I was going to write about something entirely different today, but last night Windows decided it had to download and install updates. Just before 3 AM, I shut down the computer after a long day, and there they were. On Windows XP, I had the option of shutting down the computer and not updating, but Windows 7 gives me no such option. Like it or not, they're going to install during shut down no matter how tired you are, how busy you are, or whether you're shutting down because a thunderstorm is happening, they're going to install.
More whining below.
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I'm not sure about who gets those updates either. Are they doled out to some users every day until everyone has them or are they dumped on all users on the same day? Maybe that question is one to add to my Mysteries of the Universe.
You never know what you're going to get from an update. There's nothing to tell you what's being updated or why. What you get is sometimes a surprise, sometimes invisible as if nothing happened, and sometimes the cause of white knuckled computer terror.
I remember one very long update last year. When the computer came up the next time, there was Internet Explorer 11 that they had installed to replace IE 10. 10 had worked just fine. 11 was new and the "link" to "What's New in Internet Explorer 11" under Help on the menu took me to information about Windows 8. I needed help with IE 11 because it was new, cranky, failed often (frequent "Internet Explorer has stopped working" error messages), and was a pain in the butt for a very long time and then it suddenly started to work decently.
Thanks, but no thanks for the unhelpful link to IE 11 for Windows 8. I didn't need a preview of Windows 8 no matter how much Microsoft is trying to sell me on it. I have Windows 7 and have absolutely no interest at all in Windows 8.
I still have no idea how to use the shiny new features that came with IE 11 because all the descriptions have to do with Windows 8 or 8.1. Yeah, don't have that and don't want it. I do know there's some kind of spell check because words misspelled have a squiggly line under them. By accident I discovered that if I click on the work and press the key on the lower right of the keyboard between Alt and Ctrl, I'll get suggestions for different spellings. It would have been nice to be provided with instructions or information rather than relying on a finger hitting a key by mistake.
Last nights updates took a stinking long time. There were 12 of them, some sailing through in a couple of minutes, others taking what seemed to be an eternity. And the obligatory message to not shut off or power off the computer seemed to rub my face in the fact that I was sitting there, tired as an old dog, powerless to change my circumstances. As update after update took their good long time, it was like Microsoft giving me their middle finger.
Today, of course, I had the displeasure of sitting at the computer waiting for it to "configure" all those updates, hoping and praying that the Microsoft Gods hadn't screwed something up. It was a white knuckle ride, too, as the hard drive light stayed on steady 15 minutes after my desktop had loaded and seemed ready for use. When I brought up enough courage to check the Task Manager, I found that some invisible program was using up more than half of the available CPU.
Well, hard drive light on steady or not, I dove in. Top Comments isn't going to write itself, you know. I had stuff to do.
Thankfully, things settled down after a while, but I knew that my topic for tonight had changed.
Microsoft is a virtual monopoly, running the vast majority of personal and business computers around the world. And, having that much power means they can pretty much do whatever they want. We all routinely click on EULAs - those End User Legal (or is it Licensing) Agreements that we never read because they're long, incomprehensible, and clicking on them is the only way we can get stuff done. I'm told that they essentially say that whatever happens as a result, the software company is blameless (even if they're not). We've clicked away our rights.
And fagedabout the government doing anything. They're complicit in allowing this to continue. Government had their chance in the 1990s and blew it. The great hearing where Microsoft proclaimed they were not a monopoly was debunked when someone on the committee asked for a show of hands from people using Windows. Nearly every hand went up.
Yes, there are a couple of other choices, but with the majority of us having used Microsoft software, most business using it, and most websites configured for it, there really isn't really that much of a choice. On top of all that, you're going to face another learning curve with another product or limited choices of software that will run on it.
So we grin and bear it, grumbling to ourselves. I'll see what tomorrow has in store for the computer. Maybe a miracle will happen and all will be fine. Maybe the lengthy and terrifying massive hard drive use today was just a technological tummy ache after digesting yet another Windows update. We'll see.
And, it's not just Windows. Hardly a week goes by without something or another begging for an update. Java, Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Office ..... Geesh. More stuff that can go ever so wrong.
Like it or not, computers are a big part of our lives now, necessary for much of our daily activities like banking, homework, reading the news, and communicating with others. We rely on them like we rely on a refrigerator or phone. Sadly, they're often more troublesome than the rest of our appliances.
On a better note, at least I wasn't trying to shut the computer down last night to avoid a thunderstorm. THAT would have been the worst case scenario with a power failure during the updates.
Enough grumbling, onward to the better stuff that is Top Comments ....
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