Unhappy Anniversary

I went to remote into my machine one day and found that it was offline.

While not unheard of, this was out of the ordinary. I rarely have computer crashes. When they occur, they are serious enough to power the machine down. At that point, something so horrible has happened that my computer shuts itself off as a safety precaution. So when I couldn't remote into my machine today, I presumed that this is what had happened. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen and it requires me to physically push the button to turn it back on. Maybe there's a BIOS/UEFI setting to restart the machine when this happens. It doesn't happen often enough to investigate. At least, I didn't think it happened often enough to worry.

So I made a trip to go to the box and, when I went to power the machine back on, you can imagine my surprise when I found it running. I turned the monitor on and logged in and found that at some point during the day, and without my knowledge, it had installed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. And had rebooted. And was now waiting for me to log in so it could finish changing some of my settings around.

It goes without saying that services I'd disabled were reinstalled and re-enabled. It goes without saying that the keylogging feature had been re-enabled. It's a good thing I don't rely on this machine for daily usage of stuff that's important to me.

Oh, wait. I do.

Well at least it's a good thing I don't rely on this machine for an income, or to provide a valuable service. It's already been well-established that the non-server version of Windows is not reliable for mission critical features, primarly because if it's not nagging you to upgrade, it's forcibly upgrading you against your will, and if you have upgraded, it's rebooting whenever the hell it feels like it and there's nothing you can do about it. So there. Neener neener neener.

[The longest uptime I ever had for any machine I controlled was on a Windows 98SE box. Go figure, huh?]

Aside from the obvious bizarre feelings you should have about a major corporation having pure contempt for its userbase, you should also be wondering if your computer is really yours anymore. Obviously you paid for it. It's your money. But what you do with your computer, and what your computer does for you, isn't really under your control anymore. It's Microsoft's box, and you'll do what they allow you to do with it, and when they say you can. You'll reboot when they say you'll reboot. You'll run what they allow you to run. And I'm pretty sure that if you don't want to upgrade, well, sorry, you don't have a say in the matter anymore.

I didn't lose information in this upgrade. Not that I know of. Yet. I've been inured to the idea of trusting a computer to not lose my data, a lesson I've been learning slowly and in fits ever since the era of my first machine running MS-DOS. If not for all my important day-to-day software having some form of state persistence built into them, I'd certainly have lost notes, scripts, and webpages. I did lose Internet connectivity though. So even if my machine hadn't stopped entirely and waited for me to physically log into it, when I don't always have physical access to it, I would still have to had used a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to turn the network connection back on. Honestly, in 2016, why would you want the sole Ethernet connection of a machine to have the "Internet Protocol Version 4" checkbox checked in its properties? Or any other checkbox checked for that matter? I never understood what a "Client for Microsoft Networks" was, so good rubbish to it.

It's nice to know I'm not in control of my computer anymore. It was a huge hassle having a reliable (well, "reliable") platform on which to run my programs and scheduled tasks. So boring and predictable. Now, with new Windows 10 Anniversary Update, I can always look forward to wondering if my software is running, or if I can get into it remotely. Perhaps the new motto should be "What can you do today? Seriously, what can you do?", because every day is a new adventure trying to answer that question. Today, for example, the answer was "go home and do everything from the keyboard, including turn the networking back on". Who knows what tomorrow will bring? I can't wait!

P. S., Additional editing of this article had to wait until after I'd returned to my Windows machine and fixed the firewall settings to allow RDP access again, because the update shut that off for some reason, too. Futher investigation into this brave new post-Anniversary Update world revealed that Hyper-V was completely uninstalled. Reinstalling it showed that all of my VMs got wiped. It looks like I still have the .VHDs though, so now I get to reconstruct them from the ground up again.

Later, I'd find I had hundreds of processes called "Fondue.exe" running in the background chewing up the CPU. "Stop-Process -name fondue -Force" run a few times seems to have stopped them. They come back every time I try to open mRemoteNG. Using Sysinternals Process Explorer reveals its command-line is "'C:\WINDOWS\system32\fondue.exe' /enable-feature:NetFx3 /caller-name:mscoreei.dll", which suggests that the Anniversary Update removed my .NET Framework 3.5 legacy install. I'm amazed it let me keep my wallpaper.