But you can't decline them or postpone indefinitely. It'll eventually force you to restart and update, and that's a problem.

When updates break a piece of critical software and can't be postponed indefinitely it's a real problem.

I've also run into instances where my PC was performing a task that required several weeks of processing time and Windows forced a restart because the process time was longer than the postponement window, so a task that's supposed to take 3 weeks suddenly takes 6 weeks.

Yes, security is important, but sometimes it's secondary to the entire fucking reason a computer has been deployed, and Microsoft shouldn't be dictating my priorities.

I forget the specifics, because I've had autoupdates turned off for a while now, but I think it would make you set "active hours" and then would do updates outside of your active hours. Regardless of you actually using your computer at the time. And, back in the day, my sleep schedule was non-existent, so there was no time that was completely safe for doing updates.

There was a time when you could postpone, but they got rid of that, or limited it... eventually you'd end up with an unstoppable update. It seems microsoft is trying tons of things to get people to stay up to date, but none are satisfying to everyone.

I prefer my method, which isn't easily accessible to all, manually updating periodically. Sometimes I'm a month or 2 late, but the worst of the worst vulnerabilities ends up news and that'll get me to update sooner.