Windows update shuts down half the computers on our Med Records system
 

My office manager was all bent yesterday. Computer would not do anything, even after trying to restart, system restore and everything else we could think of. Tech guy got it to work by resetting it to factory settings, which is making me thing the hard drive is going, time to get a new computer. Called the tech support guys for the med records support. They say it happened to everyone that did not shut off their automatic updates. It is trying to do it to my computer too, somehow the automatic update thing got turned back on.

F you Bill Gates

Did it actually boot all the way then hang or not boot past BIOS? Meaning did you get to the Windows Desktop?

Asking because one of my media servers went tits up a few days ago and I also diagnosed a dead drive.

Like you I leave auto update off on everything but noticed a couple of weeks ago it had somehow been reenabled on this particular box and I had made a mental note to turn it off but never did.

Win 7 Pro

In the days before I retired.......(yeah!) we NEVER did automatic updates except to a set of test computers and/or servers and had someone run through the normal day to day applications to make sure all was fine. We then did partial updates that went every few days and then on to the next department.

Generally the "security expert" who was usually a well trained Microsoft certified professional was against this sort of plan as Microsoft sez to turn updates on all the time! Generally it takes one of the crisis situations like you went through to make them and management see the light! Add up the cost of the down time and shove that under their noses and you can get your way easily.

No automatic updates for anything here. We have software to push them out once we are satisfied it won't screw the pooch somewhere.

Mine was somehow turned back on. It downloaded, but had not installed the updates yet. Only way I could get around it was to do a system restore to a week ago.

Oh, and I am talking about several hundred doctors' offices that are dealing with this.

I so do not miss Windows.

Indeed.

I've never had
Go bad on me.

It killed our HTPC a bit ago. Doing a repair from the boot DVD got it back up and going pretty quick. My Mother in law and her husband are here and he keeps telling the kids they need to do the updates on their computers. Drives me crazy.

You can use Group Policies to make sure it stays off.

Amateur. ;) :D :D

Just kidding; I gave up on Gentoo years ago. I can't believe that there are still people out there with that much time on their hands.

I usually have my PC download, but not install. Then I install when i want. I haven't had a problem with an update in many, many years.

I have my family's PCs update automatically. It's normally better that they are up to date than not.

The problem is they put out a patch and find out it is buggy and re-release it. Other than some critical updates for some exploits, it pays to wait a bit.

Indeed. I upgrade from LFS (when it was still a HOWTO and not a Book) to Gentoo when Gentoo first became available. 3 days to compile X and Gnome on dual P2-450 w/ 512mb RAM. Then forgot to have JPEG support in my USE flags. Argh.

Yep, I was going to say Restore Point. ....and then turn off automatic updates.

I have been bitten in the ass by automatic updates more times than I can remember, and Microsoft has some sort of sneaky way of turning them back on that I haven't figured out yet. Same for Windows Firewall: it will get turned on seemingly at random.

In my experience when updates break something it's about a 50/50 split from:
a.) MS did something weird that caused a bug and blew something up
b.) The software vendor had some shoddy code that a new bug fix wouldn't allow to run anymore

The only real way to tell is to just try it unfortunately, At least until App Virtulization makes everything runnable in sandboxes of different patch levels.

I'm sure it's just a registry entry somewhere...

Just build a .reg file to set it to "0" and run hourly as a scheduled task. ;)