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I suspect someone else may have ranted about Microsoft Windows updates before, not sure...
My PC is stable. It runs Win10 and I spent a fair amount of time configuring it the way I like it. I do NOT like sending all my data to MS and I do NOT like that it downloads multi-gigabyte updates when I'm trying to hold a Zoom meeting. So not only have I turned off all the monitoring and update stuff I can find, I also renamed the Windows Update DLL, supposedly a sure-fire way to prevent updates. This latest I did after a "silent" update (no reboot even) caused my printer to no longer work. I eventually discovered the update that caused the problem and rolled it back, printer working again. The following week the same update was re-applied, printer broken again. FFS - If I roll an update back, it's because I don't want it, Microsoft!
Anyway a couple of days ago it started prompting me to say my system was obsolete and would be updated; did I want to do it now or set a future date? Well since I want to do neither of those things I just close the box. Yesterday I was doing some tasks (Word document open, VS open with some unsaved code etc) when the phone rang so I just closed the laptop (as I often do), being confident I could just carry on later. Well I didn't carry on until this morning, to find the system had rebooted overnight, lost my unsaved changes, changed the font face in my email client, and changed the font sizes throughout the system (MS Word menus are now unreadably tiny). So I've had to tinker with everything again, just in order to continue using my laptop, and then re-apply / rewrite my lost work. How many billions is the global value of wasted time, Microsoft?? How many laptops get thrown out of windows (no pun intended) in frustration and anger? And... I even used "help" to find out how to change global font sizes. Windows' built-in help tells me to go to Settings, Ease of Access, and choose "Display". Settings, fine. Ease of Access, fine. Absolutely no way to change anything display-related (apart from high-contrast) on that screen. Even your own built-in help is wrong, you ..... Words fail me.
Have a lovely day! It's not raining so I'm going out to sit and listen to birdsong for a while. I'll probably come back to a Windows screen that says "Updating... 100%" and sits there for 20 minutes, like it has in the past...        
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DerekT-P wrote: Microsoft Windows updates
First time I ever hear about it. This probably runs in the background, never occurred to me that windows was doing updates.
The sarcasm is strong in this post.
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Let me get this right.....you're blaming Microsoft.....because you lost....your unsaved work.....?
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Absolutely not. (Though it's not unreasonable to suppose that I shouldn't lose unsaved work by going into suspend overnight). What I really object to is MS forcing my system into an unusable state (system menus that are so small as to be illegible) when I have explicitly set the system to NOT auto-update.
When I purchased my Windows license I was purchasing the right to use a specific piece of software; I was not (wanting to) purchase something that would randomly (from my perspective) require frequent adjustments on my part just to keep usable. Were I OCD or have any of a number of other mental conditions the change in appearance and behaviour of "my" software could be really quite disturbing, and it's certainly disruptive.
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DerekT-P wrote: When I purchased my Windows license I was purchasing the right to use a specific piece of software
Keep reading that EULA; you'll find out they reserve the right to make modifications to it whether you like it or not.
But on a more serious note: WSUS. Even if you can't run it, point it to a non-existent server. With a WSUS server specified, Windows Update will never go out on the internet on its own to download any update. When you want to upgrade your Windows 10 build, use their ISO creator and let it install on top of itself. If you otherwise just want the latest cumulative update for your current build (aka those released on Patch Tuesday), get it from catalog.update.microsoft.com.
To point your system to a WSUS server (even one that doesn't exist):
gpedit.msc, Computer Configuration, Windows Components, Windows Update, then customize values for "Specify intranet Microsoft update service location". Use the same two values in the two edit boxes, such as "http://mybogusserver:5380".
Be aware though that this will also block Defender's AV updates, because they're managed by the same update system.
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Nice to know, thanks.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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DerekT-P wrote: Words fail me.
I can send you some perfectly fitting words 
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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DerekT-P wrote: VS open with some unsaved code
What is this mean? There is such things as unsaved code??
My fingers are hardcoded to do CTRL + E, D, S after every bit of code I write. (Format Document, Save). Every now and then I miss the D* and end up making white space visible.
FML 
* I have never actually "had the D" to know if I would actually miss it or not.
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It was only about 5 lines, but it's the principle. 
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Exactly. My fingers habitually press CTRL+SHIFT+S after almost every line I write.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Which isn't just save, but "save all".
If you don't, you might as well work of USB while copy/pasting for version control.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Quote: I suspect someone else may have ranted about Microsoft Windows updates before
Never.
The sarcasm here is even stronger.
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DerekT-P wrote: when the phone rang so I just closed the laptop
What is the connection between those two events? I rarely reboot my PC, and nor does Microsoft, unless I allow it. But I do close the lid every day, and never lose anything; mainly because I make sure I save any open stuff first.
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No direct connection. I would normally double-check I'd saved everything at the end of the day, but routinely just close the lid (suspend, with power plugged in) overnight. On this occasion I was intending to pick up where I left off but got distracted.
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Overlooking the unsaved thingie, it seems to me that your biggest mistake was in the assumption that you had stopped Microsoft's (self healing) ability to update. Silly you. Microsoft works under the (correct) assumption that many/most people are too stupid/lazy/busy to do updates on their own. Then they blame Msft for any malware. So,they do the the updates automagically. I think the only ways to stop them is: 1. use an Update Server to control[ 2. Turn off the network card (hard to do if you are doing cloud stuff) or 3. use a firewall that blocks by application (mine does, they are expensive). I run W10 in a virtual machine, so I can disable the NIC when I don't want to risk anything interrupting me. Once, I created rules in the firewall to block updates. I think I wound up with about 8 or 10 IP address ranges!
