OK, I'm not one to usually bash on Microsoft - i think for the most part they offer great products, but I have a major complaint to air out concerning Automatic Updates.

So if you have Automatic Updates setup to download and install automatically, or even if they download automatically and you have to choose when to install them, I've found a major problem:

If the update requires your computer to be rebooted, it will prompt you to reboot, and if you choose to reboot later, it will keep asking you every few minutes to reboot - not a big deal you would think, but when its asks you to reboot now or later, it starts a 5:00 minute countdown, and if you don't make a choice, it reboots on its own. This happened to me the other day, and I was in the middle of a pretty hefty file download, and was AFK when it prompted to reboot, so I had to start all over when it rebooted. I have also had a person or two tell me that they have lost work when their computer rebooted on its own, so I decided to put this to the test since my one test machine was calling for updates this morning. Here's what I did:

My one spare machine here was ready to install updates, so I opened up MS-Word, WordPad, Notepad, Paint and Adobe Photoshop, and created new documents from scratch without saving and then watched the computer update. It updated, and then prompted to reboot. I sat and watched it as if I wasn't actually in front of the computer, and when it counted down the 5 minutes, Word prompted me to save changes to my document, but the prompt was there for about 3 seconds, then it closed, and Word did as well. It then went through each program, doing the same thin - prompting to save changes, and then closing the prompt, and when all programs were closed, the computer rebooted. Upon reboot, all files were gone, they were never saved, and Word didn't even have anything in AutoRecover, and my AutoRecover time was set to 2 minutes.

Anyhow, this just sucks, and I wanted to rant about it for a bit. - I know that you could not use auto updates, but that's not a good choice for home users, because they would never update.