Don’t Be an XP Forced Reboot Victim
Let’s take a break from the phones for a minute. You know what drives me effing nuts? When I set up a long battery test to run overnight (one of the only reasons I still have Windows, the testing software and support for four monitors), an important one as the tests take a long time and each time I test I age the battery slightly, gotta mail them back to whoever lent them to me, then I wake up the next day to go find out whether the battery company is lying or not and if so by how much only to find that Microsoft gave me a courtesy forced reboot because they sent out a critical patch to clean up their messy software and wanted to be on the safe side for me and make some executive decisions.
Well thanks a lot Microsoft, you sons of .. Anyway, I know some of you cell phone people also own a computer and to those of you who didn’t jump on the Vista and 7 bandwagon yet (or Linux or Mac for Chrome for that matter), here’s a handy protip from Jon Galloway I found on how to disable XP Pro (maybe regular XP too, not sure) from doing this to you:
- Start > Run > gpedit.msc > [enter]
- Expand Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update
- Double click “No auto-restart for scheduled Atomatic Updates installations” > select Enabled > OK
Doesn’t seem to happen on my Linux server oddly. If you’ve got any other tips, let me know in the comments. Or how about a good old fashioned swap file size debate?
Doug Simmons
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About The Author
Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
On all my XP machines I only allow Microsoft to “tell me” about updates. No automatic downloads or reboots. When it is convenient for me, usually within a day or so, I load the updates and deal with the nonsense.