Windows Power Users Frustrated as Microsoft Forces Automatic App Updates (techspot.com) 92
Microsoft has removed the ability to disable automatic app updates in the Microsoft Store, according to screenshots from Deskmodder.de. Windows users can now only pause updates for one to five weeks. The Registry tweak that previously allowed users to modify update behavior has been removed. Group Policy editor remains the sole method for creating update exemptions on workstations and enterprise systems, but this tool is unavailable in Windows Home editions. The change is being deployed gradually to all Windows users. Microsoft has not commented on the modification, which affects all apps distributed through the Microsoft Store including both UWP and Win32 applications added in 2024.
not a problem (Score:3)
I have the microsoft store blocked at my firewall. Additionally, i don't use any store apps.
also not a problem (Score:4, Informative)
They use every CDN (Score:4, Funny)
You cannot block them without blocking the internet. You will run what they want on their computer.
Re:They use every CDN (Score:4, Funny)
You cannot block them without blocking the internet. You will run what they want on their computer.
That's the only safe way to run Windows. Block the Internet.
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Whitelist the part of the Internet that you use in your firewall and you're good.
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L7 filtering hasn't been a thing for over a decade now. All traffic is now encrypted.
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That is somewhat misleading. In this case you control (more or less) the client, so you can install a root certificate on your firewall and the client and let the firewall do its MitM on all your traffic. If Windows tries to evade that, the firewall will fail to decrypt the traffic and block it, which was the intended result. If Windows does not evade the MitM, the firewall can do full L7 filtering just like in the good old days.
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And in the process you also break HSTS and are unable to access half of the internet.
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Or it just fails to connect to a majority of hosts on the internet and might as well be disconnected from the network.
Re:They use every CDN (Score:5, Informative)
You cannot block them without blocking the internet. You will run what they want on their computer.
I block the entire internet from my Windows machines. A Proxy server setting is required for surfing. HTTPS to any destination IP not on a whitelist is rejected. I configure that proxy setting only in my Firefox browser of choice - Firefox can browse to URLs on the CDNs, but Windows itself does not get that proxy server information.
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Thanks
Re:They use every CDN (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly (Score:2)
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My copy of Windows does not have the store installed.
Satya and company have thrown caution to the wind (Score:4, Interesting)
My decision to move off Windows for my daily driver (last year) was motivated by this. So, this change is very expected. The hard W11 deadline is Venn overlapping.
uuuggghhhhh (Score:3)
There's one easy way to stop updates: uninstall.
Yep. (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows is for people who are too non-technical to use Linux, and too poor to afford Macs.
Of course, that's most people, so Microsoft still wins. But those of us with money and/or tech smarts have a better way, if we want it.
Re:Yep. (Score:5, Informative)
You don't need to be technical to run Linux. Aside from creating a boot disc, Mint walks a user through everything. It uses a gui which people are familiar with and it takes a short time to get your bearings.
Yes, there are quirks about what things are called, but with the package manager doing all the heavy lifting, updating or installing is just a click away.
For the average user, running Linux is far easier than the daily death defying run in Windows.
Re: Yep. (Score:1)
Aside from creating a boot disc
You just lost the game there.
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My friend, I've used great apple machines. But they still suck in their own cultish manner. I'd rather have windows. It sucks, too, but IMHO, marginally less than apple.
A closed ecosystem is not a good thing. That's why there's their app store has almost what you want, but not quite.
Digital in-breeding at its finest.
What did anyone expect? (Score:3, Informative)
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Right! Kind of a contradiction.
Re: Windows Power Users? Microsoft Store? (Score:2)
Well they are very proud of themselves for memorizing some regedit entries.
So power these users
Issue is not limited to MS Store (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows OS updates are forced on users. For me, it is extremely frustrating. I go home from work, come back and find out that the forced updated rebooted my computer without my permission. I usually have a lot of programs open in different state of progress. All that gets lost. I fail to understand why Microsoft is unable to take the same approach as Apple. Offer the updates to the users, but do not reboot the computer without explicit user permission. Why take the user hostile option instead?
Re: Issue is not limited to MS Store (Score:2)
Yeah so? This isnt a reason people should lose access to their own computer.
You dont like it? Then YOU manage their computer and fix it. Oh you arent but are so important they dont get to have freedoms if you dislike them.
This is not a valid reason any other than they play outside and get their hands dirty and I dont like that.
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So, pay for the Pro upgrade and never have this problem again. Don't complain about how the version designed to keep grandma safe doesn't let you turn something off.
