Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

This time it's the 7" Windows tablet I bought a couple weeks ago.

Definitely, 100%-surly, absolutely-for-certain had Windows Update turned
off... as in *OFF!* with a capital "F"....

Now, after a reboot, it's been sitting for over 3 hours with a prompt
"Keep your PC on until this is done. Installing update 1 of 1...."

I suspect it's the screen saver/sleep/hibernation setting that's a
problem... where every five or 10 minutes it kicks in and, in addition
to turning off the screen, it stops the processor.

I've got a "Good" image and a ShadowProtec boot stick... but I've never
tried re-imaging this thing and would prefer not to start now.

Anybody else been here?
--
Pete Cresswell

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
This time it's the 7" Windows tablet I bought a couple weeks ago.

Definitely, 100%-surly, absolutely-for-certain had Windows Update turned
off... as in *OFF!* with a capital "F"....

Now, after a reboot, it's been sitting for over 3 hours with a prompt
"Keep your PC on until this is done. Installing update 1 of 1...."

I suspect it's the screen saver/sleep/hibernation setting that's a
problem... where every five or 10 minutes it kicks in and, in addition
to turning off the screen, it stops the processor.

I've got a "Good" image and a ShadowProtec boot stick... but I've never
tried re-imaging this thing and would prefer not to start now.

Anybody else been here?

I've had an automatic update once to Win7, even though I am not set up
to receive them. However, I was lucky and it didn't hang up for hours.
If I recall correctly, it was a forced update to "update" the updating
program.
bj

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

Per chicagofan:
I've had an automatic update once to Win7, even though I am not set up
to receive them. However, I was lucky and it didn't hang up for hours.
If I recall correctly, it was a forced update to "update" the updating
program.

Had one to my Win7 box a couple weeks ago that ate 30 gigs of the system
drive.
--
Pete Cresswell

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per chicagofan:
I've had an automatic update once to Win7, even though I am not set up
to receive them. However, I was lucky and it didn't hang up for hours.
If I recall correctly, it was a forced update to "update" the updating
program.

Had one to my Win7 box a couple weeks ago that ate 30 gigs of the system
drive.


Not possible...the update to update the 'updating engine' is less than
3/100 of a percent of 30 GB. Windows Updates larger than 1GB are
extremely rare. I can't recall a single one during the life of Win 7 o r
8x. The largest Win8 update was the 8.1 update and it was under 1GB.

--
...winston
msft mvp consumer apps

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

On 01/27/2015 10:08 AM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
This time it's the 7" Windows tablet I bought a couple weeks ago.

Definitely, 100%-surly, absolutely-for-certain had Windows Update turned
off... as in *OFF!* with a capital "F"....

Now, after a reboot, it's been sitting for over 3 hours with a prompt
"Keep your PC on until this is done. Installing update 1 of 1...."

I suspect it's the screen saver/sleep/hibernation setting that's a
problem... where every five or 10 minutes it kicks in and, in addition
to turning off the screen, it stops the processor.

I've got a "Good" image and a ShadowProtec boot stick... but I've never
tried re-imaging this thing and would prefer not to start now.

Anybody else been here?




I've had that happen too...and worse still...Windows insisted on wanting
to reboot and there was no way to set the schedule longer than four hours.

When it got close to reboot time, I reset the schedule for another 4
hours but that was of course ignored and the machine rebooted anyway.

I see no problem in having Windows remind the user from time to time
that a reboot is necessary...but to go ahead and just do it is inexcusable.

It looks like Win10 will allow 24 hours...but that is less than ideal.

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

Per . . .winston:
Not possible...the update to update the 'updating engine' is less than
3/100 of a percent of 30 GB. Windows Updates larger than 1GB are
extremely rare. I can't recall a single one during the life of Win 7 o r
8x. The largest Win8 update was the 8.1 update and it was under 1GB.

30 gigs sounded crazy to me... but I could not come up with any other
explanation - even after running WinDirStat and stepping through all the
directories.

I'll keep an eye out... that same update is lurking somewhere, and when
it strikes my re-imaged system I'll do a quick "Before" check and then
note the "After" space.
--
Pete Cresswell

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

Per philo:
I've had that happen too...and worse still...Windows insisted on wanting
to reboot and there was no way to set the schedule longer than four hours.

When it got close to reboot time, I reset the schedule for another 4
hours but that was of course ignored and the machine rebooted anyway.

