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Windows 10: New study shows Home edition users are baffled by updates

171 points by vezycash 8y ago

chris_wot 8y ago
I think they miss one important point: the fact that Microsoft even needs to do a restart at all. It is very rare for a Linux district to require a restart. Even some kernel updates don’t need a restart. But Microsoft needs a restart regardless of what they are updating. It’s ridiculous.
cm2187 8y ago
What I don't understand is why, once a restart has been initiated, the update process is so slow, taking sometimes north of 10 minutes on a powerful machine using only SSDs.
- lozenge 8y ago
  Answered https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/exponential-algorithm-making-windows-xp-miserable-could-be-fixed/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/expon...
  - jasonjayr 8y ago
    That article is for Windows XP -- they still haven't answered this problem on Windows 10? When they do Major Updates (ie 1709 -> 1809) why not just mount a signed read-only .wim on top of the '\Windows' directory, and overlay changes on that? IIRC part of the update process involves scanning the entire drive for incompatible software, installed or otherwise, can they stop that at this point, and alert/detect on launch?
    - lozenge 8y ago
      Sorry the link was incorrect. I think the actual reason is dlls are versioned individually and it needs to pick the superset version on each update, including optional fixes installed that may depends on hardware etc. Can't find the right link though. They did make some big improvements recently but it will only apply from the next update.
- drbawb 8y ago
  What I believe is going on is that for small updates it's issuing a lot of IO to create a restore point; meanwhile for large updates it's essentially issuing 16-30GB of IO to do a complete reinstall of Windows. I base this assumption off the fact that an artifact of these large feature updates is a `Windows.old` directory they use to power their 10-day rollback feature. For the smaller updates turning off system restore helped immensely on my NVMe-based system, however I've noticed MS seems to re-enable it after every major feature update. (Of course, they muck up a bunch of my other settings as well, so I guess that shouldn't be surprising.) The only solution that worked for me, long-term, was installing Linux.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    They really should replace NTFS with something that supports snapshotting.
- remir 8y ago
  They should do the same thing ChromeOS does with A/B partitions.
happppy 8y ago
Updates only breaks my window. I was about to throw my laptop last time. I have just turned off the updates, but MS start them again, so I turn off updated regularly from services, task scheduler.
- vezycash 8y ago
  There's a hidden option to automatically reenable services after failure - uncheck it. There are also tools that make permanently disabling Windows update a one click affair.
adminu 8y ago
Strangely enough that MS has not yet applied some sort of ML algorithm to finding the times for updates "best" suitable for each user. I thought that's the thing currently
- Haga 8y ago
  Updates always felt like a dominance gesture on windows. No smoth updates possible without yanking control away from the user.
- ilmiont 8y ago
  They have. Thing is, that's not solving the root problem though. The real issue is Windows doesn't give users enough control, and still takes an inordinate amount of time to install the updates during the offline stage (shutdown/restart) on typical home PC hardware. Merely shifting when updates occur won't help in the long-term, and might encourage Microsoft to keep ignoring the fundamental issues with Windows Update...
  - garganzol 8y ago
    You can go to Group Policy and select the desired level of control. No problem with that whatsoever. These control points are not present in conventional UI nowadays, but they are there in Group Policies, and it's a piece of cake to tune them up to your preference.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Having to go to group policy to do that, rather than the main UI, is a problem.
    - vezycash 8y ago
      Do Home users have group policy?
      - uodtl 8y ago
        The group policy editor does not exist in the Home edition, but all the group policy editor does is modify the registry, so you can just make the registry modifications yourself using the registry editor which exists in all editions. Using the policy editor is supported, while editing the registry is not, I'm afraid.
ilmiont 8y ago
Pro edition users are too.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  AFAIK you can easily disable updates with pro using group policy.
deleted 8y ago
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davidgrenier 8y ago
I'm baffled by videos that autoplay on websites.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Autoplaying videos, auto-rebooting updates, what a time to be alive!
- kgwxd 8y ago
  The browser deserves equal blame. If yours doesn't give the option to disable it, know that there are ones that do.
- vezycash 8y ago
  I use this firefox extension "Image video block" to block videos either globally or on a per site basis.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  On newer firefox versions you can fiddle with the media.autoplay settings in about:config.
- basch 8y ago
  umatrix takes care of a lot more than just this. I block cookies on any site I dont log into, and scripts on any site I dont need scripts. The granularity of easily enabling just the one script or cookie or frame I might need is great.
EamonnMR 8y ago
Updates make using Windows 10 as an occasional dual boot on a laptop a pain. I usually use the machine with limited or no internet and no power handy, so if I accidentally let it update I'm SOL. As a result I found myself reaching for Windows less and less.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- paraxisi 8y ago
  Updates make using windows 10 AT ALL a pain.
- stevewodil 8y ago
  Do you need to dual boot? I switched to using Linux full time, and running Windows in a VM when needed. It also simplifies the workflows because you don't need to reboot to switch between the systems
  - jazoom 8y ago
    How well does windows run in a VM? Will I be able to smoothly use image editing software such as Affinity Photo?
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      I run Windows 10 Pro under VirtualBox on Ubuntu - hardware is a Dell XPS 9560 (7th gen i7). Performance is basically native, I use it for PhotoShop and for video editing in Premiere. I was even playing with Propellorhead Reason the other day dabbling in making some music.
      - jazoom 8y ago
        Nice to hear, thanks. Is there any weirdness I should know about? For example, when I run some Linux distros in a VM the mouse movements are jarring. I'd love to do all development in Linux again but dual booting was too annoying. The way you do it sounds interesting.
dep_b 8y ago
Updates on macOS require restarts too. But when I restart, most applications restart exactly in the state I left them.
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  And most of the time macOS updates don't happen once or twice a month.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    And we can postpone updates forever on macOS, or disable them completely.
- Sangeppato 8y ago
  The issue to me is not having to reboot. The issue is that Windows 10 automatically checks for updates and as soon as it detects one, it will download and install it without asking or telling me anything. This is what really pisses me off
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    It's especially annoying if you have any long running tasks that you've left unattended only to return to find that your machine rebooted and the tasks didn't complete.
- auiya 8y ago
  I'll happily pay the Apple tax for this contrasting user experience.
- sccxy 8y ago
  To be honest my macOS updates are more annoying. They take more time and "2 minutes remaining" is just a lie. More likely it is 20 - 60 minutes.
userbinator 8y ago
I find it ironic that Windows was long derided for being unstable and in constant need of reboots, and now they're basically deliberately reducing uptime. Unwanted "new features" and the aspect of silently changing behaviour aside, the technology to patch files in memory and on disk without having to restart or otherwise disturb unnecessarily the entire system has been around for a very long time (and amusingly enough, malware is probably the biggest application of those techniques today); and sending only diffs instead of entire files which may be 99% the same as before would probably save a huge amount of bandwidth.
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  I was discussing with a friend on solutions on how to make your PC being 'never idle'. As he told me, if the PC is never idle, then Win10 won't enforce any updates/reboots. I do not know how true is that, but when I suggested he use MouseJiggler [1] he thanked me and told me 'it worked'. It is a stand-alone/portable .exe that 'does exactly what it says on the tin'. I use it to keep away screensavers/screenlocks (on machines I don't 100% control). [1]: https://mouse-jiggler.en.uptodown.com/windows https://mouse-jiggler.en.uptodown.com/windows Edit: I keep away from W10 so I don't know to what extend this would help. I assume it would delay unwanted reboots, but I don't know the W10 update-forcing mechanism, and on the diagram depicted on the article I don't see any 'idling' criteria.
  - smush 8y ago
