Intel(R) SUR QC Software Asset Manager restarted my PC instantly with no notice, consent, or choices

SquidNET — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 13:33:00 GMT

I am incandescent with rage over this!

I am working on multiple complex projects at my machine and have just lost hours and hours of work (live, performance testing/benchmarks, renderings, analytics modelling and so on) because your component apparently got updated and then decided to restart my machine. No warning, no notification - neither of updates being installed nor the need for a reboot. No option to pause the restart. The whole screen just went blue, said 'Restarting', and that was that.

I could have screamed, I still could, I am that angry. I don't care what the reason is for a restart being neccessary - whether it was an urgent security issue or not, you gave me no chance, no choice, no opportunity at the very least to get everything saved and closed securely...

I don't even know what this component/service is - I cannot find any official information whatsoever about it on your own website.
From its name though it seems an entirely unimportant (to me, the user) 'service' that just reports on usage (itself a concern) and/or what 'assets' are present on the machine. Nothing fundamental or core to my OS or security as far as I can tell. Regardless of importance though, my consent should have been optained before arbitrarily restarting my machine.

How could this be allowed to happen?

How do I prevent it from ever happening again?

My machine is running Windows Enterprise LTSC 64bit, Version 1809, Build 17763.2145 - which I am using for, amongst many other things, the assurance it is supposed to give me of this kind of thing not ever happening!!! Machines running LTSC builds are used in some extremely sensitive fields, such as operating theatres, nuclear facilities, and so on... THINK!

Please provide an urgent official response and mitigations.

See my event logs below.

[There does not seem to be any appropriate forum location for this (i.e. bug / issue reports) so this is the 'closest' I can find, but still not really right.]

topic Intel(R) SUR QC Software Asset Manager restarted my PC instantly with no notice, consent, or choices in Software Tuning, Performance Optimization & Platform Monitoring

Intel(R) SUR QC Software Asset Manager restarted my PC instantly with no notice, consent, or choices