Is MS up to no good?
Just last night I walked away from my windows terminal as I would any other night. I locked the desktop out and shut off the monitor. About 5 hours later I awoke and something told me to check in on things. I came back to the office and find that the workstation is at the login screen after being rebooted. Not the lock out screen.
This did not concern me to much at first. Power outage or anything like that could have caused this type of behavior so no big deal right? Wrong! After logging back in I notice that the account profile is not showing but the windows default profile is. I check a few other things and find that all personal settings are gone. Now I am getting a bit concerned with what has happened.
After another moment a message balloon from the notify area pops up and says that windows installed a needed update and had to restart the computer. Now I know why the computer was in the state it was when I found it but why? I have personally disabled the automatic updates and selected to ask me which to install but to download all. The reason for this is due to a bug in the windows genuine authenticity check. I have a valid and previously verified genuine copy of windows xp pro installed that came with the computer. The GWAC has cuased nothing but problems for other computers we use so this one was never going to see it.
Well now since updates where disabled like they were why is it now that the computer updated anyway without asking. I have not found what the last installed updates where just yet but in viewing the system logs I found the reason the default profile loaded was due to the registry being locked from the last unexpected shutdown. The fact that I had numerous projects open and being edited while the computer rebooted ticks me off a bit due to some loss in data but that was very minute and one should always save anyways but still what is the deal. I say no you can’t install updates and MS feels they need to ignore that because they know what is best. I don’t want to point fingers here but come on now.
Just the same I can not wait. About 2 more weeks and we should have a stable linux server up and running and windows can just be a faint memory of a dark past. I may suggest that if you are using win xp and have auto updates enabled in any way disable it totally and I will look into this but if possible deny access to it in the firewall as well. If you want updates go and do it yourself manualy and then set everything back to protect you again.
