Mike Schaeffer's Blog

I'm sorry I had to write that title: I just ran across a dialog box even worse than the abominable dialog box. I now humbly present the 'even more abominable dialog box':

This dialog box improves on the last by shortening the time you have to save your work from five minutes to one. It also removes the ability to defer the system restart: you have to restart now. Sadly, it loses abominibility points because it actually tells you what's wrong, but face it, who exactly knows what the 'DCOM Server Process Launcher' does, exactly? Sure, I can make an educated guess, but I'm a geek and have been using and programming on Windows machines for 15 years. If anybody from Microsoft is reading this, let me make this crystal clear: I DO NOT CARE HOW IMPORTANT YOU THINK RESTARTING MY SYSTEM IS: MY WORK IS MORE IMPORTANT. I DO NOT CARE HOW UNSTABLE MY MACHINE BECOMES: I CAN DEAL WITH IT AND RESTART IT MYSELF. I LIVED THROUGH DOS 4.0, WINDOWS 2.11 and WINDOWS 3.0, TRUST ME ON THIS. LET ME KNOW WHAT THE DRATTED PROBLEM IS AND LET ME DECIDE WHEN I NEED TO RESTART. PLEASE!!!!!!!!

Seriously, even if Linux were the $300 closed-source monopolistic OS and Windows XP was the free, open-source alternative, I'd be seriously considering switching away from Windows.

Oh, and of course Acrobat reader had to get the last word in. After the restart induced by the last dialog box, I got this:

Every once in a while, my Windows XP laptop decides to display this little jewel of interaction design:

If you haven't seen it before, this dialog box basically means that Windows has downloaded a system update that needs to restart the system to install. Once it appears you have three choices:

• Do nothing - The system will wait for five minutes, filling in the progress bar, and then forcibly restart your computer.
• Click 'Restart Now' - Your computer will restart now.
• Click 'Restart Later' - The dialog box is dismissed and will reappear in 5-10 minutes.

In short, once this dialog box appears, you're screwed; Windows is so dead set on the immmense value of whatever unknown update it's downloaded that it's going to restart your computer and close every open application, document, and network-connection whether you like it or not. It doesn't matter if you're surfing the web or working on a cure for cancer: this dialog box bascially means that 1) whatever you're doing is less important than the system update and 2) you aren't able to decide for yourself any different.

To see why this is true, consider what the dialog box does not have:

• There is no way to see a list of what updates are being installed.
• There is no way to control how long the system restart is deferred.
• There is no way to launch the page of the system control panel that controls automatic update.

None of this stuff is rocket science. My guess is that no more than 2-3 person/weeks of developer time would be enough to put together a first rate and fully documented implementation of all three enhancements: The first already exists elsewhere and the second and third are both small bits of functionality. It's because of this I'm prepared to guess the reason features like these weren't implemented: a conscious decision was taken not to. Microsoft essentially decided that, for the class of users who didn't disable automatic updates from the control panel, they weren't willing to allow those users to make their own decisions about when patches are applied. For some reason it made more sense to preemptively restart users' computers. Is this kind of known invasive bad behavior really justified by the risk?