You know what’s awesome? When you leave a long-running process going overnight on your computer, and return the next day expecting to see the results, but instead realize that Automatic Updates rebooted your computer for you, killing the process and losing all of your process’s progress! Yeah, that’s my bad for not remembering to disable Automatic Updates on this new computer, but this is terrible usability. How hard would it have been to make Automatic Updates check my running processes to see if anything looked really, really busy before forcing a reboot?!?
Also, if you use OneCare Live, you get the nice circle-of-redness if you disable the "force a reboot on my computer any time you want" feature. This. Sucks.
Yes, it sucks. But remember, they’re reworking windows to be aimed at the hardcore dumbass. That’s why UAC is such a fucking nagfest. Some idiots just DON’T get it. So, they’re looking at it in B&W:
Option 1: Newb gets his computer restarted after updates, so he’s much less likely to be vulnerable to attack. Normal to Experienced users may forget to disable this the first time or two, but they’ll know how to change if they want.
Option 2: Newb is gonna be lazy, and be all "don’t restart, I’m playing flash games and clicking popups currently!". They never allow it to restart. They get all sorts of malware/adware/spyware/viruses and spread the "OH GAWD THIS IS SUCH A CRAPPY SYSTEM APPLE MAKES REAL COMPUTERS!!!!!".
@xZAO99x
Hah, yeah, wouldn’t want to be one of those Mac users. There’s no chance this happened on a computer appropriately named VistaMac. Nope. None. 😐
I think there should be an option 3: check running processes, see if there’s anything actively running. If so, prompt the user, or wait until the process exits before attempting a reboot. This addresses both problems. Newbs aren’t going to play Flash games forever, so eventually the computer can restart. And us experienced users don’t get our apps killed and rebooted unexpectedly.
What if what’s actively running is a virus though, that spawns itself at night, so the user isn’t there to answer the prompt?
Do what it does if you have automatic-kill-and-reboot disabled: nag the user every 15 minutes or so about pending updates. It could even tell them why it didn’t automatically apply the update: "FYI, updates were not applied because L33tHAckT00l.exe was running."
Yeah, maybe the really dumb n00bz would ignore that and never patch their systems, but if that’s the case, they deserve what they get. I deserve to be able to leave something running and not have it killed because Windows feels like rebooting.