Posts Tagged ‘bad software design’

Don’t force me to reboot on updates… (Windows XP)

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

I just experienced a kind of terribly bad ideas part II for software design.

Microsoft has rolled out a new update. It’s  great that it was downloaded automatically. It would certainly have been nice if Microsoft had ASKED me for permission before installing it.

And it would have been VERY nice  if Microsoft would just have accepted that Ihad better things to do than to reboot my computer right now. That stupid messages comes every few minutes. Now, what part of NO don’t you understand?

The inevitable thing happened. I was away from the PC for a few minutes, couldn’t click on the “no” button and the computer rebooted. I can only assume it, but I doubt that the reboot process would have stopped if I had any unsaved data. (Because Opera told me on start-up that it hadn’t been closed normally.) Data loss by design. Great idea, Microsoft!

Now here’s the fix. You can download this reg-file and double-click it. It will insert 2 keys into your registry and should protect you against this very bad default behaviour.