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The suspicious death of XP support | 34 comments (34 topical) | Post A Comment
Microsoft *Forces* the Upgrade[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#19)
by ricegf on Thu Jul 17, 2008 at 03:44:57 AM PDT

After the first bricking of his laptop, my son rolled back to an earlier checkpoint to regain Internet access. The next day, XP re-installed the patch without any apparent acknowledgment from the user, then rebooted without recourse (abruptly ending a better than usual WoW campaign).

If Microsoft rams unwanted updates down its users' collective throats, I'm happy to grant it full blame for not ensuring those updates are compatible with the users' computers first. You can't eat your cake and have it, too.


----- George F. Rice It is better to copy success than to invent mediocrity.
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Forces the update?[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#20)
by modcon on Thu Jul 17, 2008 at 05:06:11 AM PDT

Actually, SP3 is an update that can be avoided by NOT using automatic updates - at least until the next update cycle. And the PC owner has a choice to use auto-updates or not. I don't use auto-update, but manually connect about a week after patch Tuesday and then select which updates I'll accept and which ones I won't (at least until the update become mandatory...) There are also other packages that allow the user to fully control which updates are and aren't installed (Update Managers.) Is it more work to manually select the updates you wish to load? Sure it is. Would most people still do the updates if it was manual? Probably not. But the main fact still remains: if MS made SP3 available to developers MS is NOT responsible for testing compatibility with third part apps and is not responsible for any resultant failuers. If it wasn't made available, then it's an entirely different matter and MS bears full responsiblility.

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Gak![ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#25)
by Anonymous User on Fri Jul 18, 2008 at 09:56:35 PM PDT

"The next day, XP re-installed the patch without any apparent acknowledgment from the user, then rebooted without recourse (abruptly ending a better than usual WoW campaign)."

Christ, people, turn off "download updates automatically" and "install updates automatically"! Especially the latter. That laptop is probably infected with WGA Notifications too, and Christ alone knows what other crawling horrors devised by the devious forces of darkness at Redmond.

[ Parent | Reply to This ]



The suspicious death of XP support | 34 comments (34 topical) | Post A Comment
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