2010-10-13

FOLLOW-UP: Microsoft's Ironic Shutdown Patent

This isn't a true follow-up in the sense that it isn't about the patent which I talked about earlier. It has to do with something that happened to me a few days ago when I needed to boot into Microsoft Windows 7 to relax and play some of my computer games (that don't work on WINE in Linux).
As usual, Windows needed to download and install updates and patches, and it needed to restart afterwards to make the updates effective. As usual, I chose to ignore the warnings and restart until the next nagging reminder came along. This particular warning asked me how long I wanted to postpone the restart for, so when I chose "1 hour", I assumed that an hour later, there would be a message box warning me of the impending restart procedure and asking me if I wanted to go ahead or postpone it again. Thinking nothing of this, I went ahead and started playing. An hour later, the game screen suddenly became black, and the cursor disappeared; next thing I know is the screen is showing the shutdown screen with a message about updates being downloaded and installed. That's right: Microsoft Windows shut down an hour later without asking me again just to install updates. I wasn't able to save my game, so I lost everything past the previous save point.
Really, Microsoft? Does the thing really need to be that intrusive? There's not really a whole lot more I can say about this without degenerating into a steaming, sputtering wreck (which is not something I do often); please bear with me.