Yes, you read it correctly. I f#cking hate windows. Why? Well, let me explain;
Microsoft has this nice feature called Automatic Updates. Basically nothing wrong with that. It makes sure that you have the latest patches and updates without having to think too much about it.
Every now and then you get a mildly annoying question if you want to reboot (no, off course not... I'm working at this moment), but you can postpone those during the day. So when you shutdown the laptop/PC at the end of the day, the changes are taken into effect, and you can be (pretty) sure that your system is up-to-date the next time you boot it up.
So far nothing wrong.......
Somehow there are certain updates which enforces a reboot of itself (see the screenshot below). This is a reboot from hell, because no matter what documents you have open, no matter how many things you need to save before restarting. This bug-from-hell (I have no other words for it), will close everything by force and reboots your system. And with force I really do mean force.
Automatic Update RebootNormally, when you close a program, you get a question if you would like to save the document if it has changed. Even when you shutdown the PC the official way, the shutdown process stops (actually, it hangs, because stuff stops responding) at those dialogs. Waiting for your input. But this enforced reboot ignores this all together.
After the first message appears on your screen you've got exactly 5 minutes to change its mind. So if you're at lunch, or on the toilet, you might be in deep sh#t. Because when you come back, the OS has rebooted. Every open document (saved or NOT) is closed, and you can start over again.
The worst part is that a unwanted shutdown can (and will at some point) corrupt data. Something you don't want, but just happened to me....
Damages:
- Corrupt Outlook PST file
which was an archived mail file, which can be recovered from an earlier backup. - Corrupt MS-Word document
thankfully the auto-save function was enabled and recovery seemed to work. No idea what content is missing yet. - Lost several notepad files which were open with several to-do things, and pieces of code I was working on.
And that's why I love Apple OSX, and f#cking hate Windows.
B.t.w. I already blogged about this feature a while back, but I hadn't lost any data that time. This time it's personal.
Oh, and spare me the advise on reconfiguring Automatic Updates, because this feature should not even exist.