What an apologist! Gheesh, can't you call a shovel a shovel? The version designed to keep grandma safe is the one that worked like a chromebook. The version in question, albeit for home users, _DID_ allow you to turn this off, and now it suddenly does not, and updates (the very means this change introduced) are the thing you can't turn off now.
It doesn't effect me, but I can certainly see the issues with it. What argument is there to make that defends removing even the registry tweak method? It's not like t
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As for why they took the registry tweak, I don't kno
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Except KB5063878 and, of course we haven't heard about it since Slashdot is slower than Internet Explorer, but this update wrecks your hard drive. If you have an SSD, and copy a folder larger than 50GB, your drive stops being recognized, and it's not fixed by a reboot.
So yeah, no. Any windows user knows NOT TO UPDATE on the first day. Every fucking patch they release breaks something. And this has happened since the first day of Windows Update.
As for "users welcoming updates", no. Absolutely no. Most non te
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Why take the user hostile option instead?
Windows users have already proven that they have poor judgement, you cannot trust them to reboot to install those updates timely. Though to be fair, if they go longer than a week without rebooting, the system will start having problems and then they will be motivated to do so. We do a weekly reboot at work because if you don't, apps start to fail.
I find that Microsoft apps in particular start to fail much sooner than that, for example Office applications stop redrawing the "ribbon" correctly within anywhere
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I fail to understand why Microsoft can do this without a huge protest by the users. If I have an unsaved document open, the system MUST NOT reboot. In old Win9X, a program could even stop the reboot. You clicked reboot and Wordpad asked "Save: Yes/No/Cancel" and the cancel button prevented the reboot. Now Windows says "Who cares about your work? Let's reboot!"
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I fail to understand why Microsoft can do this without a huge protest by the users.
Because it's difficult to call out your safe word while wearing a ball gag (Windows).
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And I thought the BDSM folks were mac users ...
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But the reason is that the people who use Home don't care. "Power users" use Pro, where you can disable updates. Which also means this article is BS, as any "power user" running Windows Home is not a "power user".
This is something beneficial for the average user who probably doesn't even know those things need to be updated on occasion. It's not meant for you. It's not meant for techspot's audience. It's not meant for this audience.
It's like an ad
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The gap between "home" and "pro" users is the reason. "Home" must - by definition - include the lowest of the "low information users", and - man, do they get low these days. I'm serious. IT is now at a point, where it's everywhere and for everyone, and the level of competency between people varies WILDLY. Orders of magnitude between people. People that are centuries and milennia apart in self-domestication, IQ, cultural norms and cognitive development are now living together on the same block. And all of th
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I fail to understand why Microsoft is unable to take the same approach as Apple.
Apple builds their OS(s) on top of BSD (Unix). Most updates to Unix machines do not require reboot.
Microsoft Windows is built on top of NT (and parts of DOS). Windows has problems going more than 30 days without reboot, updates or no.
Re:Issue is not limited to MS Store (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is because Unix has two-phase deletes, while Windows doesn't, inheriting the delete semantics from DOS and a bit from VMS.
Two-phase delete refers to the act of deleting a file - if you delete a file on Unix, the file gets marked as deleted, but the actual file blocks are not deallocated until the last reference to the file is closed, at which point the file blocks are reclaimed. This can leave orphan file nodes if a delete was scheduled but not done (e.g., power loss, sudden reboot without unmount, etc). This is why you have a "lost+found" directory on Linux filesystems - file blocks that were deleted but not actually reclaimed end up there to indicate the directory entry was removed, but the inode was not reclaimed.
On DOS, deletes are blocked if a file is in use. For a single tasking OS, this is perfectly normal as the last reference to the file should be gone by the time you delete the file. Of course, with the introduction of multitasking, and networking, these things become more complex. (MS-DOS's SHARE.EXE was a program used ot manage shared files). This leads to issues when deleting a file since you cannot delete a file that's in-use.
This is also why there are tricks on Unix where you create a file, then delete it immediately and you then use it as a temporary scratch file that will go away when you're done with it without littering the filesystem with random files. You can't do that on Windows.
When you do an update, you may be replacing files that are in-use, e.g., system libraries. On Unix, you can do this - programs already running continue to use the old library on disk whose reference was deleted, while new programs will use the updated library. However this can lead to issues since now you can have programs with a library mismatch - one program is using an old version of the library, while another program is using the newer version, so you need to restart the programs using it. And sometimes this can lead to bigger problems like file corruption if the file format changed and programs are using a mix of the and new libraries.
