Hi, all,

M$ outfoxed itself. Again. It seems update strategy is changing. Again.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/microsoft-delays-patch-tuesday-as-world-awaits-fix-for-smb-flaw/

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

I was reading your saga in another place of trying to disable automatic updates and M$ not thinking that cpdn work meant the computer was busy. It occurred to me that, "busy" might mean keyboard activity and if you had something that would tell your computer you had pressed the space-bar once every half hour or whatever interval was needed it might do the job?

Hi Dave

Ahem - start at my post here and work your way forward in time.

Hi, Dave,

Keyboard and/or mouse activity count. HDD, CPU, and network activity appear to be beyond M$ capability (or willingness) to detect.

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.

The dangers of speaking about that which I do not know!

I think I will stick to Linux (and WINE) until native tasks become available again.

I've had an even better idea.

Put a sheet of thin, clear plastic over the keyboard.
Put a bottom less cage around the whole lot.
Keep half a dozen pet mice in the cage.

That aught to keep the keyboard active. :)
You could then also say that you had a combined keyboard and mouse pad. :)

Perhaps a switch to swap between two keyboards. Not sure if these are available.

A little trick I found (after a lot of searching) after getting fed up with inconvenient restarts killing LHC Virtual Machines.

In the Win Update settings, set to not download over a metered connection, then in your network settings, again set as metered. It doesn't matter if your connection IS metered or not but this will trick MS Update into seeing it as such, so it won't Auto Update.
You will still need to occasionally manually let it download updates but you will be able to do that at YOUR convenience rather than Microsoft's.

Hi Ray

That sounds good. Not as much fun, but a lot simpler.

I keep hidden from MicroSoft by running a Wine version.

Hi, Ray,

Couldn't find GUI suggestions except for Wi-Fi. Instead, found this:

This method only allows you to set mobile and Wi-Fi connections as metered. There is no GUI option to do this with wired Ethernet connections.
Part 2: Set Ethernet Connection as Metered in Windows 10
To set your Ethernet connection to metered, you’ll have to dive into the Windows Registry to tweak the settings.

Too many years since I played in Registries, ergo ...

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"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo
Greetings from coastal Washington state, the scenic US Pacific Northwest.