    A keyboard-based similar tool is Zhorn's Caffeine which puts a pot of coffee in your system tray and presses F24(?) every 15 seconds.
  - ganomi 8y ago
    There is a nice little tool to stop the reboots: https://www.udse.de/en/windows-10-reboot-blocker https://www.udse.de/en/windows-10-reboot-blocker It changes the active hours every hour so that you will never be outside of active hours.
    - AckSyn 8y ago
jakejarvis 8y ago
Direct link to the study (without autoplaying video!): https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/usec2019_02-5_Morris_paper.pdf https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/us...
billpg 8y ago
I read once that all OS code callable from a process begins with a NOP instruction, allowing an update to drop in a jump to the new version of that function by replacing the NOP. I had to wonder why given that is available, why reboots on updates are required at all.
- barrkel 8y ago
  Shared libraries - dlls - are not reloadable like this. In fact they usually can't be deleted at all if they're in use, renamed at best, and that is risky if it's something that is dynamically loaded and is part of a dependency graph. I'd expect the majority code covered by an update to be in shared libraries.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Isn't that just a deficiency of Windows' filesystem implementation, though? On Linux, you can absolutely overwrite libraries that are still used by running applications. The OS will just not reclaim the disk space until all those processes end (e.g. by means of reboot), but new processes will start using the new libs immediately.
    - invokestatic 8y ago
      Windows memory-maps the DLL file from disk into virtual memory (a la MapViewOfFile), causing the filesystem lock. While I’m not sure why this was done, I speculate it has something to do with saving memory back in the 9x days or even earlier. It’s possible to write a DLL loader that reads from the file once and copies the bytes to memory, leaving no lock unlike memory mapping the file. But even so, there’d be no way to reliably reload DLLs running in a process, not to mention that there are usually hundreds of them running in any particular process. I can also imagine issues arising if existing processes continue to run an old DLL where a new process has a newer, updated DLL such as with IPC, or if there is a zero-day in a DLL used by a long-running daemon. All around, restarting is the safest bet.
    - fencepost 8y ago
kd5bjo 8y ago
My biggest issue with the restarts is that programs with unsaved state aren't allowed to block it. Even if I'm asleep and not using the computer, I often leave half-finished work up to continue in the morning. This works ok most of the time, but if I don't notice an update coming through it can wipe out hours of work. In many ways, it'd be better for Windows to force a restart on a more frequent, fixed schedule to prevent bad habits from setting in.
- dspillett 8y ago
  I try never leave anything unsaved that I might care about. Past problems have hammered that lesson home. I don't trust anything with unsaved information. Any OS. But Windows in particular - in the past because of instability, more recently due to it being designed to reboot without permission or adequate warning sometimes three times in a month. It isn't just unsaved content though: you lose other context too. Browser windows spread over different desktops, open windows with things selected or scrolled into view, open apps that don't restart, ... Also, any long-running processes are fair game to be killed, as of course are connections to external resources which might respond in an unhelpful manner.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    Sometimes even saved data isn't safe from Windows updates: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/windows-10-1809-update-deleted-all-files-from/ff608374-2686-4a08-a4c2-caa4caa6d4e1?auth=1 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
  - HenryBemis 8y ago
    Not a problem for me, because I am using Win8.1, but... I run simulation/optimizations for bots that trade forex. Basically trying different combinations/permutations in their parameters, and getting anything between 25 and 1500 results so I can select the optimum result/configuration. This saves time, because I don't have to run one-set-at-a-time-for-30-mins. Those optimizations can be running for days. I have literally gone away for a weekend and on Monday it was still running the simulation(s). There is nothing 'active' at that time, 'just a software running'. If the PC restarts, all the work is gone, and optimization needs to begin all over. I can fear that it wouldn't be the only case that a Win10 user would be impacted by a forced restart. I do understand Microsoft's standpoint, but as the mighty Steve Gibson says (paraphrasing), I want the operating system to NOT take initiatives :)
jcadam 8y ago
I'm off windows for good. Automatic updates which reboot my machine and cause the occasional breakage are one thing. There's also just too many UI/UX WTFs (two control panels with completely different interfaces, that fing ribbon in office, etc). Just bought a new (well, refurb) XPS 9370, wiped it, and installed Fedora. I have to run Windows at work (corp policy), but they let me install Virtualbox (so I do all of my work in a Xubuntu VM), so, at least there's that.
mugwort13 8y ago
Automatic updates can be disabled with 2 clicks of a mouse. That's it, 2. I can't believe we are still in a culture that only hates Microsoft while pretending that Apple, Alphabet, Ubuntu, and others don't practice the same questionable behavior on a daily basis. This article and the so-called study are narrowminded garbage.
g105b 8y ago
While this is true, I see a lot of comments recommending "better" operating systems like Linux based distributions... but try getting the general public to use Linux based OSes and you'll find more problems than just automatic updates.
- Slashbot 8y ago
  It's ok when more companies switch over to linux aswel you'll start to see ordinary users more accepting of ditching windows 10.. MS has turned windows into complete garbage.
skrebbel 8y ago
Windows update reboots come up on HN every so often, and I still don't understand the problem. Windows is my daily driver, and updates force me to reboot my laptop 2 to 3 times a year. oh no! Plus, usually I can just schedule the reboot to happen at night when I sleep. All I have to do is click an "restart tonight" button in a notification and then not shut it down that evening. TBH I don't understand why this is considered bad design, especially by the HN crowd. I suspect that the people who complain about this on HN are mostly people on mac/linux who run windows in a VM 3 to 4 times a year and therefore think that it needs to update-reboot all the time. I felt the same about Firefox (which has relatively noisy updates) before I switched to it as my daily driver.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  Are you on Pro or Home? On my Home edition machines, it's easily more than 3 times a year. Windows is my daily driver too, and while I generally like Windows, the two things I hate the most are the updates and how bad the search is for launching apps (I know some people are going to chime in and say search is fine, but if you have a lot of apps installed, it can be laughably bad).
  - skrebbel 8y ago
    I have a laptop on Home that I use a few times aweek. It supports scheduled-at-night updates as well, doesn't it? Maybe I remember wrong. Indeed my main laptop is on Pro. Btw I agree that the start menu search is unimaginably bad. Insane how so many gigahertzes can be wasted so much.
    - slantyyz 8y ago
      Pro is way better for updates. I'd upgrade my Home edition PC's to Pro, but for the features that I would benefit from (better update behaviour, remote desktop), it's not worth the expense to me. To upgrade an existing license from Home to Pro costs almost the same as buying a new Pro license.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
MivLives 8y ago
On one hand as a user it's annoying to come back to my machine in a freshly rebooted state because of updates. On the other as a technical support person, both for pay and free, the pain of dealing with non updated windows is the worst. The only way Windows can possible stay secure is to update a lot. I actually like their new strategy of doing a "feature update". They do them too frequently (once a year would be better) but it prevents the Windows 7 problem where they never rolled updates together after SP1. Last time I installed 7 SP1 on something I had another 100 updates to install.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
Not all updates are the same. I run Enterprise LTSC which only gets security and bug fixes every few weeks. These are small and have limited impact on your day to day use. Its the old static Windows model. Its the feature updates that are the problem. And you literally can't defer those on Home.
bambax 8y ago
> How annoying are Windows 10's automatic updates? About as much as websites that autoplay videos.
- ourmandave 8y ago
  At full volume while you're wearing headphones.
Cactus2018 8y ago
Win 10 Pro -> Start -> Search -> "firewall" -> "allow an app through Windows Firewall" -> "Change settings" -> uncheck apps and features to disallow access to internet. I turn nearly everything off. ... Check again and find various apps are allowed. (especially after a Windows Update, but seeming at random as well) WTF. This is bad security. In the past week the following apps became re-enabled in Windows Defender Firewall: "Xbox Game bar", "Windows Maps", "Windows Calculator", "Movies & TV", "MSN Weather", "Microsoft People", "Groove Music".
