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).
