The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Leren]

Hi MM, I can suggest 4 possible solutions for your update problem.

1. Try the active hours option, like I said above.

2. Google "Windows 10 turn off automatic updates". There are plenty of hits but they all sound a bit geeky to me, and they may depend on which update of W10 you have. Not recommended by me.

3. The commonsense option of disconnecting your PC from the net while you are asleep. Of course I'm assuming this won't upset your overnight process, but it can't be any worse than if your net connection was interrupted for some other reason.

4. Another option is to right click on the Windows button and hover over the Shut down or sign off option. Mostly the menu that comes up says Shut Down, Restart etc. However, if an update is imminent, it sometimes says Update and Shut Down etc. Sometimes this is the first warning I've had that an update is imminent, so I am prewarned.

Leren

<edit> I've just realised that 4 works the way it does, because I am in the active hours period, so 4 is a consequence of 1. Maybe you can set your active hours twice a day, once when you get up and again when you retire. Of course that assumes that you actually do sleep, which in your case I'm not quite sure

[1to9only]

Still looking for a perfect way to prevent auto updates.

If you are ok with manually updating win10, you'll need to stop the USOClient (Update Session Orchestrator) program from running, see this article here, it works with 1709 and 1803, i never installed 1809 but it should still work...

[Mathimagics]

RE: Unauthorised Restarts

I have had both Win-Updates and that USO-reboot thingy disabled for some time - since 29/12/2018, in fact, according to Settings, and so I remain with the version I had then namely 1803)

I will try and cultivate a habit of network disconnection when I sleep, which I actually do on occasion , but I am unsure that this will have any effect on this particular problem: unauthorised-restart + updates-disabled + non-crash-related. There appears to be nobody reporting that the update-disabling mechanism itself doesn't work properly.

There are so many instances of update-related and/or driver-crash-related problems that these rarer cases are very hard to pick out from the background noise. Or should that be "cacophony"? It is some consolation to find that many other users share my indignation that unauthorised restarts that are not crash related should EVER be allowed to happen.

I do remember that of the 3 or 4 similar instances that I found when first enraged by this, NONE of them were ever explained or resolved.

[Leren]

Hi MM,

You could alternatively cultivate a habit of changing your active hours settings twice a day, once when you get up and once when you, apparently, retire. That way you should always be notified of any pending updates and handle them accordingly.

Network disconnection presumably has the same risks as a disconnection for some other reason, power failure or ISP crash - has that sort of thing ever caused any problems ?

I also have remembered another W10 gripe - the way Edge handles the Paste buffer. I also participate in another puzzle game, which requires me to copy the puzzle from a web page into a spreadsheet.

I was doing this simply under Windows 7 and Chrome. When W10 and Edge came along the result was a disaster, I had to write a routine to unpack the Edge corrupted data.

I installed Chrome and it worked exactly the way it did under Windows 7. Problem solved and goodbye Edge. Maybe there are some tricky paste buffer settings I could configure in Edge, but why bother. Anybody actually prefer Edge as a browser ?

BTW did I tell you that griping is great fun. I like griping ! Question : what great movie has that line in it ?

Leren

[Mathimagics]

You could alternatively cultivate a habit of changing your active hours settings twice a day, once when you get up and once when you, apparently, retire. That way you should always be notified of any pending updates and handle them accordingly.

I can't even remember my once-a-day meds, so twice a day is well beyond my capabilities!

In any case "active hours" settings are irrelevant here, I think, since I have update collection totally disabled. Nor do I intend to turn it back on! Have you ever known a Windows Update that actually resolved any of these problems? Pshaw!

Anybody actually prefer Edge as a browser ?

Actually, it does one have useful feature, and for that reason alone I stick with it (but keep other browsers available as options).

I access research papers (PDF's) on a regular basis. Before EDGE I would download them and open with Acrobat Reader. But THAT software too has notorious buggy behaviour, including a nasty tendency to go into a tight CPU loop and thus becomes unresponsive (you have to kill it) for no apparent reason. (Adobe also seems to suffer from the "compulsive feature-adding disorder" that MS has).

Firefox, though otherwise quite admirable, also had this habit of chewing up CPU for no apparent reason, and EDGE appears to be stable in this regard (thank the stars!).

Anyway, EDGE can display PDF's "inline", within the browser, so you don't need Acrobat Reader. You can look at it in EDGE, and save a copy if you want to. For me that is a big plus! (Oops, I came to bury MS, not to praise it!!!)

My main GRIPE with EDGE is that when you have many, many tabs, its behaviour when you right-click on a link and "Open in new TAB" is bizarre to say the least. The new tab will generally be opened to the right of the current one, but at some seemingly random position! It's a pain trying to find it, or even to infer some sort of logic to its choice of the insertion point. Why the heck doesn't it just always put the new tab immediately to the right of the current one? Grrr!

So I work around this by opening a new window whenever my tab count looks like getting to that stage, where one more will provoke it!

PS: What's a "movie"?

[Smythe Dakota]

This is more of an Edge gripe than a Win10 gripe, but here goes.

