Now that I’m back in the States, I have stories to tell. Unfortunately, on my trip home from Hong Kong, I had a perfect situation for my SUX series.
While sitting in Newark, waiting for my flight back to Cleveland, I was playing with Microsoft Surface Collage on one of my portable Windows 7 machines, grabbing some of the pics from my trip and putting them in the collage. Imagine my grumpiness when the collage I was working on disappeared… *poof* In fact, the whole program closed. And then I saw it… the dreaded installing and rebooting screen from an automatic windows update call.
No asking me if I wanted to reboot. No confirmation that I had processes running and asking if the OS should end them. No… instead, it was being “helpful” and closed everything. It’s a good thing I wasn’t working on anything that important.
This experience is enough to remind me of why I turn off that option that lets updates download and install on their own. Why does this behavior not act consistently with some of the other restart processes? I like that it asks me if I want to force a shutdown while I have apps open on my desktop.
So this is my call to the team that works on the reboot process and the team that works on the automatic updates process of Windows Update – talk to each other and find a way to add a confirmation screen similar to the force shutdown screen to the automatic process. It would make this user experience a lot less painful.
For now, my updates will download but I’ll okay the install when I’m ready. Ah the joys of dealing with a fresh install of Windows 7 and remembering which settings to avoid to get around the painful UXes…