- stuuuuuuuuu 8y ago
  Why does Windows Calculator need network access??
  - skykooler 8y ago
    To get the latest rates for currency conversion: https://www.windowslatest.com/2017/07/23/calculator-windows-10-updated-currency-converter/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2017/07/23/calculator-windows-...
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      Ha, that's really cool. I rather like the Windows 10 Calculator.
      - minkzilla 8y ago
        The programmer mode on the windows calculator is extremely useful!
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      Then it should ask for network access the first time and remember what you said. I didn't even know it had a currency converter. These days I just do "200 GBP in hungarian forint" and google does it for me. Though in fairness I'm a linux user who does some software dev on windows (in a VM) and that's about it.
cbuq 8y ago
This isn't a problem if, like me, Windows manages to corrupt itself and is unable to perform a Windows update. A little over a year ago the automatic update failed, I've tried all sorts of ways to get an updated version of Windows, but they have all failed. My research seems to point me to a full reinstall of Windows. But my computer hasn't restarted arbitrarily in over a year!
- zip1234 8y ago
  Have you tried Windows 10 Update Assistant? I had the same problem until I tried it. Worked well. [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3159635/windows-10-update-assistant https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3159635/windows-10-...]
- isodude 8y ago
  I went into that rabbit hole some time ago, there are two tools available from Microsoft to mitigate problems with updates (other tools than the update-tool referenced in another answer). I can dig them articles up again if needed.
  - mdorazio 8y ago
    I have the same issue as the parent commenter. I tried every tool Microsoft provided as well as various recommended manual processes of deleting files, changing registry values, etc. Nothing worked and it appears to be an issue of hardware incompatibility with the Creators update (not surprising since some of my components are over 6 years old). Based on the number of people reporting the same issue when I was troubleshooting, this is disturbingly common and the only solution is to reinstall windows entirely and hope it works.
- mark-r 8y ago
  I had that problem with Windows 7. For years my media center PC was free from unexpected restarts. Finally I had to give in and reinstall Windows because some software needed VS2017 redistributable, and it refused to install on the borked system. Decided to upgrade to SSD at the same time since prices have dropped so drastically.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
p793231 8y ago
Solution: 1. switch to Windows 10 LTSC 2. block all outgoing traffic (Windows firewall advanced settings) except core networking and apps that you need to access internet (Firefox) This will block all updates. If you want you can get manually download updates from Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4464619 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4464619 I have this setup running for my family (elder parents that first came in contact with computers 10 years ago) under full admin account (autologin) since Windows 7 times. Browser is Firefox+uBlock Origin. No security issues encountered till now. Updates happen only when Microsoft releases a new service pack (Windows 7) or releases a version (once I switched to Windows 10).
- MrStonedOne 8y ago
  Never did this on windows 10, no idea how effective it is on 10, but what I did was disable the update service, disable the software protection/licensing service, and set both exes to deny execute permissions to everybody in the security tab of the files. Genuine goes away, updates can't start, and even if updates come back, your windows isn't genuine anymore, so you don't get all of the updates, just the major security ones. During GWX, I just issued the command to reset my activation to ensure genuine never came back, blocking the licensing exec also kept the notifications from showing.
- acqq 8y ago
  > switch to Windows 10 LTSC https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/faq-windows-10-ltsb-explained.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/faq-windows-10... "Microsoft changed the support rules for LTSB since Windows 10's debut ... in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to widely deploy the edition."
nkingsy 8y ago
The metered connection setting is a must. Windows 10 is a tremendous OS once you tell Microsoft to back off. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-metered-connections-in-windows-10 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...
js2 8y ago
I was at my CPA the other day. One of her two monitors went blank due to a h/w issue and so per instructions from her IT guy she had to reboot. Windows decided it had to apply updates as part of the shutdown sequence and she was unable to decline. So we had to sit there and wait 5 minutes for it to apply the updates, then reboot. (Maybe there's a way to override applying the updates and yes, she should get her second monitor fixed. I'm her client, not her IT person, so I wasn't going to intervene. And we had a nice conversation while waiting, so there's that.) FTR, macOS has also become increasingly annoying with how it applies updates, and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to. As in industry, we suck at this. Is Linux the only OS making an effort at patching without rebooting? And does it actually work? https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-without-rebooting/ https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-witho...
- crooked-v 8y ago
  > and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to Do they have alarms set? For whatever weird reason there's no way to get it to auto-update overnight if there's an alarm.
  - _sigma 8y ago
    I mean, isn't that a reasonable default? If you use a 3rd party alarm client, such as a sleep monitor, then you'd lose that alarm upon reboot.
  - thisacctforreal 8y ago
    I imagine they'd rather you go unpatched than run the risk of not waking you up for an appointment?
  - js2 8y ago
    No alarms set. Plugged in, on Wi-Fi.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Upgrades can occur on Linux at any time, or never. It depends when the cronjob is scheduled. The other nice thing is only limited things require reboots. You can find that out by "needs-restarting -r" If you're being tricky, you can parse that and insert a "shutdown -h $TIME" if you parse needs-restarting as yes.
larrik 8y ago
Windows 10 updates are SUPER fun when you are running the N version and have the media pack installed. Usually the updates fail, so you get 6 reboots every few nights until you uninstall the media packs. Finding the new media pack that's compatible is another exercise in insanity. They ALL install without error, but only one actually works. People who think Windows is simpler or easier than Linux are wrong.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  > People who think Windows is simpler or easier than Linux are wrong. Or they don't do anything crazy.
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    It’s odd your comment is in gray. In my experience, Windows 10 (Pro) works fine, as long as you don’t go looking for crazy (cause you’ll find it of course). It’s like those people running custom Linux kernels complaining about IO latency on their standard laptop running Firefox. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
    - larrik 8y ago
      Being the "IT guy" of the family has shown me that it happens even without looking for crazy. My wife's grandparents bought a nice Dell all-in-one desktop, running Windows 7, despite 8 being out. Then Win 10 came out just a few years later (less than 3), and Microsoft force updated them. Well, Dell didn't have drivers to support Win 10 (and still don't), so I had to do all sorts of crazy gymnastics to get their monitor back. Content updates regularly break these fixes, of course.
      - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        You know, I remember back in the day when this law called the CFAA made "unauthorized usage" illegal. So.. Ive seen it used against a number of individual hackers. Why not companies?
gscott 8y ago
Those forces an automatic restart while I'm working and have windows open... it closes all the windows and loses all my work. This is such a wonderful feature.
sevensor 8y ago
As anybody who's been using Windows since the 1990s knows, you have to save your work to a floppy every 5 minutes if you don't want to risk losing it.
Karupan 8y ago
I’ve twice lost my WSL Ubuntu installation after an update. Poof, just gone after the reboot. Has anyone else experienced this? (Win 10 Home)
yuters 8y ago
Does Windows 10 updates still have the Focus stealing problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stealing) ?
- Scramblejams 8y ago
  Yep. And when corporate IT has installed some batch script that runs periodically and flashes a console window that steals focus while you're in the middle of typing, and then after it disappears 0.1 seconds later, for some reason nothing is in focus, that's super awesome. If I didn't develop software, geek out on building my own IT infra, or play PC games, I'd really try to stick to an iPad. :-( Edit: Could anyone suggest any tools for finding the culprit here? It’s over way too quickly to catch in Task Manager. Like, I’d love a little live view of all the UI windows that have been created in the last 60 seconds, with a snapshot of the process tree that started each one.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    I've never once experienced focus stealing during Windows 10 updates. They don't give you any indication that they're occurring in Home, Pro, or Enterprise.
