Hi,

This morning I woke up to a computer that was turned on - "oh great, Windows Update resumed from standby again, and even did it in spite of me turning off wake timers". That would have been a minor annoyance to start the day with, unfortunately it also turned out the image file backing my persistent ramdisk had been corrupted, and I had forgotten to add the folders on it I cared about to my backup set.

I'm sick and tired of the forced reboots in general, it's ******* bad attitude of Microsoft not allowing power users to turn them off, and that they're forced even when applications have unsaved data and tell Windows that they're not ready to shut down really ought to bring a class action lawsuit. Oh, and the

I could almost live with the forced reboots, except that windows update ******* resumes the device from standby in order to do the reboots. Yes, even though I've modified the power plan settings to not allow wake timers. This is... I mean, it's beyond contempt for us users.

I've tried several solutions in the past, like disabling orchestration services, deleting the UpdateOrchestrator task files, deleting the content of the task files and removing ACLs for even the SYSTEM user to the files, et cetera -they always get recreated at some point in time during a system update.

So... are there any existing solutions to bloody STOP this insanity from happening? Any gpedit policies (that don't require enterprise edition of Win10) and actually work?

Or do I have to write a tool that continually scan for the task files and delete them if they're re-added, check for the reboot dialog box and try to cancel it, etc?

Yeah, I guess Windows only resumes from standby, not poweroff - but I prefer standby for my desktop machine, so I can just pick up where I left off.

Doesn't it help prevent tracking?

-Deozaan (July 24, 2018, 02:10 PM)

Not really, no. You have to consider that most people aren't on static global IPs, but will either have dynamic IPs, or even (a very large number) be behind cgnat. The tracking folks obviously want to be able to uniquely identify you even in spite of that, and across devices as well.

Trying to use VPN against that is absolutely useless.

You can avoid some of it if you use a combination of uMatrix (in whitelisting mode), conservative use of noscript, a decent adblocker like uBlock Origin, adding in HTTP Referer header control and Firefox Multi-Account Containers. But it's still not a 100% guarantee and it's a fair amount of work getting some sites to work the first time you visit them.