Installing Updates***

[Josephus]

Ok. So i bought a new netbook....nice little HP...for my trip to Grenada.

I'm at work, testing it out on free wireless and now I'm ready to go home. As I went to shutdown, Windows is doing its update installing (I'm at 8 of 25). i want to go home now...this is taking all day. It tells me not to power off or unplug my machine.

Two questions.

1. What happens if I do?

2. Can I just close the lid (putting it into sleep mode), and leave it powered by the battery until I get home?

[DontSayBanana]

Ok. So i bought a new netbook....nice little HP...for my trip to Grenada.

I'm at work, testing it out on free wireless and now I'm ready to go home. As I went to shutdown, Windows is doing its update installing (I'm at 8 of 25). i want to go home now...this is taking all day. It tells me not to power off or unplug my machine.

Two questions.

1. What happens if I do?

2. Can I just close the lid (putting it into sleep mode), and leave it powered by the battery until I get home?

Depends on the power plan your netbook goes into when you put it on battery.  A lot of laptops and netbooks nowadays use some kind of a "power saver" profile that throttles down the performance of your hard drive, video card, and even in some cases CPU.  In the worst case scenario, your hard disk could stutter when you switch profiles and cause a corrupted update.  On the other hand, Windows doesn't like when you cancel the update process, but if you do that and restart it when you get home, it's less likely to result in package corruption at the end (speaking from personal experience, when a Windows update package gets corrupted, it can cause all kinds of hell for your computer).

[Josephus]

Bah...I suffer from computer anxiety...so I decided to wait it out.

[Maximus]

I really hate that feature for laptops. I have, however, put it into hibernation several times during the process with no harmful effects.

[grumbler]

Interesting that this topic should come up right now; I got home last night, and my PC was in hibernate mode (as it should have been).  I woke it up, and there was a message saying that the latest update required a restart.  Upon restarting, I got the BSD for the first time ever on XP. 

When the computer re-started, there were, of course, a bunch of pop-ups saying that I had just suffered a BSD.  As I was troubleshooting, the OS apparently auto-updated with the same patch, because it again announced that it needed to restart.  This restart went off without a hitch, and the computer is fine.

So, I would second the recommendation to avoid hibernate mode while updating.