I almost popped a vein the other day with Windows 7 again. It drives me NUTS that it will auto-reboot (post-update) without your permission and no matter what you have running. In fact, I find that policy downright unprofessional. I know they think it's to "protect" the users and perhaps for the vast majority of them maybe there is some benefit; benefit as much to Microsoft as to the user. You see, if they step in as if they were you're IT department forcing you to do it their way for you're own good without choice and in the process manage to actually cut down on exploits and infections, then in the public eye Windows looks good even if they do it in a big brother fashion.
But at least have the decency to let us turn that bloody "feature" off with a simple option click. And I don't mean "Turn off auto-updates" because then you'll just be nagged. And I don't mean scour Google for registry hacks and third party software that sometimes does the trick but sometimes not. I mean an honest to goodness checkbox that says "don't reboot automatically until I say so". Not only do some of us not need it, but it actually interferes with us. My sis sometimes needs to work remotely from her main home machine when she's away and she's completely fucked if her machine decides to reboot and she's not around to turn it back on and run the proper software. Poor thing has had to call relatives to break into her home to turn it back on. And the answer should not be "oh she should install x, y, z, buy u, v, w and edit o, p, q to have l, m, n started upon boot and ...". She's not an IT professional. The simple answer is "Don't shutdown without my permission!", nag me about it later if you must.
While I'm at it... 20 years later and you still need to reboot for what feels like every little freaking thing. A driver here, a service there, registry setup change over yonder. What is it about the system that makes it impossible to just stop-service start-service restart-service and once identified to FIX IT?
(Granted, it's gotten a lot better and it's not always their fault)
