It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

kane — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:21:04 GMT

Excellent rant! I'm listening for the next installment!

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Mark Sowul — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:28:23 GMT

> the WU folks know how to do updates in an unobtrusive manner.

I'm with Norman on this one (for once). I can guarantee that I have the best "WU screwed me over" story: new XP install, overnight partitioning operation of existing data, automatic updates turned on (oops)...

Yeah, so evidently, WU decided, "hey if the user doesn't answer me when I bug them whether or not to restart the computer, I guess any open apps are irrelevant so I will just do it anyway." Hooray, my partition became totally scrambled!

Thanks a lot for nearly causing 200 GB of data to be lost, thanks for causing me to need to spend $50 for a data recovery program that could actually successfully untangle the mess that was created - it was a partition move operation, moving the 200 gb partition down 10 gb, and so there were 2 partition entries now, the original and the new one, but the move was not completed (that the "resume" functionality of the partitioning software didn't work is another bit of grief, btw). Two copies of every file, but one of each was corrupt and the other not. That was fun to sift through.

Thanks a lot WU team! I hate your guts. IMO the machine should NEVER be restarted without explicit confirmation. And as Norman pointed out, thanks for nagging me without giving me the option "I'll restart when I'm good and ready, dammit."

Needless to say I never keep AU on anymore (notify only).

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

mrk — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:14:54 GMT

Norm:

sc stop wuaserv

When you reboot at a timing of your choice, wuaserv will run again. But I prefer to install updates just before I reboot since when running with things half installed I sometimes get strange behaviour that goes away after reboot and install finishes.

The thing that I find annoying about WGA is that if you go to windows update and say don't install WGA and never show it again, it comes back into the list of critical updates the next time a change is made. If I said I don't want WGA craplet installed, and I don't want to see it in the list again ever. With the current behaviour I would never set the 'automatically install updates' option (even if there wasn't the issue of strange behaviour between install and reboot). The 'critical updates' list that gets installed automatically should ONLY be bugfixes for security, not craplets or other things being pushed down. Someone was complaining in another blog entry about itunes' update trying to foist quicktime on people during update -- I consider installing new programs/applets in the list of critical updates to be almost exactly the same thing (and therefor also extremely annoying!)

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Norman Diamond — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:37:50 GMT

You can get false positives from MSDN (with WGA on XP). Hmm wait, you're in Microsoft, so maybe this needs correction. Outside of Microsoft, one can get false positives from MSDN.

Somewhere I took a screenshot of a false half-positive in Vista too.

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:26:51 GMT

I've never seen WGA install a WGATray program, are you sure about it? Possibly this is because I don't run pirated versions of Windows (or machines with false positives).

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Marc K — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:08:31 GMT

> I'm not aware of ANY applets that are pushed via WU.

WGA was a pretty bad one. It consumed resources, did absolutely nothing for the benefit of the user and used techniques commonly used by spyware to ensure that the user did not successfully terminate the wgatray.exe process.

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Miral — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:41:02 GMT

Modern PCs don't have all that many spare resources. 32 bit OSes are limited to 3GB max RAM, and my Vista box was regularly swapping (to the point of unusability) with only 2GB RAM. And even now it frequently hits the ~40000 max handle limit.

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Igor — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:05:42 GMT

"You know the CIAs, KGBs and MI5s of this world are underfounded when the guys (and they are mostly guys) producing such software hasn't been taken out in the desert and shot a long time ago."

Quoted For Truth.

Norman, I recently run WU in Vista, it downloaded 50MB of NVIDIA drivers (which I told him to do because it was optional). It was non-intrusive except that the screen has gone blank for a few seconds after the download completed. Video driver got installed without a reboot. You can postpone installation for 4 hours if I remember correctly.

re: It's my computer, dagnabbit, not yours!

Bikedude — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 22:24:54 GMT

I hope some of the big names will listen to you.

My current pet peeve crapware is Acrobat Reader:

- it seems to run some "fast load" startup application (removed manually)

- I had to explicitly tell it to not show up inside Internet Explorer (why on Earth would I want to embedd it?)

- ...an action which has rewarded me with "ok, then that means you want me to maximize the reader window when IE launches a .pdf file!" (I have a 30" monitor, a maximized Acrobat Reader does not put me into a good mood)

- upgrade Acrobat and repeat above procedures again and again

I am also impressed by ATI's crapalyst control center that can be launched from the notification bar. ...except it takes an eternity for the poor bugger to launch! (on a core2duo with a reasonably fast SATA drive)

You know the CIAs, KGBs and MI5s of this world are underfounded when the guys (and they are mostly guys) producing such software hasn't been taken out in the desert and shot a long time ago.

Applet Mitigations

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:13:33 GMT

As I've mentioned , applets can be a plague on your system. The annoying thing is that it's possible