Friday, January 06, 2006

Dear Microsoft...

Dear Microsoft,

I would like to ask you a question about your security updates.

I understand that these are important. After all, we have to plug all the holes that your band of highly trained chimps have left all over the Windows operating system.

However, please explain this to me:

I understand that my computer needs to be restarted to install these updates (That, by the way, you downloaded and installed without my knowledge or permission.)

So I understand the need to bring up a Window on my screen that reads: “Windows has to be restarted in order to install necessary security upgrades. Click here to (Update now) or (Update later)”…with a 5 minute countdown timer, for some reason, that restarts the computer automatically once this five minutes has elapsed.

What I don’t understand is why you felt the need to program this window to pop up on my screen every 5 minutes, despite the fact I click ‘restart later’ every…single…fucking…time!

This is especially annoying when you’re halfway through a nice long blog post, get up to make coffee, and return to the computer to find that it has, indeed, restarted…removing all traces of your blog post.

Oh, and there’s nothing more fun than downloading the first 500mb of a 650mb game demo, and find that all of that has also been lost.

I mean, what’s likely to cause more problems, Microsoft? Delaying a security update that Windows has gone without for its entire product cycle up to this point? Or randomly restarting people’s computers because that security update has to be installed RIGHT NOW!

I mean, I clicked ‘Restart Later’, did you think I’d changed my mind after 5 minutes? I just lost a 1000 words of blog post and a game demo! What if I’d lost an entire academic thesis, or a business report?

I’ll be switching to Linux at the earliest possible opportunity.

1 comment:

MC Etcher said...

It is annoying. It might be to remind those people who never ever ever never shut down or reboot, but let their PC run 24/7 - and there are millions of those people.

Have you seen the Blandwagon post on this? Worth reading!