Aaargh!!! 43days into task and 82% complete and MS10 does an update and restart:-((((. Lost with a computation error.

I run Linux on all my machines and that is all I have ran this century. A thought occurred to me. Is it possible to use your router functions to block MS domains to prevent aotomagical updates?

Aaargh!!! 43days into task and 82% complete and MS10 does an update and restart:-((((. Lost with a computation error.

It might not be a bad practice for anyone still running these very long tasks to return to making frequent backups. Two months is a long time to go without a crash or unexpected restart.

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Hi Alan,

I see both your PCs are running Win10 Pro, so you can stop auto updates using Group Policy (can't do this for the Home version). See this link on tenforums.

I use this and never have a problem, as the updates will NOT be downloaded until I say it is OK. Although I configured the Group Policy to notify me before download AND before install, I find it installs immediately after download. That I can cope with.

However I think I remember reading that with the new Creators version, it limits the time of delay. Can't find the link, but I seem to remember it was a reasonable time. Creators does make it easy to defer updates, but I'm not sure if it will notify you at the end of the deferral period that is is going to install updates. See PCWorld here. It is still important to be notified of updates when running CPDN. I guess I'll find out more when the Creators edition comes through to my PCs.

Jim,

As far as I'm aware, I don't think there is a decent restore procedure in place. In the old days even restoring a couple of tasks was a nightmare, but with today's multiprocessor PCs is it really worth the headache? OK, did you backup 1 hour ago, 1 day ago, one week ago? The backup will restore the task OK, but then start sending the same trickles again. Does the backend handle this OK (I don't know.) As I've said before, as long as the PC is normally reliable don't worry about a few failures. They will get reissued, and surely the researchers & programmers are well aware of the average failure rate and will have all this built into how they handle the results. If not they should be saving up for a new mainframe ;-)

For the record I backup everything every day except for the BOINC task folders.

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There was a time when I used to make a backup every morning. The “backend” handled any duplicate trickles just fine. You didn’t get any credits for the duplicates, but, when you reached the point where you left off it picked up without a hitch. I would rather repeat the crunching for all the cores for a day or two than loose something that I had been running for 43 day!

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For me the question is how many of these very long tasks are there going to be? If they are going to be regular then I will start making backups again especially as none of my machines have more than 4 cores, two of them being only dual core. - If the long tasks are only going to be very occasional ones then perhaps backing up only when I have one of them might be the way to go?

Just checked and the repeat issues of this run have also failed with a compute error after a much shorter time than mine did. Oh well - might not have been MSs fault after all:-)