A while ago, I was critical of Apple for including Safari by default in their software update.  Given the widespread protest, Apple subsequently changed the update pretty much along the lines I and many others had suggested.  Today it’s Microsoft’s turn for a ribbing.  I have a 4+ year old Panasonic laptop that works great. Runs Windows XP and is usually snappy and super stable.  Yesterday morning it slowed to a complete crawl and I could not easily determine why.  Well it turns out that Microsoft was downloading some fairly massive updates.  It should not be difficult to do that in a way that does not completely suck up the performance of the machine, or at a minimum provide an easy way to pause a download if you are trying to get some work done.  But it gets better.  I have updates set to automatic download but prompt for install.  I generally like to see what’s going on and sometimes I don’t want to be interrupted in my work with the nauseating “Restart your machine” prompt that comes up every 5 minutes or so after an update that requires a restart.  The updates that downloaded this time, however, showed a much stranger behavior.  Instead of seeing any kind of prompt, they began to install automatically when I tried to shut down my machine.  Now that is wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to start.  Suffice it to say that overriding a user’s explicitly stated desire to approve installs better have a really good reason (and doing so at shutdown on a laptop without the power plugged in is a total recipe for disaster).

A while ago, I was critical of Apple for including Safari by default in their software update.  Given the widespread protest, Apple subsequently changed the update pretty much along the lines I and many others had suggested.  Today it’s Microsoft’s turn for a ribbing.  I have a 4+ year old Panasonic laptop that works great. Runs Windows XP and is usually snappy and super stable.  Yesterday morning it slowed to a complete crawl and I could not easily determine why.  Well it turns out that Microsoft was downloading some fairly massive updates.  It should not be difficult to do that in a way that does not completely suck up the performance of the machine, or at a minimum provide an easy way to pause a download if you are trying to get some work done.  But it gets better.  I have updates set to automatic download but prompt for install.  I generally like to see what’s going on and sometimes I don’t want to be interrupted in my work with the nauseating “Restart your machine” prompt that comes up every 5 minutes or so after an update that requires a restart.  The updates that downloaded this time, however, showed a much stranger behavior.  Instead of seeing any kind of prompt, they began to install automatically when I tried to shut down my machine.  Now that is wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to start.  Suffice it to say that overriding a user’s explicitly stated desire to approve installs better have a really good reason (and doing so at shutdown on a laptop without the power plugged in is a total recipe for disaster).