
Windows’ “Active Hours” shows you’re not in control of your devices (2016) - throwaway888abc
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-active-hours.html
======
mrjin
It was simply arrogance and stupid: How would they know when the user is going
to be inactive and the computer can be restarted? A couple of years ago, one
of my colleague's computer was rebooted for updating in the middle of a
important presentation to his boss and the time needed to complete was over
two hours. Now they allow the user to specify an active windows which is a
little bit less stupid but my question still stands. Even the user cannot tell
exactly when she/he would not be using the computer but for sure M$ product
managers decided that they KNOW. And the more funny thing is that the benefit
they can get by doing that is very limited or even NIL as how could they ever
know what the user would set that that window to and whether the user isn't
going to shutdown/put it to sleep/hibernate before inactive windows and power
it again later?

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00deadbeef
Worse is that these forced updates sometimes break your Windows install. I use
Windows exclusively for gaming. I have installed: Steam, Steam games, nvidia
drivers, and Firefox. Hardly an unreasonable setup. Yet somehow, twice in two
years, I’ve been forced to reinstall Windows because a forced update has blown
it up and the built-in recovery tools couldn’t restore it.

I use macOS for work. Apple doesn’t force updates to happen. Despite people’s
perceptions of Apple being controlling within their walled garden, I actually
feel in control of my Mac. I don’t feel in control of my custom-built PC.

~~~
ddek
Agreed. It’s got to the point now where Windows is in a bubble - I have a 64
GB nvme that windows is installed on, and absolutely nothing else.

The number of times I’ve had to reinstall Windows, it just makes sense to have
it isolated so I don’t lose any data.

Except, I inevitably do because Windows finds a way to have files saved and
programs installed where I don’t want them.

~~~
ztjio
Interestingly, as of the most recent edition of macOS, this is how macOS
structures itself natively.

It will install the OS itself in read only mode (and encrypted) onto a
dedicated APFS Volume, with all the data on a separate APFS Volume, both
sharing the same container representing the entire boot drive.

As a user you will not notice at all unless you go looking.

This is mainly for security reasons, as I understand it. But, surely this also
makes an OS reinstall or recovery much simpler. I have not yet had the luck to
need to do either since this installation model was adopted so I don't know
what the impact (positive or negative) to the user is in such a scenario.

Anyway, I find it amusing that such a model has only recently been adopted by
a mainstream OS after so many decades of the concept being espoused as
important in the general Unix-like world. I wonder if Microsoft will follow
suit.

~~~
ornornor
That’s also how BSD does it. It’s easier to reinstall the OS then. Not that
you’d need to, BSD being as robust as it is.

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dusted
I'm only using my windows computer for playing games, so it's turned off most
of the time, it's incredibly annoying to have to wait through updates.. I
would just disconnect it entirely from the Internet, but then I can't log into
the game-delivery-platforms nor play multiplayer.

It's amazing, considering how much money is in the videogame industry, that
we've not yet seen an OS developed specifically for playing games. It could
even be shared between consoles and pcs, making it much easier for developers
to release for all platforms.

~~~
blackbear_
Perhaps that was the vision of SteamOS [1] ?

[1]
[https://store.steampowered.com/steamos](https://store.steampowered.com/steamos)

~~~
00deadbeef
That’s more of an OS (Linux) adapted for playing games than an OS designed for
playing games.

~~~
mulmen
Linux is a kernel. SteamOS is an operating system.

You could argue that SteamOS is a modified Ubuntu(?) and not a clean sheet
gaming OS but I’m not sure that distinction really matters. SteamOS is a
purpose built OS.

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mcv
I'm constantly surprised that updating a system is such a massive problem.
It's great that updates can be easily applied through the internet these days,
but it mostly seems to hurt the user experience, taking their system away from
them, killing their work.

Why can't updates be run in the background, ready to be applied when you want
it to? Give me a notification that says: "Application X is ready to update to
a new version. Your work will be saved and restored. The update will take
approximately X minutes." With buttons "Update now", "Postpone until
tomorrow", etc.

And can we please update applications without requiring the entire system to
reboot? Is it odd to think only kernel updates should require a reboot? In
fact, this might be a great argument for a microkernel architecture; the less
the kernel does, the less it needs to be rebooted. Make every other aspect of
the OS individually updateable without a full reboot. That would be pretty
awesome if it's possible. (Unfortunately I'm not enough of an OS guru to know
if this can work.)

~~~
corty
Linux distribution package managers work like this. Updates can run in the
background, processes pick up new libraries whenever they are restarted, but
updates can happen before that during normal operation mostly without any
disturbance (there are some exceptions to this, e.g. Firefox behaves strangely
if updated while running). Unix file systems generally allow overwriting files
in use, processes that already had it open get the old version, new processes
get the new file transparently. Only kernel updates really need a reboot, and
the occasional related stuff like kernel modules (but even that is rare, you
can e.g. update your Nvidia driver and only need to restart X11, not the
kernel, however, it is easier to just reboot). There is e.g. checkrestart and
similar tools that tell you which processes you might want to restart after a
given update by checking library dependencies.

There are occasional rare glitches this system wouldn't catch, like e.g.
artwork being changed resulting in a mix of old and new icons, but that
doesn't happen if you just stick to normal releases of stable distributions
like Debian.

I always pity my windows colleagues in the week after patch tuesday. Our Linux
boxes are automatically updated 4 times a day, reboot is automated for login
servers for when nobody is logged in (with some help of loadbalancing), other
servers generate a mail and we reboot them when convenient. But reboots are
rare. Automatic unattended updates breaking stuff is even more rare, I think
two instances in 10 years.

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kd5bjo
An important corollary: if you turn off your computer when you’re not actively
using it, you’re going to have a bad time. The updates that are supposed to
happen in the background instead force you to wait while they run.

So you have to save and shut down everything at the end of the day to not lose
work, but also leave the computer eating electricity in case it wants to
update.