I see no problem in having Windows remind the user from time to time
that a reboot is necessary...but to go ahead and just do it is inexcusable.

Mine finally came back sometime during the night - so I guess my little
theory about the screen saver mode was incorrect and the update just
took over the machine for 12+ hours...maybe close to 24.

Looking on the bright side, the install of Prey (computer
tracking/recovery utility) is now working whereas it was not before the
update..... and my System drive space is still a little over 3 gigs.
--
Pete Cresswell

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

On 01/28/2015 08:41 AM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per philo:
I've had that happen too...and worse still...Windows insisted on wanting
to reboot and there was no way to set the schedule longer than four hours.

When it got close to reboot time, I reset the schedule for another 4
hours but that was of course ignored and the machine rebooted anyway.

I see no problem in having Windows remind the user from time to time
that a reboot is necessary...but to go ahead and just do it is inexcusable.

Mine finally came back sometime during the night - so I guess my little
theory about the screen saver mode was incorrect and the update just
took over the machine for 12+ hours...maybe close to 24.

Looking on the bright side, the install of Prey (computer
tracking/recovery utility) is now working whereas it was not before the
update..... and my System drive space is still a little over 3 gigs.




An insanely long amount of time but glad it worked.

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

philo wrote:
On 01/27/2015 10:08 AM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
This time it's the 7" Windows tablet I bought a couple weeks ago.

Definitely, 100%-surly, absolutely-for-certain had Windows Update turned
off... as in *OFF!* with a capital "F"....

Now, after a reboot, it's been sitting for over 3 hours with a prompt
"Keep your PC on until this is done. Installing update 1 of 1...."

I suspect it's the screen saver/sleep/hibernation setting that's a
problem... where every five or 10 minutes it kicks in and, in addition
to turning off the screen, it stops the processor.

I've got a "Good" image and a ShadowProtec boot stick... but I've never
tried re-imaging this thing and would prefer not to start now.

Anybody else been here?




I've had that happen too...and worse still...Windows insisted on wanting
to reboot and there was no way to set the schedule longer than four hours.

When it got close to reboot time, I reset the schedule for another 4
hours but that was of course ignored and the machine rebooted anyway.

I see no problem in having Windows remind the user from time to time
that a reboot is necessary...but to go ahead and just do it is inexcusable.

It looks like Win10 will allow 24 hours...but that is less than ideal.

Windows has built-in code to protect itself. Delaying the update is only
permitted for a certain length of time.

--
...winston
msft mvp consumer apps

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

Per . . .winston:
So no single update was 30GB as previously implied :)

Correctamundo!.... must have been from something else, although I still
cannot figure out what. To me, 30 gigs is a lot of space and it seems
like I should have been able to find it in WinDirStat unless it was just
a gig here and a gig there across many non-windows directories.

But the three gigs that they did take suggest to me that, eventually,
Windows Updates are going to eat my limited System drive. I would also
observe that, pre-application-of-updates, Windows Update said that it
would be taking less than a gig of additional space.

Not a huge deal because I can always buy a bigger SDD and/or move my
Data partition to another drive if push comes to shove.... but the
pattern seems to be the Windows Update will slowly eat your System
drive.

For somebody with a WinBook that does not allow expansion of the System
drive and whose System drive only has about 6 gigs free right out of the
box (i.e. the TW700 that I recently bought) that seems like a show
stopper.

Windows Updates under XP used to eat the System drive too, but one could
delete all the $Uninstall folders when things got tight.

Now it seems like MS has that stuff inaccessible to mere mortals.


Drivers for hardware are always optional requiring the user to 'check'
the optional update in order to install.

If you truly received a keyboard update then uninstall it to revert to
the pre-update condition. Additionally hardware (in Device Manager) has
the option to revert to the prior driver in addition to installing a driver.

It finally dawned on my to look in Programs and Features. Uninstalled.
Re-installed to the proper one and was good to go.


Have you a KB number for that MSFT keyboard update ?

No - and maybe it was one of the 3 that failed.... and therefore
incomplete. No way something as messed up as what I saw could have
gotten out the door - even from MS.


Most folks will tell you never to install optional Hardware update
unless the existing one doesn't work.

You had 120 updates for Windows 8 (you reported so in this is the Win8
group) ?

Yes. I had always gone with only "Critical" (or whatever MS calls
them) updates only but this time I thought I'd just go crazy and see
what happened. Worst case, I'd have to spend 30 minutes re-imaging -
most of it unattended - so I figured "Whyyyyy not?".

