[zigzag312]

Yes, they are not completely random, but users may perceive them as such. Technically, nothing on computer is truly random.

Non-technical users don't configure active hours usually. Many are not even aware of this feature.

I'm not sure I would call a feature that can (and does) cause data loss, when user doesn't follow minor update schedule, only inconvenient.

The three cases I mentioned, none were using Home edition. 1st was sister's co-worker that was running some heavy computations of the terrain they were analyzing. He left workstation running over night, expecting to get completed results the next day so he could continue working on it, but system restarted and he lost one day, because he needed to run it again during the work hours. 2nd was a friend writing master's degree. She had all her research documents opened at relevant positions while she was going slowly through the research while writing. She put computer into hibernate mode each night, so she could just resume where she left of next day. Same story, Windows rebooted, closing a few dozen documents. Fortunately, she had her work saved, but she still lost her state/organization of documents and needed to find relevant section of each document again. 3rd was an accountant who was working late and left computer for a few minutes. Again, Windows restarted closing everything. I find current design of updates and active hours very narrow minded. It may seem good in theory, but from my experience, it's bad in practice.

But hey, maybe Windows is not intended for professionals any more. Just home users and gamers.

[qayxc]

Sigh. You are contradicting yourself a little here.

> Non-technical users don't configure active hours usually. Many are not even aware of this feature.

Ok. Fair enough, but then don't end with this:

> maybe Windows is not intended for professionals any more. Just home users and gamers.

All the anecdotes you provides lack crucial details, such as was the system prompting for restarting after updates, how were updates configured, what was the actual version (19004 21H1, older?), etc. It honestly sounds a lot like some important bits and pieces have been left out.

If you're using the Professional Edition and are worried about data loss because of update-related reboots, configure a proper update schedule and group policies - that's what the Professional edition is for.

You can't come to the conclusion that an OS is not for professionals if you don't actually use the corresponding features and configure it accordingly.

Btw., Windows has a feature that allows apps to auto-reopen and restore their state after a reboot. The fact that most software doesn't support this is not the fault of the OS either.

[zigzag312]

> All the anecdotes you provides lack crucial details

I don't know all the details and I agree that they could have prevented it, if they had known how to do it. The point of these anecdotes was to show that there seems to be a serious issue with the design of this feature to cause problems this frequently.

Issues IMO are:

- default setting to restart when user is logged in and has applications opened is kind of hostile towards the user as it can lead to data loss (updates are important, but not more important than user's data)

- there is no way to configure this in the Settings app (nor is there any information in Windows Update settings that informs the user about this)

- setting is buried inside group policies. It's hard to find the correct setting without instructions. (and there are a lot of bad instructions online regarding this)

- all things considered, this feels like a dark pattern.

> If you're using the Professional Edition and are worried about data loss because of update-related reboots, configure a proper update schedule and group policies - that's what the Professional edition is for.

Configuration has reset for me once after a feature update. It might have been due to a bug, I'm not sure. Anyway, it happened long ago, under Win 8 Pro I think. Not really relevant anymore.

> Windows has a feature that allows apps to auto-reopen and restore their state after a reboot. The fact that most software doesn't support this is not the fault of the OS either.

The fact that it proceeds with a restart even, if not all running applications support this feature, is the fault of the OS. It's a good feature and hopefully it will gain more support in the future.

[qayxc]

I completely agree with your issues regarding the settings, lack of discoverability. The whole configuration system of Windows is a mess and needs to be replaced.

Windows updates in general are a convoluted mess that breaks things regularly in unexpected ways (e.g. an update broke Visual Studio's profiler for over a year).

I only don't agree that unexpected restarts are a common occurrence these days, I'm with you w.r.t all other complaints.