Every once in a while, in this forum and in others, a post is not displayed completely. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, several words are omitted. It then picks up again with a later sentence or a later paragraph.

But if I do a "reply with quote", the missing material magically reappears. So it was there all along, it was just hidden!

If I use Internet Explorer instead of Edge, this nonsense does not happen. But Microsoft continually removes features from Internet Explorer, and warns that it is obsolete. I'd use Chrome, but I haven't quite mastered the technique of dividing Favorites into sub-folders, if such a feature is even available.

Grrr.

Bill Smythe

[Leren]

I haven't done this yet in Chrome but if you right click on the Bookmark bar and chose Add folder a box comes up and you can create a new folder under the Bookmarks Bar folder.

I'm sure it will be easy to move individual Bookmarks into the new folder, which should appear as a folder icon on the Bookmarks bar.

Leren

[Mathimagics]

An update on the "Unauthorised Reboot" issue …

At last I have caught the rotten thing in the act!

I got the message "Windows needs to update, a restart willl happen in 15 mins. Options: OK, Restart Now, Another Time".

Since I had 4 jobs working on the job of confirming that tarek's list of 1 million 16x16 minimal puzzles, and this was 25% done, I naturally chose "Another Time". This option makes the same dialog repeat a couple of hours later.

A short time after, my daughter asked me to come upstairs for dinner. When I returned the system was rebooting!

Clearly there is some TIMEOUT for a response to this dialog box. And the default action is to assume that I said "OK".

This is CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE, and it seriously SUCKS!

That's 6 hours x 4 jobs down the tube ... thanks, MS

[Leren]

I also had a compulsory W10 update on all three PC's yesterday. Luckily for me I had a chance to stop jobs and let the updates proceed. On one of my PCs the update took about 45 minutes, including multiple restarts and long periods of black screens. If you've been a Black Screen of Death victim like me, you will know how unnerving that can be. Anyway, the big update finally finished. Or did it ? One great feature of W10 is that when an update finishes, and you bring up the shut down or restart options, it still says update, even though it has been done. In fact if you actually do a restart, W10 will try and do the update it has just done ! I think this persists for some time, possibly until you move into your next active hours period, when W10 actually realises that it has already done the update, umm ... that it has already done! Oh, I nearly forgot. The big feature of the long update ? No real idea but the chime sound is now super cool. Awesome !

Also, I suspect that in each update of W10 they block off more ways to circumvent further unauthorised updates, so anything you read about them is usually out of date.

Yep, griping is still great therapy . Leren

[StrmCkr]

gripe list for me:

windows 10 ascii key code change --completely screwed over my turbo pascal program for displaying my grids since a large number of keys went from 3 digit codes to 4...

makes importing text files a pain in my butt as well, since it cant recognize the new format it constantly changes stuff to the wrong value or errors out.


y did they have to change it in the new windows when it worked for decades perfectly fine!!!

[Mathimagics]

The big feature of the long update ? No real idea but the chime sound is now super cool. Awesome !

y did they have to change it in the new windows when it worked for decades perfectly fine!!!

Like the %$#$#*&! Taskbar … grrr …

I have a Unix reference book I bought nearly 20 years ago … I will bet London to a brick that just about everything in it is still useful, and still works just as it says …

[Leren]

Haven't had a W10 gripe for some time now so I'm in need of gripe therapy.

This one is about the long restart time. Even after the desktop has come up and looks OK, W10 is still working on the restart, for several minutes. Last week I attempted to bring up a spreadsheet, whilst the restart was in progress and the result was that W10 destroyed the file. Luckily for me, I'm only half stupid, so I do back up all my important files.

Would it be too much for the geniuses at Microsoft to have a message come up to say that a restart is still in progress, and then say that it's complete and you can get on with your cyberspace day ?

Well, now I feel much better

leren

[blue]

With "blue screen Tuesday" fast approaching, and a new "feature update" expected, I did a Bing search for "Windows 10 feature update".
This came up: Microsoft Confirms Massive Windows 10 Upgrade Changes

It turns out that the feature update won't come until May, but the other news looks promising !

[Mathimagics]

Well, that certainly looks promising …

More options to defer upgrades is certainly a good thing, but I see no actual evidence in there that MS will address the most egregious issue of all (IMO), that is, forced restarting (following setup of an update) without explicit permission from the user ...

[Leren]

Gripe time again.

After Microsoft told us they were going to massively rethink their update policy, I just had yet another unannounced W10 update today. I only noticed it because one of my PC's had mysteriously restarted. The W10 alarm horn immediately went off in my brain arrugggah ... aruggahh .... aruggahh W10 update on all 3 PC's So I was able to stop work and update all 3 PC's without too much inconvenience, phew. Also found out that I've also been a victim of the Blue Screen of Death, as well as the Black Screen of Death. I must admit I thought that the Blue Screen of Death was an Acer problem because I've only ever had it on one PC. The lesson to learn from that is, never concentrate on problem solving, make sure you save your work every 30 seconds or so, because otherwise the Blue Screen of Death may strike at any time without mercy. Anybody know of any other coloured W10 Death screens ?

Leren