    - yuters 8y ago
      I know a fullscreen focused pop-up occured on its own asking to select a time to "apply updates and reboot" on Windows 7. I was wondering, since it occured last during a very time sensitive task at my work and was the breaking point when I decided to switch OS. If it's not happening again I might consider going back to Windows.
      - cptskippy 8y ago
        There are no longer Task Bar notifications in Windows 10. Windows 10 has an Action Center which is similar to the Android Notifications Panel. Anything pushed to the user shows in there and doesn't steal focus. It can however briefly obscure part of the screen with the notification toast.
sisu2019 8y ago
To start with I am super unhappy with the content and execution of recent windows updates. Its not okay to keep resetting my preferences and it's not okay to rip out control dialogs that worked very well the past decade with some demented metro app (rip display and sound device setting). But I have not had a single unexpected reboot on my win10 install. It's because I always update at the next time of convinience. Updating is required maintenance of any software system and you can't afford to ignore it. I also see some consequences of questionable behavior blamed on windows. You should never have hours worth of unsaved work open. NEVER. Don't blame windows or whatever, just dont ever do that or at least bear your shame quietly. Also, please for the love of god, stop lobbying for OSes to faithfully restore your open apps on reboot. The only way to solve a lot of problems is to be able to really reset the state of everything which is not worth trading for your ability to better compulisvely hoard chrome tabs. That shit is not healthy btw. Finally, reboots are necessary on all major operating systems, even linux. Remember Windows user used to be free to apply updates when they wanted but you, yes you, MS hater of yesteryear kept blaming MS for the large number of unpatched and therefore insecure Windows systems. So they don't give users the freedom to postpone indefinitely and of course it's also not right. So what can they do?
- Zanni 8y ago
  It's less unsaved work (that would be madness), but unsaved context. The physical arrangement of windows and browser tabs and file locations is significant, and losing it all to a reboot (intentional or otherwise) destroys that context. Want users to reboot more often and on your timetable? Preserve and restore context.
  - vic20forever 8y ago
    Meanwhile, in a smoky apartment on the bad side of town[1]: Warning: this hard locked my MBP. [snip] It was a pain in the ass to recover: my only option seemed to be to power down and power back up again, at which point OSX helpfully remembered the state my machine was in and dropped me back into the blacked-out display and maxed fan. Some combination of NVRAM reset, SPC reset and safe mode was required to get back in. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265107
CydeWeys 8y ago
It's unbelievable how badly Windows has gone downhill since 7. Settings have become nonsensical and split across different panels, application search in the start menu is frequently worthless, and all sorts of shit you don't want is advertised or installed to you. Despite having paid well over $100 for it I feel like I'm being subjected to a freemium model. I get that Microsoft no longer makes most of their money from Windows, but that doesn't mean it needs to become terrible!
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  “I get that Microsoft no longer makes most of their money from Windows” Is that even true? I thought it’s still the cash cow.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    There's some figures here: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/29/how-microsoft-corporation-makes-most-of-its-money.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/29/how-microsoft-corp... Windows revenue is well below Office and Cloud revenue, and even below Xbox revenue. This makes sense; a typical user is probably only paying an average of $100 on Windows, and infrequently at that. The last time I bought Windows was many years ago, when 7 came out. I took advantage of the free upgrade to 8 and then 10 since then.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Maybe Google should learn from them how to get away from ads. It's pretty phenomenal that they have been able to shift their main revenue from OS to other things like Cloud. I know people like to sh.t on MS but I wonder many of the current tech stars will be able to stay alive and healthy during several major technology changes like MS has done for decades now,.
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
        Seems kind of like a tangent, but, advertising is a field that has existed for many hundreds of years. It's not the same kind of thing as Microsoft Windows, which is a specific type of software product. I'd say the fairer comparison is that Microsoft is still completely dependent on selling software, just like Google is still completely dependent on selling advertising.
Animats 8y ago
The big question with Windows updates today is "what are they doing to screw me over this time?" From forced installs of Candy Crush to the Big Brother features of "telemetry", every update is a probable hostile code install.
- lvs 8y ago
  I don't understand why everyone is tolerating (nay, engendering!) the level of invasion and subjugation that's baked into all the modern operating systems, linux aside. I want to spend $99 on a perpetual license and not be monetized any further! It's gone way too far now, and there has to be a way back to sanity. I suspect laws will be necessary and the industry will need to shrink. Some will lose their pointless jobs, but so be it. It's a dystopia you're building anyway.
  - unityByFreedom 8y ago
    I mean.. it costs money to continue to develop software. The idea of paying for an OS is different from the idiocy of Windows-forced updates. I understand people think of an OS as a static thing but when hardware changes you need to rewrite some of the stuff that sits on top, plus security updates.
    - lvs 8y ago
      Then just price in the cost of security updates into the up-front price. Done and done! This "innovation" in tech business plans to maximize perpetual revenue from users is (obviously) anti-consumer and dystopian. It's disingenuous to say that you can justify what's happened solely based on the cost of updates.
      - unityByFreedom 8y ago
        Price in the cost of all future security updates? Why would I want to buy software updates for life? That sounds incredibly expensive. And if a company were successful at selling this model, they could be taken over by some greedy businessmen who cut costs in order to get short term profit.
lmilcin 8y ago
As a contractor I spend considerable amount of effort and money to have my work tools in good shape. I buy top-notch hardware and am not afraid to buy software if it helps my life just a little bit. I can't understand how Microsoft thinks it is okay to force updates on me and then not even bother to make sure those updates work. After having couple of high-cost delays due to my laptop deciding reboot while doing important analysis or deciding not to boot at all due to Windows update failures I was forced to drop Windows and a dozen Windows-only tools I have used along with it. Macbooks are non-starters. The laptops are barely usable. I am heavy keyboard user and touch-typist and I can't envision using a laptop without physical function keys. A laptop that can die due to dust speck? Apple, please make a laptop for people that actually work and need reliability and usability more than shedding another half millimeter of thickness. I don't want to say Linux is perfect. It is extremely irritating to spend hours trying to get basically anything working. I just want a machine that works and that I can rely to work next day when I open it to start my work day. Why is it so hard in 2019?
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > Why is it so hard in 2019? To be honest: mass-market software developers realized that they can abuse their users with few repercussions, so they've changed their practices to suit themselves rather than their users. The attitude started with web apps, and now it's completed its dominance by spreading to operating systems. Stability takes a lot of work. Users love it, but developers hate back-porting patches.
- diffeomorphism 8y ago
  > I don't want to say Linux is perfect. It is extremely irritating to spend hours trying to get basically anything working. If this is a machine for work, why are you not buying one with linux preinstalled? For instance the dell precision models: https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop_us https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lap...
  - gtm1260 8y ago
    Sure that helps you with the initial cruft of drivers and stuff, but later on down the road there will be many obscure things that don't work right on your specific distro w/ some weird specific fix/workaround that can only be found after googling for hours.
MrStonedOne 8y ago
