Never mind hardening windows, how about stopping Windows update behaving like some sort of particularly malicious malware by forcing me to rebuild my machines at random after an update?
AU forced one machine to be fully reinstalled, last week's update rendered another machine inoperable with admin access denied on windows system programs (mmc etc.) followed by boot device error (disc was fine) with no restore or roll-back available, so had to rebuild that one too.
Getting very tempted to set windows update addresses to point to Host.
I hate how Windows 10 silently installs updates and then rolls them back every time I boot it up (and then forces another reboot)... all because I have a Linux bootloader installed and C: isnt the active partition.
Fuck you Microsoft. This is 2017. You've had 25+ years to perfect dual booting.
You're making it sound as if Microsoft would want dual-booting to work. Hasn't the Surface Pro been pretty bad for using Linux on it so far, compared to other notebooks?
I'm still using good old PC BIOS partitioning, dual boot Arch and Windows 10, and after every single Patch Tuesday I end up having to manually change the boot partition, update Windows, then use third party Windows software (because Microsofts built in tool wont let you set a partition containing a filesystem they don't recognise as active to switch it back to Archs /boot .
I rarely boot in to Windows 10, but very single time I do now its a 5 minute update, rollback, reboot dance. I just don't know how you could call this 'FUD' when its been painfully obvious for 10-15 years that Windows Update is about as broken and agonising as it gets.
And, while I am a 'Linux fanboy', I also have a Mac... and Apple manage to make updates a joy.
Why should Microsoft cater to people who want to boot Linux? It's not their OS. Apple doesn't either. The Linux community has to build all sorts of workarounds for Apple's crummy practices.
Furthermore, if you rarely booted Linux or your Mac - you'd have a lot of update problems with them too. In my experience, Linux Mint will literally shit all over itself when it tries to update, if you haven't constantly kept it up to date for some reason.
With Apple, if you haven't updated in a while you might be in for a good 30-60 minutes of fighting with their updater to work properly. Besides that, Apple does weird shit with hardware during updates because of the extreme measures that they go to in order to keep competitors out. That's why there has been a plague of issues with 3rd party (and even 1st part) hardware dying during OS X updates - https://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+mouse+not+working+after...
EDIT: Also, your story conflicts itself. Is it "every single patch Tuesday" or is it "I rarely boot Windows 10"?
Anyway, you should just fix your configuration to one that is supported by Microsoft. Would you run a hardware configuration that isn't supported by your Linux distro and then complain about it when it didn't work? No, you would not. And if your reply is that "I'd fix it myself..." - no you probably wouldn't. If you're one of the rare few who actually would, then you're spending the most precious resource that you have in order to do it - your time. In that case - I hope you enjoy doing it! Me? Like many people, I'll take convenience any day over ultimate flexibility.
Ahahhhh! That is why every single Windows 7 update since last October has failed on my machine with two installation trials and endless rollbacks! That explains a lot.
This may be kind of off-topic, but does anybody happen to have a link to some explanation of how to fix this without annoying things like unplugging internal drives or fiddling around with potentially dangerous disk tools? I've looked on official Microsoft community websites but they only give fairly useless advice like switching off all antivirus programs and reinstalling the whole OS from scratch.
