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I do have Win 10 Pro, and I paused updates the same way you do. The pause feature apparently is working differently for me — I guess.

When I finally got rid of McAfee (which came with the computer) and recently switched to Defender, I was irritated that I started getting notifications every few days or so. For a moment I thought that the pause had stopped working, but quickly realized that all of the notices were solely for Defender.

I can’t remember the exact wording (I last saw one yesterday), but the notifications were to the effect that “updates” required my attention; virus signatures were not specified. To find out what the updates were, each time I had to go into Settings | Update & Security | Windows Update.

In fact, I went in there just now. And there I see the pause icon (orange circle, with 2 vertical lines inside) to the left of  “Updates available Last checked: Today 1:22 pm” (which was over 4 1/2 hours ago), with the added explanation that it’s a Security intelligence Update for Windows Defender, which is “ready to download.” In order to actually update Defender, I have to hit the button for “Download.” Looking in the history for definition updates, I see that the last one was installed yesterday (which I had done manually by hitting that button).

So the long and short is that pausing Windows Updates in general pauses definition updates on my machine, but doesn’t prevent my hitting the download button to install those updates without “unpausing” everything else.

I now have to figure out what’s going on with the Task Scheduler, which I set up as instructed here. I set it for 2:00 pm local time. But I did that between 1 pm and 2 pm, so it’s not clear to me which happened first: Windows Updates getting the notice that new definitions were available, or my setting up the scheduler. Whichever, the task scheduler didn’t cause those most recent definitions to be download, but maybe that’s just because of the overlap.

So I guess that what I’m doing now is hitting that download button, and then waiting to see whether the next batch of signatures is downloaded automatically per the task scheduler, or if I’m back to square one.

That was easy.

Thanks large.

That worked. I attached the mouse to the back of the computer and the drive to the front, and no problem for any of the three drives.

How weird!

Thanks large.

Understood.

Thanks very much for your help.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Coldheart9020, Alex5723

I’ve done this and it seems to have fixed things, at least for now.

When I went into Settings | Accounts, there was a link (I’ve already forgotten the exact wording) saying that I had to “update” my account information. When I clicked on that, it asked for my PIN, and then my password. However, it wouldn’t accept the latter, so then I had to reset my Microsoft password. Oddly enough, when I tried to do so using the password that I wanted (the one that I had a record of already having), MS refused to accept it, for the very reason that it was my old password. Not clear to me why it didn’t work if MS already knew it was my password, but whatever.  So then I had to create a new password, going through the rigamarole of getting verification codes, first to my email, and then to my phone.

Which, as before, leaves me baffled in (at least) two respects. First, all this nonsense with my password couldn’t have been anything other than something that Microsoft considers a security matter (why else diddle with passwords?), so more than slightly amazing that it could be so easily circumvented by using the task manager. Second, it seems very odd that only my laptop started acting up this way, when I had my account set up exactly the same way on my desktop.

Now that I’ve changed the MS password, but haven’t done anything with the account information on my desktop, I’m wondering whether something similar is going to happen the next time I reboot my desktop. I dunno, and will have to see. If it does, maybe I’ll have to change the password again, this time through the desktop, which will then cause the same problem to recur with the laptop, whereupon I’ll have to change the password yet again, leading to a recurrence of a problem with the desktop, and on and on in an endless loop. My modern updating, I suppose, of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Fun, for sure.

Anyway, thanks large for helping me fix the problem.

I looked in the Event Viewer, but I’m enough of a computer ignoramus that I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

I was going to reply to request further guidance, but first followed up on the other suggestion — to check my account information — and that led to a solution, which I’ll elaborate on in my reply to that other message.

Thanks for your help.

With Firefox (only on the laptop), the control bar does not appear on screen when Youtube is in full screen mode. It’s there, but it just off screen, at the bottom, so I have to scroll down to see it, thereby losing a corresponding section at that top of what I’m trying to view.

