Don’t get me wrong, I think "Windows Update" or its big brother "Microsoft Update" is absolutely essential to keep Windows running.
That said, what seriously shits me, and it happens way too often, is that an update comes down, often at night that requires a reboot. If you happen to be at the computer when the update is ready to install you get a dialog that pops up asking you if you want to reboot now or "reboot later", if you select "later" the dialog appears again, and again and again.
If you let the dialog sit there for too long (like when it appears in the middle of the night while you are asleep) then after some period (I don’t know how long) it decides that you want to reboot and does it for you.
Unfortunately for me my typical development environment consists of several Firefox windows each with multiple tabs, several editors, several terminal sessions etc so after a reboot I have to spend a non-trivial amount of time getting things back the way they were.
I know I could disable auto-install of updates but that really defeats the purpose of having an auto-update service.
On the Mac when you elect to install an update that requires a reboot, after installation you get a "reboot now" dialog that you can move out of the way and ignore forever if you like, or wait until you are in a position to do a reboot in a controlled manner.
There is no auto-install on the Mac mostly due to the fact that most updates require you to authenticate the update with the admin password, as a rule system level changes always require authentication, this is one of the reasons that OS X is not a malware/virus magnet like Windows.
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