As somebody who has experience with live updating software on windows while its running with no downtime, Windows updates has no excuse. You can use symlinks to blue green deploy the software, swap the symlink over, and restart the software to have the new version take effect with little downtime. You can do this with dlls and having the software manually unload and reload the dll for the same. locks on symlinks apply to the target, not the symlink, this is piss easy to implement, and heres the kicker! Windows already uses symlinks for all of its dlls and exes as part of the winsxs store, so they could already use this to update without restarting, and even when a restart is needed, they could just stage it in the background, and do a normal reboot without the need for a pre shutdown and post startup stage. This exists, right now, as something you can do in windows, windows 10, windows 7, windows xp. It works for all of them. Microsoft has no excuse.
- gtm1260 8y ago
  This! The pre shutdown and post startup stages are infuriatingly slow, and the message that says 'Please Don't shut off your PC' makes me want to strangle it with its power cable.
cwyers 8y ago
The fundamental issue here is simple: 1) In 2019, in order to be secure, a computer needs some bare minimum of sysadmin. 2) Computers are like people -- herd immunity helps a lot. Unmaintained PCs are not merely a threat to their owners, but can be used as part of botnets for all sorts of things that jeopardize security for lots of people. 3) Most users are incapable of being their own sysadmin, and there are a lot of people who either don't understand that they even have such a need or suffer from a lot of Dunning-Kruger. So, with the switch to Perpetual Windows, Microsoft has taken on a lot of things that people either ignored or did poorly before, and they want to know why they can't go back to ignoring them or doing them poorly. A not insubstantial part of the reputation Windows 10 has for being user-hostile is because of the difficulty of doing this at scale combined with the fact that some users act pretty hostile themselves, from a herd immunity perspective. Those are the Windows equivalent of anti-vax parents who complain about the school system being hostile to them just for bringing back measles. Windows is never going to be as secure as Android/iOS, with their ability to bring a new security model to things. But Windows 10 is a lot more secure than any Windows before it, and a lot of the reasons people think Microsoft are "ruining" Windows are part of why it's getting more secure.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > In 2019, in order to be secure, a computer needs some bare minimum of sysadmin. That is true only of security patches. > So, with the switch to Perpetual Windows, Microsoft has taken on a lot of things that people either ignored or did poorly before, and they want to know why they can't go back to ignoring them or doing them poorly. No. Prior to Windows 10, users weren't forced to install feature updates on MS's aggressive schedule. They were given much more software stability. I don't think anyone would be complaining if all MS did with Windows 10 was force home users to install security updates regularly. The problem is that in addition to that, Microsoft decided to also aggressively force half-baked feature updates on them and simultaneously draft them as release testers for professional editions.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >Windows is never going to be as secure as Android/iOS, with their ability to bring a new security model to things. But Windows 10 is a lot more secure than any Windows before it, and a lot of the reasons people think Microsoft are "ruining" Windows are part of why it's getting more secure. You know how to make it even more secure? Don't allow the user to use the computer at all: require the user to tell a Microsoft employee what they want to do and have the MS employee do it.
studentik 8y ago
Archlinux updates operating system, all drivers and all installed programs with one command. Takes 5 minutes. Windows update is a joke.
pulse7 8y ago
It's obvious that Satya Nadella IS NOT USING these Microsoft products (Windows 10 Home)! Bill Gates used to use Windows and complained about it, so it got better before it was sent out to the public. How can one use Windows 10 Home, when all CPU + Memory + Network work all the time performing updates, updates, updates... If you are not using a computer for 2 weeks, you will not be able to use it for the first 30 minutes, because Windows will need to... update... Updates make Windows an unusable product!
justfor1comment 8y ago
Windows: Updates are absolutely critical for the safety and security of your laptop. Me: Is this a security update? Windows: No, it's an UI update. Me: Please don't install this update. Windows: Restarting... Back in the Windows XP days you could install security patches without updating Windows to use the new UI, settings or other random things that the dev team decided to change. Wish Windows 10 brought that back.
president 8y ago
At this point, Microsoft will need to re-write Windows to get it to any level near an acceptable user-friendly OS. It'll never happen though.
politician 8y ago
It's hilarious how terrible Windows updates feel compared to MacOS updates. Windows insists on making users stare at an endless blue screen while admonishing them "don't turn off your computer." Meanwhile, MacOS completes the upgrades during boot up, and then has the courtesy to restore your apps - a trick that still makes me smile every time it happens. It probably takes about the same amount of time to apply the update, but feels much faster. Update on shutdown is a bad policy. It's disruptive every time. Getting off the plane? Don't turn off your computer! Running late for an appointment? Don't turn off your computer! Going to sleep? Don't turn off your computer! Just lost power in a windstorm? Don't turn off your computer!
- wolco 8y ago
  On non-laptops update on startup is worse. Shut down turn off and go do something else. Waiting 10 minutes to start is annoying.
- norswap 8y ago
  As long as you actually do the update as they come along. I've had to upgrade a Mac that hadn't received any updates since 2 or 3 years - it's a disaster, the app store barely even works anymore. Otherwise I pretty much agree.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  Counterpoint: Booting my Mac is when I'm going to work on something and seeing delays due to an pending update feels like an inconvenience. Shutdown is the time to do those tasks that block me from using my computer. I'm sitting at my Mac right now and see an update notification popup in the upper right corner - it has been nagging me for days and every time it returns I wish it would remind me on shutdown when I don't intend to use my computer for a while. I click on on "try again tomorrow" although I know that there's no way I'll interrupt my work when the notification returns the next day. This continues until I actually remember to start the update instead of shutting down my Mac.
tvanantwerp 8y ago
Microsoft needs to stop treating Windows like a scrappy start-up's single-page app that is constantly shifting its UI with the latest A/B test results. This is supposed to be a mature product with an expectation of stability and consistency--especially in the corporate environment.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
It amazing me how unprofessional the software industry has become. Users have had what they're willing to tolerate so steadily pushed against that they've all just become this industry's beta b----es. But hey, we get to drink beer and play games and get free food.
temporallobe 8y ago
These baffling updates are exactly the reason I dropped Windows like a hot potato over 2 years ago. I am a pretty serious hobbyist musician and used hugh-end DAWs for years on anything frim Win 98 to 7. As soon as 10 rolled around, constant unexpected forced updates would severely impede my workflow. I do indeed understand the need to update, but ok call me a control freak ...but I need to be in charge when and yes, IF that happens. Updating am OS could break a carefully configured machine that took lots of time and money to accomplish. I gave up snd tried Linux but quickly found that it’s useless for serious music production. I moved to Mac and it’s great except that you’re locked into a pricey walled garden, which is a price I’m willing to pay for stability and control. On a related note, I know professional producers (and I am friends with one of them) that maintain very old OS X systems for this very reason - these highly integrated systems can cost upwards of $15-20k and absolutely cannot be updated for fear of breaking something. They usually don’t have internet connections, so they’re not vulnerable to external threats anyway.
ionised 8y ago
They're right to be baffled. Windows 10 is a schizophrenic mess of half-baked ideas and abusive telemetry collection, which is a shame because the performance boost it gave to games wasn't insignificant.
masko 8y ago
Never have hours worth of work open? Why not? It's unsafe but I always save frequently, and have never lost progress. However, my issue is that the computer should behave THE WAY I WANT IT TO. It shouldn't close everything I'm working on just to restart and perform an update. My issue is that Windows constantly performs unintended actions. Wiping away my background services configurations, performing updates when I have work open and leave for 10 minutes, or run data telemetry services and spike my CPU usage. If it weren't for the native office 365 suite and touchscreen support (I use a stylus) for my school work, I would have switched entirely to a Linux distro as a daily driver.

