Updates on Shut Down

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

http://www.superantispyware.com/

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

http://www.lavasoft.com/

These are what most of use and they are all free, in conjunction with our preferred AV. If you ask, the preferred AV is MSE.

System restore point....http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-windows-vista-system-restore/

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials

Yeah hi bass, again.

I'm back to ask a question. Generally speaking, how am I supposed to tell when an update is taking too long? I guess this also depends on how many parts to the update there is...

Well in my case, today, my computer was running a "1 of 1" update...and I gave it say between 5-10 minutes. Is that too long? I'd imagine so. I mean, I personally don't see why it should take more than a minute to do each "1" of the update, so tell me what you all think.

Either way I shut it down before it ended, and let me tell you from experience, it hardly EVER finished its stupid "1 of 1" updates anyway.

But now I fear all this shutting down when my laptop runs updates like these might cause some harm.

I was Google searching and stumbled upon someone on Yahoo Answers asking what will happen if a computer is shut down when it's not finishing an update, and someone replied with:

"You can turn off it. It will redo the updating from where it has stopped. Nothing will harm your computer, coz windows itself takes a precaution of system restore before it does every updating. So, even you can run a system restore if you think something is wrong. Nothing to worry at all"

Personally I don't know which he means - is it restarting the computer, shutting it down by "tapping" the power button (which in my case means the computer shuts down, but as soon as you turn it back on, you'll see the update screen again meaning it still isn't going anywhere) or holding down the power button so that when you restart it, it reboots Windows. I did the latter of the three.

Anyway just in case I did something wrong I'm going to do a system restore before that point...*sigh*

By the way, in the System Restore's menu, where you can check for the complete list of things that will be deleted, and things that will be restored (depending on the date you choose to restore back to...), and there isn't anything listed under the "things that will be restored" list...is there then a point to do that restore, if your concern is only that something might have been screwed when you force-restarted your computer while it was updating (I had to do this since the "Installing update x of x" screen just never went away)?

Please reply back.

........

MJOLNIR, I believe that refers to applications, etc that would be restored & deleted. There are still system settings that would be reverted back to that restore point.

If you try a restore and it doesn't do what you want then there is always the option to come back to today.

Ok thanks man. I just don't understand why a Windows 7 PC would by crappy in this manner. I mean, I have a 360 and PS3 and never once experienced a technical problem with them (that I can remember), but the more popular and expensive W7 PC has a different problem by the week. So strange...

I'm not sure what you mean by "be crappy to you." Microsoft updates are primarily to improve security or to install new .NET functionality. It is generally the .NET installs that, in my experience, seem to take an unusually long amount of time and seem to have the most install issues.

But you force shutting off the machine adds an extra bit of complexity because the updates end up in a partially installed state. I have noticed that updates can be quite a pain on laptops because unlike my desktop they aren't on all the time so you need to allot time for updates. My personal choice is to have updates notify but not download or install so I control when and where updates happen but this requires a proactive decision; if you want the convenience of automatic updates then plan to leave your computer on all night Thursdays.