Leave the machine without backing up my work? Get caught once and I probably won't do it again.
The best way to remember your wife's birthday? Forget it once. 
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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Indeed. Over the couple of years I've had to use W10 I've lost track of how much time I've spent trying to turn everything off; there is a whole industry advising people of the "absolute" solution. It's not the loss of a few lines of code that peeves me - though it is inexcusable - but the fact that my system became totally unusable after their update. Although I'm no W10 expert, it only took me about 15 minutes to get the system in a state I could use it again. But for many people, they would have absolutely no way of finding out how to do it (especially since W10's own help is simply wrong on the subject). MS can force updates upon me to draw a fancy animated box around options in settings when I hover over them (100% pointless bling), yet can't be bothered to provide a way to permanently stop updates that totally screw up my display and cause my printer to no longer print.
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kmoorevs wrote: I still consider Win7 to be the pinnacle.
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If the average consumer would just think twice about what purchasing hardware on which to run software entailed, in a contractual way, they'd quickly realize that the fine print can be interpreted.
The job of good lawyers, interpretation.
Honestly what is a rant? Is this an expression of some dissatisfaction with some product you bought? Let me ask you this, how much RAM is installed on the offending piece?
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I ranted about this before. One thing as an FYI: When I ranted about the problem, I NEVER received any notifications in the taskbar that Windows was going to reboot for updates, and would come back to find everything gone. Frustrating as all get out.
About six months ago Visual Studio started giving me errors I could not understand. I used that as an excuse to reinstall Windows from scratch, since the previous install was the overwrite upgrade from 8.0->8.1->10.
After the reinstall the notification now appears in the taskbar, which is a HUGE improvement from before. Also, my Visual Studio errors disappeared.
I'm not recommending you do that, because it sucked. Almost two days of reinstall hell. But it is something to be aware of.
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To be honest, it's not even the lack of notification that irks me. (On this occasion, I did get prompts twice asking me when to update; perhaps windows should interpret my repeated dismissals as an indication I do not WANT their "update".) But why on God's earth should an "urgent" update (which I assume it was) decide to resize the fonts in all the menus to make them miniscule? (I already have an overall magnification of 1.25 set, but this new setting made *some* fonts much smaller than even the 1.0 setting).
In fact it's all the little things together that are so frustrating. The number of ways to reduce updates, the seeming impossibility of permanently saying "no, my system's really great as it is, I like it, DO NOT CHANGE IT"; the fact that even when I've explicitly backed out an update MS re-apply it days later without warning; the way updates break random stuff like making my printer 100% non-responsive, or changing menu font sizes across the board; the way sometimes updates run "silently" and sometimes don't; the way that after an update from MS the "help" information is just plain wrong, if you can find it at all.
I'm old enough to remember upgrading from Win 3.1 to Win 3.11 and finding that (a) everything still worked, (b) everything still looked pretty much the same, (c) I'd not lost any of my personal settings, and (d) there was new stuff. And I did the upgrade when I wanted to. I cannot for the life of me understand how the present situation is an "improvement" from those days.
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Pretty sure it's time for windoz users to experiment. Buy a cheap laptop remove the SSD or HDD replace it with a new one on Amazon. Install Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, or some other Linux distro from a USB stick. You may/may not have to install Firefox, and you can always get the Libra/Apache Office suite for free. I built a small form factor desktop with my son and installed Fedora. The only think I need my cheap windoz laptop is to run turbotax every April.
~d~
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haha. It gets worse. In Settings / Windows Updates it tells me I've "paused" updates. There's a link that says "See what's new in this update". Clicking on that opens a (non-standard) message box that says "You'll need a new app to open this ms-get-started link". What's an "ms-get-started" link?? There's an OK button but no others. The OK button is disabled. (Fortunately clicking anywhere, in or out of the message box, closes it).
So I need to update something (what?) in order to find out what the updates are.
When I go to Settings / Windows Updates / View Update History, it shows me a blank screen under "Update history". Even though I know previous updates have been applied.
Just how bad can you get, Microsoft??
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So, another update has once again trashed my printer driver. TWICE I've un-installed this, TWICE MS have re-applied it.
My "Update history" is now completely blank, but I can go to "Uninstall updates". Trying to work out which one is which, there's helpfully a "Support link" shown at the bottom of the screen as you highlight each uninstallable update. The "Support link" is NOT a link, and worse, it's not even selectable / copyable. I have to re-type the URL into a browser. (Guess what, MS? I'm NOT using Edge.  )
Oh, and the URL is wrong; regardless of the ?kbid= parameter, it takes you to a generic "support" page that provides no support whatsoever.
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that MS has made it so difficult to disable the unattended restart. I'd settle for a simple warning that a reboot was required...and always wait for a human response, at least giving the opportunity to save and close my open apps.
It crashed so often that I got used to hitting the save shortcut frequently while coding. The cure for that catastrophe was Win2K which I used until Win7 came out. I still consider Win7 to be the pinnacle.