IMHO the unasked-for updates are an issue for users out there who need
their machines for work.

I can't understand why *any* update should be forced if the user has
elected to be prompted.

Seems to me like they always used to bite me when I was hot-and-heavy in
pursuit of some production problem or working to a looming deadline:
reboot for some reason and "Windows is installing XX updates...".

Used to make me crazy.
--
Pete Cresswell

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

On 01/28/2015 07:50 PM, . . .winston wrote:



I've had that happen too...and worse still...Windows insisted on wanting
to reboot and there was no way to set the schedule longer than four
hours.

When it got close to reboot time, I reset the schedule for another 4
hours but that was of course ignored and the machine rebooted anyway.

I see no problem in having Windows remind the user from time to time
that a reboot is necessary...but to go ahead and just do it is
inexcusable.

It looks like Win10 will allow 24 hours...but that is less than ideal.

Windows has built-in code to protect itself. Delaying the update is only
permitted for a certain length of time.



On all Windows machines used for work I'm turning off auto-update...then
will manually update on /my/ schedule and not Microsoft's.

A few months back an update ruined one of my wife's work computers...
and though I repaired the damage, it took a lot of work on my part.

The project was so critical that we had /two/ other machines ready to
put on line with the same software and data.

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per . . .winston:
So no single update was 30GB as previously implied :)

Correctamundo!.... must have been from something else, although I still
cannot figure out what. To me, 30 gigs is a lot of space and it seems
like I should have been able to find it in WinDirStat unless it was just
a gig here and a gig there across many non-windows directories.

WinDirStat cannot look inside System Volume Information.

See the Command Prompt window here, for some ideas.

http://www.ghacks.net/2012/10/05/man...-command-line/

vssadmin list shadowstorage

I managed to trash my Windows 7 C: (unrecoverable),
while examining four files inside SVI. So if you take
that route, protect yourself ahead of time. What was neat
about the files, as seen from Linux, is the "sum.exe" of
the files was exactly zero. Meaning there was some "fake"
nature to the files. And after running sum on them,
I could no longer boot from the disk in Windows. I had to
restore from a backup.

Using vssadmin, just seem safer to me :-)

HTH,
Paul

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

On Thu, 29 Jan 2015 10:02:33 -0500, Paul wrote:

What was neat
about the files, as seen from Linux, is the "sum.exe" of
the files was exactly zero. Meaning there was some "fake"
nature to the files. And after running sum on them,
I could no longer boot from the disk in Windows. I had to
restore from a backup.

Sometimes people create files with an exact complement[1] of the
checksum embedded, so that the checksum automatically is zero.

As for why running sum.exe caused that failure, I (obviously) have no
idea - but it makes me wonder if my first sentence doesn't apply here,
and something else very strange is going on.

[1] What constitutes a "complement" would depend on how the check sum is
computed; for any robust checksum scheme, it's probably not going to be
a 1's or 2's complement at all.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

On Thu, 29 Jan 2015 10:02:33 -0500, Paul wrote:

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per . . .winston:
So no single update was 30GB as previously implied :)

Correctamundo!.... must have been from something else, although I still
cannot figure out what. To me, 30 gigs is a lot of space and it seems
like I should have been able to find it in WinDirStat unless it was just
a gig here and a gig there across many non-windows directories.

WinDirStat cannot look inside System Volume Information.

If you just want to look around in SVI to see filenames and their sizes,
then TreeSize Free works a treat. You can open most of the files, as well,
but I see no reason to mess around in there.

Yet Another Unasked-For Windows Update ?
 

Per philo:
On all Windows machines used for work I'm turning off auto-update...then
will manually update on /my/ schedule and not Microsoft's.

Based on past experience I predict that you will still get burned -
albeit not as frequently.


A few months back an update ruined one of my wife's work computers...
and though I repaired the damage, it took a lot of work on my part.

The project was so critical that we had /two/ other machines ready to
put on line with the same software and data.

I had an update go bad on a Windows 7 VAIO laptop that took it down for
almost a week before I figured out how to get it back. Can't recall the
details, but it was a Windows Update gone wrong.

At the time I was whining in various fora and kept hearing "Well, it's
not happening to anybody else, so you must have done something wrong..."

But I did not do anything except click "OK" for proceeding with the
updates.
--
Pete Cresswell