I got a bit pissed off today and I have shut off the automatic update feature in Windows XP.
I was writing a few articles in Notepad++ for my renovation blog, my personal blog and an IT related work blog/community that I contribute to for my work with YWAM when I had to step away to take care of my daughter, who is having her first birthday today.
Windows Automatic Update decided during that time to do the 5-minute count down for restart to finish some sort of update on my computer. Because I had just walked away for a few minutes I had not saved my articles before walking away, so when my computer automatically restarted I lost all the work that I had done on the articles.
It’s partly my fault for not saving, but it’s not very often that your computer automatically restarts without you approving it. Microsoft’s way of making people opt-out of a restart, instead of authorizing a restart sucks.
So that is why I have turned off automatic update now on my Windows XP machine.
To change your Windows Automatic Update settings you need to go into the control panel, double click on the “Automatic Updates” link and then choose what level of updating you want. I have not actually turned it off completely, but instead I have set it to automatically download the updates, but to prompt me before installing the updates.
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