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#11
It is designed to work that way, although not the default. I always set it for manual installs on my main machines. Even during all of the XP years. If you keep up with what's going on with security issues I think it's perfectly fine to do the updates yourself. Every once in a while there will be an update that causes some sort of problem. But update problems go back to early XP days, too. An update might break some feature that you use with a particular app, or it might have caused a problem with the OS itself that wasn't forseen, etc. There've even been updates that MS has pulled from distribution right after pushing them out. I think the problem is much more rare than it used to be (even throughout the years of XP). I have never used auto updates because of the potential, but rare, problems. I just keep up as best I can with the security world and update when I'm good and ready (when I know there are no mass reported issues). I'm not the typical update guinea pig. There's really no real reason for me to be that way anymore though. Since around 2005, I've been making images at least once a month, and always between the first of the month and patch Tuesday, so it really would be easy enough just to roll it back.
That said, when I repair other folks' machines I usually set it to full auto. That's because it's much easier to correct any rare issue resulting from updates rather than fixing a machine that's been totally crippled because it hasn't been updated in the last year.
If you get that a lot you've got some kind of conflict occuring, an install problem, something's going on. But, I think you're right, it's not yet a very well refined all-around "troubleshooter". When it does have a legitimate answer it always seems to be something that would've been easy to find anyway just by doing a little poking around the system yourself.
Stick with w7 for a while. I think after a while you may find that it's much more stable, secure and customizable than XP. I think I can agree on WinME being considered a disaster, but I've always thought the 95/98 versions were revolutionary, considering how bad I thought 3.1 was. I think developers had a rough time developing to the new standards imposed by 95. But it seemed to me to be just as revolutionary as the ME to XP leap. I had such a good time with 95/98, that if XP hadn't been built on the NT model, I probably would've held on to the 95/98 machines much longer than I did. I used NT4 client and server at home on a few machines for a number of years, and used them at work. And while I loved it, I think MS had a lot of work to do before introducing NT into the consumer world.
Well, most of the Linux flavors are free to try (I think most are). But I don't consider w7 a disaster at all, quite the opposite actually. I'd stick with it for awhile (of course I've no idea how long you've already stuck with it). And even though XP will be updated until April 2014, you've got to think about how patched up it is. It'll never be as secure as w7.
Also realize that because of security issues that MS, as well as many other software firms, are trying to push more and more towards auto updates. If I remember correctly w8 was originally going to be designed as auto only. Don't know if it made that way by the time of the preview; I haven't tried it yet but I think it's now an option.
Last edited by F5ing; 10 May 2012 at 23:50.
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Quote: Originally Posted by sibble 