Microsoft can bite me

[giza]

So, I was at work this morning, writing code on my Windows XP box. I don't like Windows, but it's what I'm paid to use, so I consider it a fair exchange.

Right as I'm in the middle of writing code, imagine my surprise when this popped up:




Note the grayed out option. No chance to defer the reboot until the end of the day. Nope, that would make too much sense. The machine must be rebooted right now. The Royalty demands it!

And yes, that's 1 minute and 16 seconds you see on there. The countdown originally started at 5 minutes. Gee, it's a good thing I wasn't in a meeting or anything, otherwise I would have come back to a box that had "mysteriously" rebooted and thought I was having power supply problems.

I just... cannot fathom the utter lack of judgement displayed by Microsoft in forcing you to reboot your machine at a time that is potentially inconvenient to you, and not even giving you the option to put it off until later. Not to mention that the system installed an upgrade behind my back.

What if you were a CSR in the middle of a call from an important customer? What if you were in the middle of processing a large dataset? What if you were in the middle of working on something, anything, and did not want to be interrupted by a forced reboot?

Ironically, it was Linux to the rescue for me. I had a session of Putty open to a remote box, where I was running an instance of the UNIX screen utility. So, upon rebooting, I was able to reconnect to that instance and pick up where I left off. At least for my coding. I still had to restart all the other applications that were running on my machine.

What an annoyance.

Comments

[toracub.livejournal.com]

if you are on a machine you have admin rights on you can cancel the shutdown. hit start, run, type in cmd and hit enter, then in the black window type in "shutdown -a" and hit enter.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

That's awesome! Thank you!