My biggest peeve with windows is when I am done and I tell the machine to shut down, I am greeted by a message stating that the system is installing updates and I shouldn’t pull the power cord. I don’t always have 45 minutes to allow the update to do its thing.
I hate that too. Hey, who’s in charge here? Windoze doesn’t even have the courtesy to ask, Would now be a convenient time to install the updates?
I don’t like that either, but it usually doesn’t take very long unless there has just been some major patching after a black tuesday. One of the reasons I don’t set my computer to auto-update.
The worst part of using Windows is developing Windows applications in Windows, thanks to Windows Update:
My development PC at work will always have lots of applications running: Visual Studio, MSSQL Studio, various SOAP and XML tools, FTP clients, web service testers, Sublime, VB.NET development, Explorer folders opened up across mapped drives nested five directories deep, etc. I have dual screens and fill them both with running apps I need to stay open overnight because I’m actively developing and designing in an Agile environment.
I need to leave everything the way it’s running so I can pick up where I left off, but I’ll often come into work the next morning and damned if Windows Update didn’t dump a bunch of security patches onto my machine and auto-reboot it in the wee hours of the morning. Takes fifteen minutes of flailing to reopen everything and find the right auto-save temp file created during the forced reboot.
Between the MS Windows Update and our own separate internal corporate Windows Update site, Microsoft comes and kicks over my sandcastle one or two times a week to apply patches to their F’ed up operating system... And that’s just my dev box I’m talking about; we have zillions of MS Windows Servers that constantly are undergoing reboots and patches and updates all across our enterprise.
It just flat sucks, but Microsoft just thinks they’re cool. “Hey! We introduced TOUCHSCREEN to the corporate desktop environment to make everything simpatico with your Zune music player and your Nokia Windows Phone and all those Surface RT lap-pad things that are such a big hit! And get THIS: You can TALK to Bing now! Pretty bitchin’, huh? HUH?!”
No, not bitchin’. Totally gay, actually. Shoot yourselves in the face, Microsoft.