Well, I left the computer on downloading last night....but when I came down this morning I discovered that the computer had rebooted. Once again Microsoft has decided that my computer "needed" to be restarted, right in the middle of the fucking download, well, hey Microsoft maybe if you're so courteous and intuitive about what's needed on MY computer you could at least re-open the programs that were running before you decided to take control of MY computer so I dont waste hours of potential download time sitting at the windows startup screen :mad:

yeah same problem here...I hate those self updates

To stop using the Microsoft Update Web site and start using the Windows Update Web site, follow these steps:1. On the Microsoft Update site, click Change Settings.
2. Scroll down the page, click to select the Disable Microsoft Update software and let me use Windows Update only check box, and then click Apply changes now.
3. You receive the following message:
Windows Automatic Updates will not be able to deliver updates from Microsoft Update Service.

Are you sure you want to continue?
Click Yes.
...

Something similar happened to me recently. I know I turned off automatic updates, but somehow it got turned back on and my computer rebooted sometime during the day while I was gone. The bad part was that I knew I was going to have to use Remote Desktop later, which obviously didn't work because windows was sitting at the login screen.

I am using Office 97 with Windows XP. I regularly get Microsoft Updates but they only install when I shut down. My problem is that for no apparent reason I have problems opening Office documents from the My Documents folder. The path cannot be found from the object. If I open the application first then search for the object it opens perfectly. This problem has only occured after 5 years of using Office 97. Could it be that a recent Microsoft update has messed Windows XP compatibility with Office 97.

Those auto updates infect the user's OS with MS certified trojans!!!. It's been around for years.

Something similar happened to me recently. I know I turned off automatic updates, but somehow it got turned back on and my computer rebooted sometime during the day while I was gone. The bad part was that I knew I was going to have to use Remote Desktop later, which obviously didn't work because windows was sitting at the login screen.

This is where Network logins comes into play, of course it's OS dependent, obviously not Windows XP Home edition.

Better still is the usage of Duel booting if you can't afford a spare computer system. Personal preference for servers is FreeBSD although you could use OpenBSD or any flavour of Linux. (Using a GUI will obviously undermine a systems true power for serving)

Of course none of those things will potentially deal with whatever Remote Desktop tasks you had planned, but they make a lot of sense for torrent related downloading or other downloading as long as you know how to configure your OS to do it.

"Barebones all the way Baby :)" - Anon

I just disabled automatic update, it'll download the update but ask me to tell it to install them, so when i'm away, i might come back to a pop-up asking me to install downloads, but nothing else would've changed, it's quite nice.

I don't know what vista users go through but I'm sure it can't be much better... my pity goes out to thee...

People actually let MS Automatic Update to happen???

Not to be nasty man, but you should know better....

I broke my last monitor, a 22'' flat screen, because my PC rebooted on its own and I punched the screen so hard that it broke.