Here at the cottage I have a 3 gig/month cap. If I go over I pay extra. That gives me about 100 meg a day to play with. In preparation for the summer I have to spend some time
- setting my wifi connection to metered (to block updates)
- disabling "also update Microsoft Software"
- running sc config wuauserv start=disable
- running sc stop wuauserv
- disabling updates on foxit reader, firefox and a dozen other apps
There's always at least one app that falls through the cracks. Last summer my Visual Studio updated and ate up my cap in one sitting. Which brings me to my latest beef - the builtin Microsoft Antivirus. I appreciate that it needs periodic updates but these updates should be incremental. I suspect they are not because the previous update (two weeks or so back) was around 250 meg and today's update (which at least I had a chance to decline) was over 270 meg. Ther is no (rude word) way that a sensible anti-virus implementation should have to push out .25 gig every two weeks. Changes to the definitions should only have to be incremental and I can't believe that the software is that large.
And while I am ranting, it would be nice (are you developers listening???) when you write software that checks for updates, please check if the active connection is metered and if so, show me a dialog that tells me how big the proposed download is and allow me to accept, reject or defer the update for a selectable period of time. I shouldn't have to maintain a database of apps that I then have to manually allow/disallow updates.
