preview 2.0, using customers as beta testers for the paid release next year.

And that happens. Look maybe it is because I work in a very large corporate environment doing OS support. We get MS patches that pass all the testing internally and then every now and then it breaks something when rolled out into the production environment as it is so much larger. I work in a place that even with however many nines you want to add to the end of 99.99% there are enough machines the math says something is b0rk3d every day even with all the testing and monitoring. So I tend to have a more pragmatic view of this. Shit breaks, and people are stupid, which is why you should be backing up your data and have a plan in place in case you need to flatten and reload.

That said as I stated earlier after reading the Forbes article, automagically checking that update is bad juju because that is not a simple patch and needs babysat when it is run.

Where is that? If you are running professional/enterprise you can set up your own patching servers (and really if you are in that world you bloody well should do this) and schedule all that yourself. Actually that’s a way better environment cause everyone should have the company image and not have permissions to screw around on the machine. Way less variation to deal with.

1 Like

Decline. I’m tired of having my email inbox filled with spam from the zombie desktops of people too lazy or stupid to keep current with security updates. If you’re worried, you can simply delay the update, and see if there are any reports of problems, then let it run.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 490 days. New replies are no longer allowed.