On my desktop it’s another matter. On that machine it works the way you describe: the bar is there at the bottom, and it disappears if I move the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen. I’d like to get Firefox/Youtube to work that way on my desktop.

Edge, on either computer (i.e., it works the same on both of them), is yet another matter. In my initial message, I said that the bar stays permanently on screen when YouTube is in full screen mode, and isn’t affected by moving the mouse pointer. I checked that again, after I read your message today, and either it’s changed, or I was nuts the first time and didn’t understand what I was seeing. In any case, today Edge (on both the laptop and desktop) works exactly the same with YouTube as Firefox does on the desktop: the bar is visible in full screen mode, and can be made to disappear by moving the mouse pointer off to the side. The only difference from Firefox is that the bar is transparent in Edge, whereas it’s a solid black in Firefox. (In Firefox it is transparent when not in full screen mode, but it changes to solid black when I switch to full screen.)

So, to recap: on my laptop, but not my desktop, and only when using Firefox, when I put a YouTube video in full screen mode, I can’t see the control bar without scrolling down the page. I have to scroll only a short distance, but to the extent that I have to scroll, I lose the top part of the video, since it naturally gets scrolled off the top part of the page. This makes it impossible, in full screen mode, to use the controls while maintaining a complete view of the video.

If worst comes to worst, I can always use Edge when I want to view a YouTube video on my laptop. I don’t care for Edge for other reasons, but this is nevertheless a possible solution. However, it would be nice to be able to get Firefox and YouTube to cooperate on my laptop, so any other suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

1 user thanked author for this post.

b

Thanks for the suggestion.

I’m not a complete computer nitwit, but dealing with scripts is beyond me. So what I did after I saw your message, therefore, was simply to disable my ad blockers. I exited and relaunched Firefox, to allow for the speculative possibility that that might do something after that, and then tried YouTube again. Same result — i.e., the control bar doesn’t appear unless I scroll down the page, thereby hiding the top part of what I’m watching from view.

If you or anyone else has any other suggestion, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks large.

Thanks for your checking and for your suggestion. However, I don’t see the difference between how your link works and mine does. I tried both just now, a split second apart, and they both took me to the same page [albeit with advertising that looked slightly different, since Yahoo rotates what it shows you; see attachment 1 (my link) and attachment 2 (yours)]. In either case there’s a place to enter my username. Once that’s done, another page asks for my password. That done, I immediately get to my email.

It used to be the case that I could enter my user name and password on the same page, but Yahoo changed that a while back, presumably for security reasons (though why that’s more secure is beyond me).

 

Thanks for checking.

The thanks button is something I actually knew about. I didn’t use it in your case only because back in the distant past, when I was new to these forums, I both replied to a message and clicked the thanks button, which resulted in someone’s sending me a message stating that doing both things was something that wasn’t done. I’ve no idea where over half the etiquette requirements in this world come from, so I’ve just blindly proceeded accordingly, to avoid committing a faux pas.

Seems I committed one now anyway, but easily remedied.

Thanks.

Huh. For some reason it never occurred to me to try copying and pasting in Edge.

And now I can’t think of the reason that the reason never occurred to me.

But I tried it just now, and it worked.

Thanks.

Just to be sure I understand: when you refer to copying and pasting, you’re talking about Pale Moon, not Edge?

I know I can copy and paste in Firefox (where I’m able to have duplicate bookmarks), but I’m not familiar with such a thing in Edge.

Thanks.

For what it’s worth, as of this morning my startup pages are launching again.

I’ve no idea whether this is due to an update in Edge. I can see that my current version is 96.0.1054.62, whereas at the time I posted my original question it was 96.0.1054.34. But I have no idea what the version was yesterday, when the startup pages still weren’t launching automatically, so I don’t know if there was an update overnight.

In any case, either Microsoft fixed the problem or randomness came to the rescue.

Downloaded it just now, and nothing on my computer exploded.

Thanks.