I fall for it every time
I just made a big mistake.
I was doing some routine stuff that involved a plug-in disk. Nothing serious but it was doing some funny things. I decided to check it out in Windoze.
I rebooted into Windoze for the first time in many months and ran a test on the disk. Grand. No bother. All was fine.
Then I realised that things were happening. Windoze was updating! Even worse, the laptop itself said it was updating after connecting to Dell. Fuck! There were all sorts of messages saying that if I interrupt anything, the chances are that my laptop will be totally fucked up. Bugger!
So I’m stuck here in Windoze. Dell has, for the last ten minutes been installing the first of ten updates. Windoze is trying to install something critical and has been stuck at 5% for an age. I’m locked into a machine that can’t be switched off or switched back into Linux.
I think I’ll go and shampoo some carpets.
Maybe when I come back in an hour or two things will have moved on a bit here.
Windoze is a pain in the hole!
Beware the second Tuesday of the month, usually mid-afternoon onwards in Europe – it’s the Windows monthly update day. Always have plenty of non-IT tasks in stock to fill the unproductive hours it can take.
Never tested it but the ‘Don’t switch off’ message can’t be absolute – if a desktop PC suffers a mains power-outage during an update, the system must be able to accommodate that and recover. Any competent IT professionals would anticipate that common event and design it into the process. But then it is Microsoft . . . .
Hah! It must be a year or more since I last had an update – I usually run Windows with the wifi disconnected for that very reason. Yesterday I finally managed to get it to reboot whereupon I got the black screen with the message along the lines of “Do not switch off; system updating”. I left it for half an hour and then did some research [on my smartphone]. I immediately came across a site with steps to get beyond this. I tried Ctrl-Alt-Delete – nothing happened. Their second suggestion was a hard reboot. That certainly worked, and I got back into Linux. I daren’t try Windows again in the immediate future. I’ll try it again in a year or two.