With our laptop that travels with us, I learned the hard way that it is best to turn off automatic updates. I had logged in to the free wi-fi at a gas station and the laptop started some Microsoft updates. I was unaware of it updating and so we drove away.
The update could not be completed. System crashed. Big time.
Fortunately, the laptop had a recovery partition as I didn't have the systems disks with us.
Moral of the story ... don't have automatic updates turned on when travelling. I keep it set to notify me but let me choose when it updates.