171 points by vezycash 8y ago

I think they miss one important point: the fact that Microsoft even needs to do a restart at all. It is very rare for a Linux district to require a restart. Even some kernel updates don’t need a restart. But Microsoft needs a restart regardless of what they are updating. It’s ridiculous.

cm2187 8y ago

What I don't understand is why, once a restart has been initiated, the update process is so slow, taking sometimes north of 10 minutes on a powerful machine using only SSDs.

lozenge 8y ago
Answered https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/exponential-algorithm-making-windows-xp-miserable-could-be-fixed/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/expon...
- jasonjayr 8y ago
  That article is for Windows XP -- they still haven't answered this problem on Windows 10? When they do Major Updates (ie 1709 -> 1809) why not just mount a signed read-only .wim on top of the '\Windows' directory, and overlay changes on that? IIRC part of the update process involves scanning the entire drive for incompatible software, installed or otherwise, can they stop that at this point, and alert/detect on launch?
  - lozenge 8y ago
    Sorry the link was incorrect. I think the actual reason is dlls are versioned individually and it needs to pick the superset version on each update, including optional fixes installed that may depends on hardware etc. Can't find the right link though. They did make some big improvements recently but it will only apply from the next update.
drbawb 8y ago
What I believe is going on is that for small updates it's issuing a lot of IO to create a restore point; meanwhile for large updates it's essentially issuing 16-30GB of IO to do a complete reinstall of Windows. I base this assumption off the fact that an artifact of these large feature updates is a `Windows.old` directory they use to power their 10-day rollback feature. For the smaller updates turning off system restore helped immensely on my NVMe-based system, however I've noticed MS seems to re-enable it after every major feature update. (Of course, they muck up a bunch of my other settings as well, so I guess that shouldn't be surprising.) The only solution that worked for me, long-term, was installing Linux.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  They really should replace NTFS with something that supports snapshotting.
remir 8y ago
They should do the same thing ChromeOS does with A/B partitions.

happppy 8y ago

Updates only breaks my window. I was about to throw my laptop last time. I have just turned off the updates, but MS start them again, so I turn off updated regularly from services, task scheduler.

vezycash 8y ago
There's a hidden option to automatically reenable services after failure - uncheck it. There are also tools that make permanently disabling Windows update a one click affair.

adminu 8y ago

Strangely enough that MS has not yet applied some sort of ML algorithm to finding the times for updates "best" suitable for each user. I thought that's the thing currently

Haga 8y ago
Updates always felt like a dominance gesture on windows. No smoth updates possible without yanking control away from the user.
ilmiont 8y ago
They have. Thing is, that's not solving the root problem though. The real issue is Windows doesn't give users enough control, and still takes an inordinate amount of time to install the updates during the offline stage (shutdown/restart) on typical home PC hardware. Merely shifting when updates occur won't help in the long-term, and might encourage Microsoft to keep ignoring the fundamental issues with Windows Update...
- garganzol 8y ago
  You can go to Group Policy and select the desired level of control. No problem with that whatsoever. These control points are not present in conventional UI nowadays, but they are there in Group Policies, and it's a piece of cake to tune them up to your preference.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Having to go to group policy to do that, rather than the main UI, is a problem.
  - vezycash 8y ago
    Do Home users have group policy?
    - uodtl 8y ago
      The group policy editor does not exist in the Home edition, but all the group policy editor does is modify the registry, so you can just make the registry modifications yourself using the registry editor which exists in all editions. Using the policy editor is supported, while editing the registry is not, I'm afraid.

ilmiont 8y ago

Pro edition users are too.

vbezhenar 8y ago
AFAIK you can easily disable updates with pro using group policy.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

davidgrenier 8y ago

I'm baffled by videos that autoplay on websites.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Autoplaying videos, auto-rebooting updates, what a time to be alive!
kgwxd 8y ago
The browser deserves equal blame. If yours doesn't give the option to disable it, know that there are ones that do.
vezycash 8y ago
I use this firefox extension "Image video block" to block videos either globally or on a per site basis.
AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
On newer firefox versions you can fiddle with the media.autoplay settings in about:config.
basch 8y ago
umatrix takes care of a lot more than just this. I block cookies on any site I dont log into, and scripts on any site I dont need scripts. The granularity of easily enabling just the one script or cookie or frame I might need is great.

EamonnMR 8y ago

Updates make using Windows 10 as an occasional dual boot on a laptop a pain. I usually use the machine with limited or no internet and no power handy, so if I accidentally let it update I'm SOL. As a result I found myself reaching for Windows less and less.

deleted 8y ago
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paraxisi 8y ago
Updates make using windows 10 AT ALL a pain.
stevewodil 8y ago
Do you need to dual boot? I switched to using Linux full time, and running Windows in a VM when needed. It also simplifies the workflows because you don't need to reboot to switch between the systems
- jazoom 8y ago
  How well does windows run in a VM? Will I be able to smoothly use image editing software such as Affinity Photo?
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I run Windows 10 Pro under VirtualBox on Ubuntu - hardware is a Dell XPS 9560 (7th gen i7). Performance is basically native, I use it for PhotoShop and for video editing in Premiere. I was even playing with Propellorhead Reason the other day dabbling in making some music.
    - jazoom 8y ago
      Nice to hear, thanks. Is there any weirdness I should know about? For example, when I run some Linux distros in a VM the mouse movements are jarring. I'd love to do all development in Linux again but dual booting was too annoying. The way you do it sounds interesting.

dep_b 8y ago

Updates on macOS require restarts too. But when I restart, most applications restart exactly in the state I left them.

simongr3dal 8y ago
And most of the time macOS updates don't happen once or twice a month.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  And we can postpone updates forever on macOS, or disable them completely.
Sangeppato 8y ago
The issue to me is not having to reboot. The issue is that Windows 10 automatically checks for updates and as soon as it detects one, it will download and install it without asking or telling me anything. This is what really pisses me off
- slantyyz 8y ago
  It's especially annoying if you have any long running tasks that you've left unattended only to return to find that your machine rebooted and the tasks didn't complete.
auiya 8y ago
I'll happily pay the Apple tax for this contrasting user experience.
sccxy 8y ago
To be honest my macOS updates are more annoying. They take more time and "2 minutes remaining" is just a lie. More likely it is 20 - 60 minutes.

userbinator 8y ago

I find it ironic that Windows was long derided for being unstable and in constant need of reboots, and now they're basically deliberately reducing uptime. Unwanted "new features" and the aspect of silently changing behaviour aside, the technology to patch files in memory and on disk without having to restart or otherwise disturb unnecessarily the entire system has been around for a very long time (and amusingly enough, malware is probably the biggest application of those techniques today); and sending only diffs instead of entire files which may be 99% the same as before would probably save a huge amount of bandwidth.

