I guess Win 8.1 was tired of waiting...?

[JasonPratt]

Booted up early tonight (after the storm system passed) to discover that Microsoft was tired of waiting for me to say yes, and decided to upgrade my system to Win 8.1 without my consent.

So it dl'd without telling me, and pre-installed, and now is locked into whatever multiple level install procedure (with several restarts) will occur. At best I can hold it off indefinitely, maybe.

This wouldn't be so bad -- I've heard 8.1 is a major improvement -- except I quickly put that free shell program on my Win 8 system which simulates a proper XP start menu button, and knows to go to an XPish desktop when booting. I have no idea what will happen now in the update; will the two things conflict and break?  >:(

Thank you Microsoft. Thank you ever so. How about just refunding me half the cost for 8Pro for selling a broken tablet-swiping abortion of a UI that you forced on your customers first?




AND CHARLEMAGNE DLC FOR CK2 RELEASES TOMORROWWWWW!!

[Martok]

Allow me to lend you my commiseration and rage, Jason.  That sucks balls, man.   

[Gusington]

Donkey balls.

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

Tribble balls.

[JasonPratt]

Quadripple balls?  :))

The nightmare appears to be over, for now. Fortunately I had enough sense to tell it not to do express setup, as it would have sent all kinds of information back to Microsoft's mothership in orbit.  >:(

(To be fair, a lot of similar phishy things would have been turned off in express, too.)

At any rate, my start button shell appears to be overriding the new old start button (or whatever), and the XPish UI seems to remain in place. My carefully calibrated video settings seem to be okay, too. All things considered, it could have been much, much worse; and I realize there were (supposed to be) helpful patches in the point update, not just an excuse to put the Start Menu and a proper Desktop back in play.

The installation didn't quite go off without a hitch, as about 15 minutes before I had told it to (I thought) remind me (actually it was going to restart at that time regardless), it interrupted my Lotro session by simply rendering all controls inoperative with mere system dings whenever I tried to click anything. I thought the game had crashed; but alt-tabbing out revealed the 'problem'. Did manage to save and leave once I acknowledged (not permitted) the install was going to continue in 13 minutes. 

[Martok]

Ick.  Talk about your glitches in the Matrix... 

Well, glad you got it sorted out for now anyway.  Here's hoping you can keep this s*** from happening again. 

[undercovergeek]

switch off updates?

[JasonPratt]

Except most updates are important for security reasons. Though I think I had the updates on REQUEST PERMISSION, since up to last night it would occasionally pop up a message about 8.1 and I'd say no, don't want it.

That does remind me that the new settings were either/or, auto updates or none at all. I need to tinker with that and see if I can get it back to manual permission from alerts.

After playing the hell out of the new CK2 DLC of course. Priorities. 

[undercovergeek]

absolutely - it looks great, need to finish vanilla first