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Author Topic: Updated, Restarting  (Read 473 times)

Starver

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Updated, Restarting
« on: July 01, 2011, 06:15:09 pm »

Yes, I know Windows has updated some component, because I was the one that made it do so, having retained control over this rather than having random "Windows has restarted your machine" messages appear on a machine that had been left processing things overnight and ended up being interrupted.  Yes, given that I conceded and got you to install the silently downloaded updates I know I eventually need to restart to get the full benefit, but I'm still in the middle of doing something...  Why are you now pestering me every five minutes[1] without even a decent "Don't let me know for another [10/15/30/60 minutes / 2/4/6/12/24 hours]"-style choice-box that at least some software I am familiar with provides for just such occasions...  I've got maybe an hour more ahead of me of finishing off something[2], and then I can restart with a good conscience.  Hey, I might even shut the machine off for half an hour while I get something to eat.

But I just know that within the next handful of instances of this message popping up in the middle of the screen I'm going to be a microsecond too slow in realising that the innocent mouse-click in the middle of the screen that I'd just started to initiate by a series of nerve pulses towards the relevant part of the right forearm muscle-grouping is going to result in the object-code tied to the dialogue's [Restart] button being initiated prematurely[3]...


And why on earth did Adobe Acrobat Reader need to restart my computer, the other day?  How totally inveigled into the OS are you to mean that a restart was actually necessary?  Actually, probably far more inveigled than I'd really care to know, I imagine, so you probably don't want to answer that, but at least that 'only' kept popping up a balloon dialogue from the systray icon

(When this particular machine was actually permanently offline and disconnected from any network connection for about 18 months, about halfway through that period it had actually started to tell me that "There is a new version of the software available for download".  With absolutely no way that it could have known this fact except for being pre-programmed with "If older than a year, there must be a new version available, so pester your user mercilessly about this".  I didn't even have reason to open .PDFs on this, given the use I was putting it to, then, so it couldn't even have picked this up from trying to open a newer .PDF writer's document and encountering a higher-than-expected version number or some other unsupported features...  The AV program I could stand pestering me[4], in such circumstances, but a document reader?)

Anyway, rant over.  And on the basis that I will get to restart this machine within the next hour or so, I suppose I'm justified in signing this off with something almost pithy like...

"See you on the other side."


[1] Three Four times in total, now, during the editing of this very post, which may mean even more frequently than that, given how little time I'm devoting to editing this down into to something vaguely legible or in any way succinct and to the point.  (Most of the effort was in removing an some of the excessive number of conversational-effect ellipses, given that they were being... well... I suppose... excessively over-used.)

[2] The effort for which being not so easily preserved by adherence to the phrase "save early and often", just to pre-empt the obvious solutions.

[3] That or Alt-N at the wrong time.  I must double check that this isn't a key combination I'm likely to be using.

[4] Subtle enough to ignore, and also in safe enough circumstances to allow me to do so...  And, even then, the very first thing I did when it finally got made into a networked machine once more was got a complete update of everything on it that was capable of demanding dial-home-for-updates action, these all being preceded and succeeded by some totally-over-the-top precautionary malware scans just to stub out any remaining irrational doubts about the cleanliness of its 18-month workload and to ensure that it had not been harbouring anything approaching an (at that time) 0-day rootkit caught on the morning shortly before it's original isolation and then forced to sit there, impotently unable to interact with anything outside of the box but biding its time for when finally it could once more see the gateway to the internet and report itself ready for duty...  (There wasn't anything like that, of course.  Nor even any suspicion of one.  But you never know. :) )
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