At a previous job, I was not doing IT support but another role and I noticed a coworker had a red dot on the Windows Update status bar icon.
Told him I don’t think I have seen that before, normally it is orange.
So he tells me that he is trying to see how long he can keep it going before something happens. I recommended against this, and also I normally recommend against using the desktop to store files. The laptop goes up in flames, so do your files. We have OneDrive for business, I know people hate it, but at least your stuff is… relatively safe. Backed up at least with version history.
A few weeks later I was chatting to someone else who sometimes shared my desk, and somehow I mentioned this encounter. A while later, his manager sitting ahead of us is on a phone call and we hear he is getting upset. He hangs up and turns around, tells us.
Him and one sales guy had spent hours on some proposals, worked out all the values and timings and it’s gone. All that work gone. His laptop rebooted because Windows updates.
He mentions who… it is the same guy. I tell him I was just telling my desk buddy about him and how he intentionally left his laptop running for months to see what Windows Update would do and clearly he did not take my advice about rebooting and using OneDrive.
The rest of the day… this guy did not stop. Every 30 minutes or so he’d just go “All that work, gone. Why?”
We’d be walking to get lunch, talking about other things and again he’d just switch back to that and turn gloomy again.
I mean… I don’t doubt this happens. But, even though I hate Windows with the fire of a thousand suns and don’t use it, this is what Group Policy is for
I don’t know how our IT system was set up, I had no access to poke around.
But I think it was a bit relaxed, we knew some users were downloading movies in certain office locations. Told to stop rather than clamping down.
So I think everyone was just left to deal with the update schedule themselves because there were maybe… 2 or 3 desktops in the entire office. Everyone was on laptops and didn’t leave them running overnight.
At a previous job, I was not doing IT support but another role and I noticed a coworker had a red dot on the Windows Update status bar icon.
Told him I don’t think I have seen that before, normally it is orange.
So he tells me that he is trying to see how long he can keep it going before something happens. I recommended against this, and also I normally recommend against using the desktop to store files. The laptop goes up in flames, so do your files. We have OneDrive for business, I know people hate it, but at least your stuff is… relatively safe. Backed up at least with version history.
A few weeks later I was chatting to someone else who sometimes shared my desk, and somehow I mentioned this encounter. A while later, his manager sitting ahead of us is on a phone call and we hear he is getting upset. He hangs up and turns around, tells us.
Him and one sales guy had spent hours on some proposals, worked out all the values and timings and it’s gone. All that work gone. His laptop rebooted because Windows updates.
He mentions who… it is the same guy. I tell him I was just telling my desk buddy about him and how he intentionally left his laptop running for months to see what Windows Update would do and clearly he did not take my advice about rebooting and using OneDrive.
The rest of the day… this guy did not stop. Every 30 minutes or so he’d just go “All that work, gone. Why?”
We’d be walking to get lunch, talking about other things and again he’d just switch back to that and turn gloomy again.
I mean… I don’t doubt this happens. But, even though I hate Windows with the fire of a thousand suns and don’t use it, this is what Group Policy is for
I don’t know how our IT system was set up, I had no access to poke around.
But I think it was a bit relaxed, we knew some users were downloading movies in certain office locations. Told to stop rather than clamping down.
So I think everyone was just left to deal with the update schedule themselves because there were maybe… 2 or 3 desktops in the entire office. Everyone was on laptops and didn’t leave them running overnight.
Ahh ok, that makes more sense