BLOG by zaiss

It’s 7:00 AM, and I’m awake and blogging. This is the earliest I’ve woken up in the past few weeks, which is ironic, because my alarm didn’t go off this morning. Nor was it going to go off eventually. I just happened to wake myself up, which is a first and likely the last occurrence I’ll see before August 2nd.

Backing up a little… I have my alarm clock on my computer. I made this transition a few years ago when my old alarm clock (one of those that sets itself from some control tower in the middle of Colorado) kept losing it’s signal and reseting to midnight while I was asleep. I was late a lot that semester. This alarm pulls music from my computer AND pulls up news websites. I mean, I wouldn’t do it on my own that early in the morning. Are you kidding?

Right, sorry for rambling… 7am and all. I woke up this morning to find that my computer had restarted itself. Despite my groggy state, I still could recall quite clearly that I hadn’t done this myself. Power outage? No… none of my clocks were flashing. So I logged in, and found that Windows had installed a security update on my behalf. They even went so far as to restart my computer on my behalf too.

Traditionally, Windows has (1) asked you to confirm that an update should be installed, and (2) asked you if you were ready to restart your computer afterwards. And unless I’m sleepwalking (which I’ve never been told that I do… sleeptalking sure, and occasionally sleeping with my eyes open, but certainly never sleep-installing-Windows-updates), I’m assuming that Microsoft made these changes automatic.

Was this security update so critical that it required immediate action? If so, I think a little user communication would be nice. All I know is that an update was installed, but I have no idea what it was for. Admittedly, the only detriment to me was that my alarm was turned off. It turned out to not be that big of a deal, I guess. But you know that someone was rendering some complex graphic that took 5 days, and this morning they were going to get to look at their result, but sorry — the work was lost because Windows had to restart.

I also wondered if this is a move on Microsoft’s part to make it easier to install security updates. I certainly didn’t have to do as much work this time around. If this assumption is correct, it seems a bit drastic to go directly from “users can’t install updates currently” to “we’ll just install them automatically!” If it happens again, maybe I’ll do a little usability analysis. You’ll see my work in action - it’ll be grand. But for now, I need to apply my talents to HCI Project.