I’ve been reading recently that on some computers Microsoft’s updates are happening automatically, even though the user has set the update settings to download but notify before updating, or even set to check for updates but not download or install without prompting. Microsoft has mentioned on their blog “Update Notifications and Install-at-Shutdown Behavior” that they “are investigating the reports and trying to clarify with the community exactly what people are experiencing.” They then go on to clarify how the update notifications work.
As I’ve written in the past, certain updates cause more harm than good on some computers so the ability and choose which updates to install and when is important. Certain updates could conflict with programs or hardware and cause computer instability.
A more comprehensive article from windowssecrets.com on this issue can be found here. In this article, it is mentioned that “One theory to explain the forced installs is that the large number of patches Microsoft released on June 9 overwhelmed the Redmond company’s download servers…The extra demand may have caused some downloads to be incomplete. Incomplete downloads are known to disable the notification icon and possibly the approval dialog that’s supposed to appear during shutdown.”
Something to be aware of if your computer has been giving you problems over the past couple of weeks, it may be because of some unwanted updates.
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Microsoft is long known for such practices. Another recent example was their effort to push IE8, alongwith the updates.