So in general, a reboot is generally safest unless you are sure no one was using the file. Windows needs it more as it can't update files in use so the early boot process the system performs the updates and deletes that were scheduled, while Unix they may reboot just to ensure everyone is using the right version of a library.
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Actually, DOS has had this delete semantics since before VMS was used as a basis for Windows NT, and it might have been borrowed from an unexpected place - the IBM timesharing OS for mainframes VM/CMS. In defense of VM/CMS I can note that in it it's possible to do the UNIX trick with the temporary files, sort of. The CMS filesystem has a special feature for that - files with certain mode get automatically deleted when no longer opened.
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When you do an update, you may be replacing files that are in-use, e.g., system libraries. On Unix, you can do this - programs already running continue to use the old library on disk whose reference was deleted, while new programs will use the updated library. However this can lead to issues since now you can have programs with a library mismatch - one program is using an old version of the library, while another program is using the newer version, so you need to restart the programs using it. And sometimes this can lead to bigger problems like file corruption if the file format changed and programs are using a mix of the and new libraries.
No, that is not how it works, Shared Object files (.so) have version numbers in the name. When you update you install a new file with a different name. Example: my shell (on Debian Trixie) uses /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.6.5, where 6 is
the major number and 5 the minor number. A new version (eg bug
fix) would increment the minor number, an ABI change increment the major
number. Some libraries have a third number (patch change) - see
semantic
versioning [wikipedia.org].
You can have several different versions of
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Have you defined your active hours so it doesn't do that anymore?
There is no option for more than 18 active hours. FYI, there are plenty of people with actual work shifts that are that long and run over that length regularly, and none of that changes the OP point of going home at night only to find their machine had rebooted over night (IE: the inactive hours).
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"Why take the user hostile option instead?"
Because for Microsoft, "user hostile" isn't an option, it's a way of life.
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Look for the Windows Update Blocker app on MajorGeeks.
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Windows OS updates are forced on users. For me, it is extremely frustrating. I go home from work, come back and find out that the forced updated rebooted my computer without my permission. I usually have a lot of programs open in different state of progress. All that gets lost. I fail to understand why Microsoft is unable to take the same approach as Apple. Offer the updates to the users, but do not reboot the computer without explicit user permission. Why take the user hostile option instead?
Using the windows firewall app within the group policy editor disable rule merging and the default permissive outbound rule and whitelist everything you want to talk to the Internet. It never fails. All of the firewall APIs that windows itself and apps use to add exceptions for themselves are summarily ignored the disabling of rule merging.
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I go home from work, come back and find out that the forced updated rebooted my computer without my permission.
Congratulations on not knowing how to use your computer. Windows doesn't force reboot your computer for days and then gives you a notification a full day in advance of doing so (let me guess you disabled notifications). For that entire period it puts a little orange dot on your shutdown button and on your update button (let me guess, you don't know what that means). And during this period you can even reboot / shutdown your computer without forcing updates.
Sorry but your comment went out of date with Window
Resistance is futile (Score:2)
Group Policy editor remains the sole method for creating update exemptions on workstations and enterprise systems, but this tool is unavailable in Windows Home editions.
Just give their Star Trek Borg like AI time. They'll "fix" that.
Praise the Computer Gods (Score:2)
The only Windows I use is the Server 2016 RDP managed service my company pays for, so updates are invisible to me. My two MacBooks and my Ubuntu laptop all have sane update policies which remind me of updates, without endlessly clogging up the works by downloading the updates. Every time I use an actual Windows machine I'm reminded of what an appallingly bothersome workflow-interrupting OS it has become.
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I get rather annoyed with Apple's constant reminders to update to the latest OS, given I'm running just one version behind (and they are still supporting it).
It's futile (Score:4)
The Gates Borg image needs to be reinstated for Microsoft stories on Slashdot.
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The son learned from the father, the master of all evil.
You have had 34 years to switch to Linux (Score:3, Informative)
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34 years
The ultimate nerd brag: to have switched to Linux a week before Linus Torvalds first announced it.
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Stop playing anti cheat cucked games and subscription cucked software and the problem goes away.
Cool, so just stop doing the things I want to do and use the software I want to use with the features I want. Got it. You've been a real help there buddy!
As a matter of interest has the "Fuck your hobby do something else" approach worked for anything other advice you have given? It's 2025 and Linux market share has shown that this doesn't work. Why do you persist on giving advice that no one wants and achieves nothing?
