4 ms·
About a month ago I decided to reinstall Windows on one of my old PCs, an Intel Ivy Bridge desktop i5. It is frustrating and nearly impossible to end up with a
by adrtessier 11y ago
About a month ago I decided to reinstall Windows on one of my old PCs, an Intel Ivy Bridge desktop i5. It is frustrating and nearly impossible to end up with a patched system. The process was pretty much as follows:
1. Manually check for updates. This took forever and thrashed the hard disk, every time.
2. Select, download, and install the updates.
3. Goto 1 until Windows couldn't find any more updates.
In some cases, step 2 would fail with various unknown errors and hex codes. The only way to fix this is to run a Windows diagnostic that "resets Windows Update components", which makes Step 1 take even longer than it would have otherwise.
All in all, I think the update cycle took me about 4 hours before I gave up on the third reboot and decided to just let Windows figure itself out. Compare this to an 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' or the OS X Software Update, and it's a wonder people update Windows at all.
- tedunangst 11y agoWindows 10 should (eventually) move to a model where the initial install is much closer to the current update, requiring less patching.
- makeithappen 11y agoInteresting, do you have any links about this?
- tedunangst 11y agoThe latest is actually they did it, then pulled it, but presumably they'll try again. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/windows-10-november-update-mysteriously-pulled-as-concerns-about-bugs-grow/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/window...
- yuhong 11y agoAnd only a few updates are needed at most when you do need them, thanks to the new cumulative update model.
- bhrgunatha 11y ago> Compare this to an 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' or the OS X Software Update There was a major update to Arch recently - due to GCC 5 changing the standard C++ library with binary interface changes. Basically every package written in C++ and compiled with GCC needed re-compiling and updating. Mine took about an hour to update (6 year old machine) - with over 500 packages updated. Of course everything kept running, but I chose to reboot since it was such a major change and everything worked flawlessly. Kudos to the whole Arch team. But take a minute to think about that - it's a major percentage of the whole system updated. Updating my Windows machines in comparison is terrible - the amount of time and effort is so variable, plus having to be careful to avoid or remove the dreaded tracking updates backported from Windows 10.
- yuhong 11y agoWin10 actually improves things here BTW, with the new cumulative update model requiring only a few updates to be installed at most.