10 Jan
2012
10 Jan
'12
2:08 p.m.
On Jan 10, 2012, at 4:47 PM, John Foust wrote:
At 03:13 PM 1/10/2012, Alexandre Souza - Listas
wrote:
My complaint was actually about pre-SP3 XP, something which up until a year or two ago I
still had to use for work on a semi-regular basis. The settings could be changed, of
course, but the default was to auto-install and force a restart, often while I was on a
bathroom break and still connected to a few servers over SSH. Every time I came upon a
new machine, I got bitten by it again.
It's solved by default now, yes, but I am still quite angry about it many years later.
It was rightly pointed out to me off-list that this kept most average home users
well-patched despite their best (or worst efforts), which is true, but I found it
offensively poorly-planned. I'm a member of the "save early and often"
school, but many others aren't (yes, it's their own damn fault for not saving
before they got up).
I think the default was changed in SP3, but I wouldn't swear to it. I still have to
use XP a lot because curiously, companies in the tech sector are slow to approve an
update, so yes, the failings of a nearly decade-old operating system are a real and
pressing concern to me now. I think, if nothing else, it speaks well of XP's overall
design relative to its predecessors that it's still very much preferred by a great
many people.
- Dave
I don't know what windows are you using, but
my Windows XP downloads the patches (because I configured it to do so) and tells me they
are avaiable,
Which Windows is he using? Well, something beyond XP. It'll download updates,
it might give you a choice whether you want to install them, but once you do,
it'll install updates now, then maybe again pre-shutdown and then maybe again
post-startup, and no, it doesn't warn you before it does it or while it's
doing it, and then you can rise-lather-repeat any number of times before
it's all updated, and then maybe tomorrow it'll decide there was a few
more it forgot about.
Vista was released five years ago, Windows 7 two years ago, so how out of
date was your advice?