Update Takes Over
I have two computers connected to one monitor, mouse and keyboard with a KVM switch. At night I typically fall asleep to music playing in WinAMP and my times the player is on one computer and the music is on the other. Last night I awoke at 3:00 in the morning with the computer playing the music continually repeating a half second part of the song that disappeared when the computer with XP on it rebooted all by itself.
I thought that it was unusual that the computer would reboot all by itself. Made me think that maybe there had been a momentary glitch that caused it to reboot. But then when I woke up the next morning and brought a third computer, a laptop running XP, out of hibernation it soon presented a system dialog box saying that in 4 minutes and 32 seconds it would automatically reboot! The dialog box, if I remember right, seemed to indicate that the Windows Update service had mandated this reboot.... without my agreeing to it!!!
I am a database developer and sometimes work with very large data sets and sometimes can have processes that run for hours.... and now Microsoft has deemed it kosher to reboot my computer when they deem a security threat serious enough to reboot all our computers? If I hadn't seen this happen on two computers I might have thought that it was a hardware glitch or a momentary lack of power, which I have seen knock some computers out while not others. Did this really happen? Has Microsoft changed it's Window's Update service to allow automatic rebooting of our computers or am I incorrect of my analysis of the problem? BTW....I've only observed this on computers running XP, my computers running Windows 2000 didn't suffer this reboot.
Thanks for the great letter, I am a long time Plus subscriber. Keep up the good work. I hope that you can shed some light on what happened to me last night. For lack of light at 3:00 in the morning I also knocked over a glass of water and stood there in the glow of the monitor in my home office/bedroom in a puddle of water wondering "what the ......" all the while trying to get the song that endless repeated, "Wha, wha, wha, wha, wha...... " to stop it's annoying, inopportune wakeup alarm. ---Jesse
Some updates do require a reboot, in order to replace or change files that are in use when the PC is running. When you have Windows Update set to run in full-auto mode, it will reboot when needed after running the update (the default update time is usually 3AM local time); and as you saw, it then opens a little dialog that says "update rebooted this PC" so you'll have at least some clue as to why your system restarted.
If you're running critical stuff that might need a long, uninterrupted chunk of time, your best bet may be either to turn off auto updates completely and remember to run update manually every couple days; or at most to set Update to tell you when new updates are ready; but not to do anything with them until you give the all-clear.
This normally solves the kinds of problems you've run into, Jesse, but may cause other problems, such as interfering with Windows Defender, which seems to require that full Auto-Updating be enabled. Sigh.
Official MS site on using, configuring Update:
http://support.microsoft.com/wupd
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