~~~
rkachowski
Not only that but if powered off, the windows machine will actively power
itself on late in the night unless drastic measures are taken to disable this
feature. The amount of times I have been spooked by ventilation noise +
monitors turning on at 2am is far too much.

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foxrob92
This is exactly why I changed all of my personal machines to Linux.
Unfortunately I'm bound to Windows at work (work is a MS shop).

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tdeck
The real issue is that Windows updates themselves take way too long, and
mostly seem to require a restart. Why is the former worse than before and the
latter still so bad?

~~~
freeone3000
The removal of incremental patching means most major updates are now secretly
a reinstall. This has increased system stability - now patched installs and
fresh installs are the same. The rebooting even for minor updates is due to
files not being able to be changed while they're open, so a change to, ex,
gdi32.dll is going to prompt a restart, regardless of the size.

~~~
ztjio
That doesn't really explain why an updated to, say, .NET forces a restart. Far
too many updates force restarts when it seems they shouldn't require it. It's
not just the main OS updates.

~~~
alkonaut
I'm guessing applications will be running with the old libraries loaded and
developers should be able to count on this one-version-only situation (e.g.
ABI between processes). Forcing a restart is just the simple but crude way of
ensuring that no applications are using any system files (.NET _is_ part of
the OS, up until .NET Core).

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mike503
I was annoyed that it doesn’t let you block out more than 18 hours in a 24
hour period. I legitimately do have 20ish hours of possible active hours.

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llimos
You can set active hours through PowerShell:

    
    
      Set-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings -Name ActiveHours[Start|End] -Value xx
    

So, while this is a really bad idea in practice, theoretically you could have
a Scheduled Task that keeps changing your active hours in a rolling window so
you never hit it.

~~~
freeone3000
After 14 days, updates will be applied regardless of active hours.

~~~
llimos
I wasn't suggesting anyone actually _do_ this

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blackbear_
I wonder if it is possible to prevent updates by blocking connections to MS's
servers via firewall rules or DNS?

~~~
Xelbair
the best way i found so far is to install ancient version of win10, prior to
creator's update, block it in group policy, and set up a registry key that
your lan connection is metered.

Upside: you have full control over when your updates will be downloaded, and
when they will be applied.

Downside: you have to update manually.

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grishka
I'm a Mac user, so I'm used to the OS respecting me, but as I sometimes need
to build and debug Windows stuff, I do have a VM with Windows 10. I use it
maybe once a month, sometimes rarer. Every time I ran the VM, there inevitably
were new updates. These forced updates pissed me off enough to figure out how
to turn the update system off altogether.

If anyone's interested, here's how it works. There are several services
related to Windows Update. Some of them have their state controls in
services.msc greyed out so you presumably can't stop them. But if you leave
just one of them on, it'll reactivate the rest of them and guess what, you're
getting annoyed again. So you have to look for all services that have the word
"update" in their name or description, and set their state to "disabled"
directly in the registry, then reboot. I did this more than a year ago, and
haven't had a single update prompt ever since.

You should probably also disable everything related to telemetry while you're
at it. And uninstall the Windows Store, it's useless anyway.

~~~
pmontra
Somebody downvoted parent without adding a comment. Is that information
factually incorrect?

~~~
grishka
There's this weird category of people who think that

\- Updates are so important for security you have to install them the second
they come out (some are, but most are not), don't you dare even THINK about
using outdated/unsupported software that works just fine

\- You have no right to mess with the software running on the hardware you own

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TwoNineFive
It's Not Your Computer.

------
Havoc
>or learn more about this Linux alternative everyone is talking about …

And then quickly abandon it when they try to get 4K netflix working on it

~~~
sneak
4K Netflix works great under Linux, provided you download it using Bittorrent
instead of https.

~~~
Akronymus
I honestly don't even feel the need to have netflix in the first place. Most
shows are just kinda garbage.

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tehabe
I think the author really misunderstood the term "active hours"

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malikNF
If you are using windows without actively trying to switch everything to or
some of your critical personal work to a different OS you are an idiot. Yes
there are some software that might not work on linux, or the alternatives
might not have a feature you got on windows but you if are willing to give up
control of your own PC for some convenience you deserve to be treated like
this by corporations.

