On a Windows Vista (and likely Win7) box the Windows Updates has gotten this nasty idea to automatically reboot your computer – if for some odd reason it feel like it, now where this may be useful in some sceneries I have had important video conversions disrupted by this exact behaviour.
If you happen to be looking at your pc while the update is in progress you will see a warning, stating that the computer will reboot in 10 min and you can then choose to delay this up to 4 hours, but if you have set a large conversion of video files in motion – then you are likely watching a good movie instead and will come back to a computer laughing at you via its loginscreen.
Anyhow, it’s a simple thing to fix once and for all, you just have to do a bit of registry tweaking;
Create this key;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU
NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers=1
And Windows will behave after a reboot (that mean no more unscheduled reboots caused by Windows Updates)..
If you are lazy, then this blog offers a small utility to modify the registry for you 🙂
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/prevent-windows-update-from-forcibly-rebooting-your-computer/
Problem solved…
I have before talked about Online backup, and now a new player has entered the arena https://www.carbonite.com. Well new and new, it would appear to have existed for some time, but I just recently heard about it. Pricing is very similar to Idrive.
I have not tested this service yet, but a quick comparison to the previous favorite (www.idrive.com) lists these pros and cons;
Pros;
Unlimited backup (not like Idrive where unlimited equals a fair use limit of 150GB, I never understood this)
Cons;
Data can be decrypted by the hosting company. This WILL require a subpoena, but never the less data CAN be decrypted, in the case of www.Idrive.com you can set your own encryption key for TOTAL privacy – for most this is not an issue, but if you are concerned about privacy this may be a dealbreaker, furthermore there is the issue of national law – what is legal to store in Denmark (where I live) may not be legal in the USA and vice versa eg. copyrighted music – having total privacy does tend to keep my mind at ease about such matters.
Conclusion;
It is interesting, but for now I think I’ll stay at www.idrive.com mainly because of the privacy issue, and besides I have already uploaded about 110 gb data *sigh* the thought of restarting the process can kill any initiative 😉
If you once in a while work with installing software, then you HAVE to check this out.
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/scite
It is a scripting language that will make it very easy to install and modify installed software installations, it uses a very intuitive VB variant that is very easy to understand and the help is just wonderful. One of the VERY neat features is that once you have completed your install script you simply compile it and viola you have an .exe file, thus you can simply add an install.exe file to the package you wish to distribute and the enduser do not need to have any scripting engine etc. installed, it IS neat..
So you might think, “well if its a VB vaiant, why not just make the whole thing as a VB-Script” – well you could – but have you ever tried to access files/registry etc via a VB script, well sure it is possible but the code quickly become unnessesary complex, this scripting language is straight out of the bag – copyfile( from, to) as easy as that.
The scripting engine has support for;
System variabels (eg. @StartMenu = location of startmenu, @StartMenuCommonDir = location of All users start menu etc etc.)
File management (copy / delete / move files)
Directory management (copy / delete / move directories)
Registry access (read write)
Replay keystrokes
and a whole lot more..
This is from the introduction in the help file;
Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
Manipulate windows and processes
Interact with all standard windows controls
Scripts can be compiled into standalone executables
Create Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
COM support
Regular expressions
Directly call external DLL and Windows API functions
Scriptable RunAs functions
Detailed helpfile and large community-based support forums
Compatible with Windows 95 / 98 / ME / NT4 / 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008
Unicode and x64 support
Digitally signed for peace of mind
Works with Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC)
Inspiration;
If you are interested I have created an uninstall script for McAfee Virus Scan and ePO agent,
you can download it here for inspiration;
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.au3
or the compiled EXE version here
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.exe
For more on uninstalling McAfee Virus Scan and ePO please see https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=147