OK, a couple days ago I got the ol’ blue box popup telling me it was time for an AV main program update. All well and good, clicked it, off it went, and I continued doing my thing on the computer, typing away at documents and internet forms etc.
Then at some random point later I started noticing programs disappearing off the taskbar (luckily I had quite a few things running putting this ageing system under some stress - luckier, all their data was already saved) and there was a brief display glitch which showed something akin to the regular login screen for a half second. Kind of half realising what was happening I tied up the thing I was typing as quickly as possible (“must break here, PC’s doing a forced restart!” SEND), did emergency saves and pre-emptive shutdowns on as many other programs as I could (especially the browser to preserve the tabs), and watched as, yes, the system shut down and then warm booted again.
It was due a restart from Windows updates as well, and I was going to do that once I’d finished what I was working on, but this was still a bit out of the blue and undesirable (forcing a 10+ minute break in the flow of an online conversation, for example, as this computer doesn’t boot very fast any more and it’s best to put it into sleep mode instead between pre-planned restarts) … and I’ve never known any Windows update other than those which happen during setup and the installation of service packs to -force- a restart. The timing suggested it was wholly down to Avast.
Was this supposed to happen with the last major update (to the free, WinXP version), or is it a sign that something’s not right? Did I misread or entirely miss some warning given about it, or was there none?
The best explanation I can come up with that gives everyone involved the best benefit of the doubt is that it popped up a “restart now?” box that didn’t even have time to render before accepting a mid-word keystroke meant for the program it stole the focus from, and interpreting that as a “yes” or “ok” reply without me even seeing it. In which case the question becomes … can you please integrate a delay on accepting the input to such critical choice dialogue boxes? Even just a 3-second countdown or something so it can pop up, get our attention, and we can realise what’s going on before accidentally agreeing to something we didn’t want to, or cancelling something we actually wanted to happen, without it causing a massive holdup. Both for keystrokes and mouse/pen clicks.
I’m just glad all I was doing at that point was typing, rather than working on a large image or sound file, processing a long hi-def video or similar… things that simply couldn’t have been interrupted, or saved quickly enough to avoid the hammer coming down, and would have had to have been restarted (potentially disasterous for someone on a tight work deadline) or may have been corrupted or lost entirely.
Hope this report is of some use!
T