HenryBemis 8y ago
I was discussing with a friend on solutions on how to make your PC being 'never idle'. As he told me, if the PC is never idle, then Win10 won't enforce any updates/reboots. I do not know how true is that, but when I suggested he use MouseJiggler [1] he thanked me and told me 'it worked'. It is a stand-alone/portable .exe that 'does exactly what it says on the tin'. I use it to keep away screensavers/screenlocks (on machines I don't 100% control). [1]: https://mouse-jiggler.en.uptodown.com/windows https://mouse-jiggler.en.uptodown.com/windows Edit: I keep away from W10 so I don't know to what extend this would help. I assume it would delay unwanted reboots, but I don't know the W10 update-forcing mechanism, and on the diagram depicted on the article I don't see any 'idling' criteria.
- smush 8y ago
  A keyboard-based similar tool is Zhorn's Caffeine which puts a pot of coffee in your system tray and presses F24(?) every 15 seconds.
- ganomi 8y ago
  There is a nice little tool to stop the reboots: https://www.udse.de/en/windows-10-reboot-blocker https://www.udse.de/en/windows-10-reboot-blocker It changes the active hours every hour so that you will never be outside of active hours.
  - AckSyn 8y ago

jakejarvis 8y ago

Direct link to the study (without autoplaying video!): https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/usec2019_02-5_Morris_paper.pdf https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/us...

billpg 8y ago

I read once that all OS code callable from a process begins with a NOP instruction, allowing an update to drop in a jump to the new version of that function by replacing the NOP. I had to wonder why given that is available, why reboots on updates are required at all.

barrkel 8y ago
Shared libraries - dlls - are not reloadable like this. In fact they usually can't be deleted at all if they're in use, renamed at best, and that is risky if it's something that is dynamically loaded and is part of a dependency graph. I'd expect the majority code covered by an update to be in shared libraries.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Isn't that just a deficiency of Windows' filesystem implementation, though? On Linux, you can absolutely overwrite libraries that are still used by running applications. The OS will just not reclaim the disk space until all those processes end (e.g. by means of reboot), but new processes will start using the new libs immediately.
  - invokestatic 8y ago
    Windows memory-maps the DLL file from disk into virtual memory (a la MapViewOfFile), causing the filesystem lock. While I’m not sure why this was done, I speculate it has something to do with saving memory back in the 9x days or even earlier. It’s possible to write a DLL loader that reads from the file once and copies the bytes to memory, leaving no lock unlike memory mapping the file. But even so, there’d be no way to reliably reload DLLs running in a process, not to mention that there are usually hundreds of them running in any particular process. I can also imagine issues arising if existing processes continue to run an old DLL where a new process has a newer, updated DLL such as with IPC, or if there is a zero-day in a DLL used by a long-running daemon. All around, restarting is the safest bet.
  - fencepost 8y ago

kd5bjo 8y ago

My biggest issue with the restarts is that programs with unsaved state aren't allowed to block it. Even if I'm asleep and not using the computer, I often leave half-finished work up to continue in the morning. This works ok most of the time, but if I don't notice an update coming through it can wipe out hours of work. In many ways, it'd be better for Windows to force a restart on a more frequent, fixed schedule to prevent bad habits from setting in.

dspillett 8y ago
I try never leave anything unsaved that I might care about. Past problems have hammered that lesson home. I don't trust anything with unsaved information. Any OS. But Windows in particular - in the past because of instability, more recently due to it being designed to reboot without permission or adequate warning sometimes three times in a month. It isn't just unsaved content though: you lose other context too. Browser windows spread over different desktops, open windows with things selected or scrolled into view, open apps that don't restart, ... Also, any long-running processes are fair game to be killed, as of course are connections to external resources which might respond in an unhelpful manner.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Sometimes even saved data isn't safe from Windows updates: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/windows-10-1809-update-deleted-all-files-from/ff608374-2686-4a08-a4c2-caa4caa6d4e1?auth=1 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  Not a problem for me, because I am using Win8.1, but... I run simulation/optimizations for bots that trade forex. Basically trying different combinations/permutations in their parameters, and getting anything between 25 and 1500 results so I can select the optimum result/configuration. This saves time, because I don't have to run one-set-at-a-time-for-30-mins. Those optimizations can be running for days. I have literally gone away for a weekend and on Monday it was still running the simulation(s). There is nothing 'active' at that time, 'just a software running'. If the PC restarts, all the work is gone, and optimization needs to begin all over. I can fear that it wouldn't be the only case that a Win10 user would be impacted by a forced restart. I do understand Microsoft's standpoint, but as the mighty Steve Gibson says (paraphrasing), I want the operating system to NOT take initiatives :)

jcadam 8y ago

I'm off windows for good. Automatic updates which reboot my machine and cause the occasional breakage are one thing. There's also just too many UI/UX WTFs (two control panels with completely different interfaces, that fing ribbon in office, etc). Just bought a new (well, refurb) XPS 9370, wiped it, and installed Fedora. I have to run Windows at work (corp policy), but they let me install Virtualbox (so I do all of my work in a Xubuntu VM), so, at least there's that.

mugwort13 8y ago

Automatic updates can be disabled with 2 clicks of a mouse. That's it, 2. I can't believe we are still in a culture that only hates Microsoft while pretending that Apple, Alphabet, Ubuntu, and others don't practice the same questionable behavior on a daily basis. This article and the so-called study are narrowminded garbage.

g105b 8y ago

While this is true, I see a lot of comments recommending "better" operating systems like Linux based distributions... but try getting the general public to use Linux based OSes and you'll find more problems than just automatic updates.

Slashbot 8y ago
It's ok when more companies switch over to linux aswel you'll start to see ordinary users more accepting of ditching windows 10.. MS has turned windows into complete garbage.

skrebbel 8y ago

Windows update reboots come up on HN every so often, and I still don't understand the problem. Windows is my daily driver, and updates force me to reboot my laptop 2 to 3 times a year. oh no! Plus, usually I can just schedule the reboot to happen at night when I sleep. All I have to do is click an "restart tonight" button in a notification and then not shut it down that evening. TBH I don't understand why this is considered bad design, especially by the HN crowd. I suspect that the people who complain about this on HN are mostly people on mac/linux who run windows in a VM 3 to 4 times a year and therefore think that it needs to update-reboot all the time. I felt the same about Firefox (which has relatively noisy updates) before I switched to it as my daily driver.

slantyyz 8y ago
Are you on Pro or Home? On my Home edition machines, it's easily more than 3 times a year. Windows is my daily driver too, and while I generally like Windows, the two things I hate the most are the updates and how bad the search is for launching apps (I know some people are going to chime in and say search is fine, but if you have a lot of apps installed, it can be laughably bad).
- skrebbel 8y ago
  I have a laptop on Home that I use a few times aweek. It supports scheduled-at-night updates as well, doesn't it? Maybe I remember wrong. Indeed my main laptop is on Pro. Btw I agree that the start menu search is unimaginably bad. Insane how so many gigahertzes can be wasted so much.
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    Pro is way better for updates. I'd upgrade my Home edition PC's to Pro, but for the features that I would benefit from (better update behaviour, remote desktop), it's not worth the expense to me. To upgrade an existing license from Home to Pro costs almost the same as buying a new Pro license.
- WorldMaker 8y ago

MivLives 8y ago

On one hand as a user it's annoying to come back to my machine in a freshly rebooted state because of updates. On the other as a technical support person, both for pay and free, the pain of dealing with non updated windows is the worst. The only way Windows can possible stay secure is to update a lot. I actually like their new strategy of doing a "feature update". They do them too frequently (once a year would be better) but it prevents the Windows 7 problem where they never rolled updates together after SP1. Last time I installed 7 SP1 on something I had another 100 updates to install.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Not all updates are the same. I run Enterprise LTSC which only gets security and bug fixes every few weeks. These are small and have limited impact on your day to day use. Its the old static Windows model. Its the feature updates that are the problem. And you literally can't defer those on Home.

bambax 8y ago

> How annoying are Windows 10's automatic updates? About as much as websites that autoplay videos.

ourmandave 8y ago
At full volume while you're wearing headphones.