Enshittification (Score:2)
There are way too many apps and programs that lost features through updates. And if all updates would be great, there would be no reason to force them onto users.
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The people who don't (want to) know how their computer works use the default setting. If you really want to make auto-updates the default, do so, but give the power users a switch to turn it off.
Enshittification of newer version is not the only point. You also get into the situation that you do not know why something stops working. The scenario "I did NOTHING and then it broke!" gets real with auto-updates. As a supporter it gets really annoying if some app or chrome extension updated itself to a broken ver
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There are way too many apps and programs that lost features through updates.
Updates are especially risky bc it's an App store. Similar in concept to the Google chrome extension store.
It is not unusual for apps a lot of people installed to get sold or taken over by a new developer who then blanks out the app and transforms it into malicious code to be delivered on the next automatic update.
Updates for Windows itself are important and all, and in theory Microsoft is trusted.. but 3rd party app develope
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The linux advertising budget (Score:2)
It's getting bigger and bigger, and they don't even have to pay a dime for it.
You thought you owned your computer? (Score:2)
But you upgraded to a TPM 2.0 system and installed Microsoft Windows on it?
Maybe it's time to reevaluate the choices in your life, or at least accept that you don't own your own hardware.
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Good luck finding a new PC without TPM 2.0 these days.
You really have to wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
You really have to wonder just how much shit Windows users will put up with before they throw up their hands and switch away. Little by little Microsoft is making your PC a piece of rental equipment that they own. but that they store in your home.
I've been on Mint for ~5 years and can't imagine going back to Windows. I have a pet Windows box used for running a security system, but I may switch it over too and run the security app in a VM.
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Define "shit". Most users are conditioned to have always up to date software. Virtually all users had no idea that blocking updates was even a thing, nor would they understand why someone would want to do that.
If you're wondering why users put up with things that don't affect them and they had no idea even was a feature in the first place, maybe have a long hard think about your question.
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Why are pros complaining about home? (Score:2)
* - or Enterprise, or Workstation.
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linux (Score:2)
Happy BSOD, bitches. Microsoft just doesn't give a (Score:2)
This is a disaster in the making.
MS can't be trusted to deliver updates that work. Their track record proves that they push faulty updates.
The FTC should fine them USD$10,000 for every failed update. Then maybe they drop that "just good enough" mentality and provide quality software. (Finally)
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Only if the fine is per affected user.
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Oh, absolutely! I was so mad after reading that that I was ranting faster than I can type.
Microsoft has had a pass on its unprofessional behavior for too long. It's time they were held accountable to individuals whose lives they;ve negatively impacted through their blantantly indifferent negligence.
Perhaps the United Healthcare solution could expand to other industries....
Just goes to show (Score:2)
More enshittification (Score:2)
The enshitification continues (Score:2)
With Microsoft forcing updates on drivers and now apps, the stability of their OS will be compromised when things "don't work".
One more reason I'm done with Microsoft OS's. It's Linux and Chrome for me.
Local Policy (Score:2)
I'm almost certain Windows Home still has the Local Policy Editor. I'll have to check this evening. Assuming so though, and with that, you can configure your updates to operate however you wish. The idea that "Windows Power Users" can't control this behavior is nonsense. Either they are "Power Users" and can meddle in the registry or LPE, or they are not "Power Users."
All that said, I see both sides of this. MS is forcing most users to accept updates, which in turn tends to keep them more secure. It's
"I'm sorry Dave ... (Score:2)
... I'm afraid I can't (let you) do that".
This is just a latter-day example of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". But in this case they're extending their control over users' hardware, while they simultaneously extinguish users' control.
All of this, of course, is designed to restore what they view as the rightful order in computing. They're dragging the world back to the client / server model, where the owners of the servers have all the control. The customers both have, and are, "dumb clients".
Are you stupid? (Score:2)
Ask yourself this one simple question: are you stupid? If you are still running Windows in full knowledge of the privacy, security and usability disaster it has become then the answer is. Yes. You are stupid. Simple.
OK Microsoft spinbots, have at.
Marketing (Score:2)
I don't think Windows is a good choice for "power" users.
The fact update behaviour and schedules get in the way is proof enough for most that Windows is not a good place for "power" users.
Power users is pretty much everyone these days as casual net users are on phones now.
All apps? (Score:2)
> which affects all apps distributed through the Microsoft Store
What about PWAs? Surely it simply doesn't apply to PWAs.
Move to Linux and the apps will follow. (Score:2)