Bill P. Godfrey et al
Welcome to my incredibly stupid website. This was my pride and joy from '04 to '07. I've since rescued it from its barely- functioning state and I'm presenting it here.

I hope you enjoy it.
-- Bill P. Godfrey, 2022.
🦉 My current website
📜 About this archived blog
✨ A random blog entry
🐧 My Twitter
🀄 My Facebook

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Excuse me, I'm busy!

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Why is the "Restart Later" button disabled?



I like automatic updates for home use, as I feel the risks of someone exploiting a unpatched vulnerability are much greater than the possibility of a application suddenly not working.

But (and you knew there would be one) doing it this way is just annoying. I had a firefox window with ten tabs of YouTube videos, all loaded up and ready to watch. The above box appeared in the middle of watching one.

I couldn't work out how to stop the countdown so I just saved everything in sight, taking the screenshot along the way.

Now, I've switched to "Automatically download and inform me". We'll see what happens.

posted by Bill P. Godfrey at 11:19 PM

⬅️ All growed up. Storm Damage ➡️

4 Comments:

  • Thats a bit strange, and rather annoying! I've never seen that button disabled or have a timer before. Usually when an application demands I restart by only offering a "restart now" button I just drag it off the screen and forget about it. But what to do when a timer's involved? Hmmm... kill the process? I'm the type of person that if I saw a timer like that, I'd run around to the back of the case and rip the power cord out shouting: "no timers gonna decide when you restart! you'll restart when I tell you to restart bastard!" ... and then I take my pills and everything is nice again.

    By Blogger GammaGoblin, At 3:38 AM, August 09, 2006

  • I often have that - which is why I've done the same as you Bill; it is so annoying - the thing is you click "later" and it pops up again in five minutes saying "gonna do it now" and you go "no, I said later" and then 5 minutes later, up it pops...

    ...so why do they say "you can continue working while these updates are installed" ?

    And it's not just microsoft; firefox and their auto-downloading updates; I'd ran out of diskspace on my home pc the other day; the pop-up happenned and wisely I said "oh, do it next time you start"; of course, next time it started the install failed and I had to use IE until I'd freed up enough space for a total install.

    Oh those poodling flumps!

    I guess it's okay for idiots who wouldn't know an RS232 from their COM1 but for the rest of us...

    By Blogger M., At 9:41 AM, August 09, 2006

  • Hi Bill,

    Could the greyed out "Restart Later" button be to do with you being logged in as a non-admin user? I think only users with admin rights get the option to restart later.. Although I could be completely wrong and there's no way to force the dialog box up to test it!

    By Anonymous Simon Dobson, At 3:38 AM, August 13, 2006

  • Firefox has lost my love.

    By Anonymous Tuckle, At 10:23 PM, August 19, 2006