Cactus2018 8y ago

Win 10 Pro -> Start -> Search -> "firewall" -> "allow an app through Windows Firewall" -> "Change settings" -> uncheck apps and features to disallow access to internet. I turn nearly everything off. ... Check again and find various apps are allowed. (especially after a Windows Update, but seeming at random as well) WTF. This is bad security. In the past week the following apps became re-enabled in Windows Defender Firewall: "Xbox Game bar", "Windows Maps", "Windows Calculator", "Movies & TV", "MSN Weather", "Microsoft People", "Groove Music".

stuuuuuuuuu 8y ago
Why does Windows Calculator need network access??
- skykooler 8y ago
  To get the latest rates for currency conversion: https://www.windowslatest.com/2017/07/23/calculator-windows-10-updated-currency-converter/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2017/07/23/calculator-windows-...
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    Ha, that's really cool. I rather like the Windows 10 Calculator.
    - minkzilla 8y ago
      The programmer mode on the windows calculator is extremely useful!
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Then it should ask for network access the first time and remember what you said. I didn't even know it had a currency converter. These days I just do "200 GBP in hungarian forint" and google does it for me. Though in fairness I'm a linux user who does some software dev on windows (in a VM) and that's about it.

cbuq 8y ago

This isn't a problem if, like me, Windows manages to corrupt itself and is unable to perform a Windows update. A little over a year ago the automatic update failed, I've tried all sorts of ways to get an updated version of Windows, but they have all failed. My research seems to point me to a full reinstall of Windows. But my computer hasn't restarted arbitrarily in over a year!

zip1234 8y ago
Have you tried Windows 10 Update Assistant? I had the same problem until I tried it. Worked well. [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3159635/windows-10-update-assistant https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3159635/windows-10-...]
isodude 8y ago
I went into that rabbit hole some time ago, there are two tools available from Microsoft to mitigate problems with updates (other tools than the update-tool referenced in another answer). I can dig them articles up again if needed.
- mdorazio 8y ago
  I have the same issue as the parent commenter. I tried every tool Microsoft provided as well as various recommended manual processes of deleting files, changing registry values, etc. Nothing worked and it appears to be an issue of hardware incompatibility with the Creators update (not surprising since some of my components are over 6 years old). Based on the number of people reporting the same issue when I was troubleshooting, this is disturbingly common and the only solution is to reinstall windows entirely and hope it works.
mark-r 8y ago
I had that problem with Windows 7. For years my media center PC was free from unexpected restarts. Finally I had to give in and reinstall Windows because some software needed VS2017 redistributable, and it refused to install on the borked system. Decided to upgrade to SSD at the same time since prices have dropped so drastically.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

p793231 8y ago

Solution: 1. switch to Windows 10 LTSC 2. block all outgoing traffic (Windows firewall advanced settings) except core networking and apps that you need to access internet (Firefox) This will block all updates. If you want you can get manually download updates from Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4464619 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4464619 I have this setup running for my family (elder parents that first came in contact with computers 10 years ago) under full admin account (autologin) since Windows 7 times. Browser is Firefox+uBlock Origin. No security issues encountered till now. Updates happen only when Microsoft releases a new service pack (Windows 7) or releases a version (once I switched to Windows 10).

MrStonedOne 8y ago
Never did this on windows 10, no idea how effective it is on 10, but what I did was disable the update service, disable the software protection/licensing service, and set both exes to deny execute permissions to everybody in the security tab of the files. Genuine goes away, updates can't start, and even if updates come back, your windows isn't genuine anymore, so you don't get all of the updates, just the major security ones. During GWX, I just issued the command to reset my activation to ensure genuine never came back, blocking the licensing exec also kept the notifications from showing.
acqq 8y ago
> switch to Windows 10 LTSC https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/faq-windows-10-ltsb-explained.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/faq-windows-10... "Microsoft changed the support rules for LTSB since Windows 10's debut ... in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to widely deploy the edition."

nkingsy 8y ago

The metered connection setting is a must. Windows 10 is a tremendous OS once you tell Microsoft to back off. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-metered-connections-in-windows-10 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...

js2 8y ago

I was at my CPA the other day. One of her two monitors went blank due to a h/w issue and so per instructions from her IT guy she had to reboot. Windows decided it had to apply updates as part of the shutdown sequence and she was unable to decline. So we had to sit there and wait 5 minutes for it to apply the updates, then reboot. (Maybe there's a way to override applying the updates and yes, she should get her second monitor fixed. I'm her client, not her IT person, so I wasn't going to intervene. And we had a nice conversation while waiting, so there's that.) FTR, macOS has also become increasingly annoying with how it applies updates, and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to. As in industry, we suck at this. Is Linux the only OS making an effort at patching without rebooting? And does it actually work? https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-without-rebooting/ https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-witho...

crooked-v 8y ago
> and my iOS devices never seem to auto update at night like they're supposed to Do they have alarms set? For whatever weird reason there's no way to get it to auto-update overnight if there's an alarm.
- _sigma 8y ago
  I mean, isn't that a reasonable default? If you use a 3rd party alarm client, such as a sleep monitor, then you'd lose that alarm upon reboot.
- thisacctforreal 8y ago
  I imagine they'd rather you go unpatched than run the risk of not waking you up for an appointment?
- js2 8y ago
  No alarms set. Plugged in, on Wi-Fi.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Upgrades can occur on Linux at any time, or never. It depends when the cronjob is scheduled. The other nice thing is only limited things require reboots. You can find that out by "needs-restarting -r" If you're being tricky, you can parse that and insert a "shutdown -h $TIME" if you parse needs-restarting as yes.

larrik 8y ago

Windows 10 updates are SUPER fun when you are running the N version and have the media pack installed. Usually the updates fail, so you get 6 reboots every few nights until you uninstall the media packs. Finding the new media pack that's compatible is another exercise in insanity. They ALL install without error, but only one actually works. People who think Windows is simpler or easier than Linux are wrong.

TomMarius 8y ago
> People who think Windows is simpler or easier than Linux are wrong. Or they don't do anything crazy.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  It’s odd your comment is in gray. In my experience, Windows 10 (Pro) works fine, as long as you don’t go looking for crazy (cause you’ll find it of course). It’s like those people running custom Linux kernels complaining about IO latency on their standard laptop running Firefox. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
  - larrik 8y ago
    Being the "IT guy" of the family has shown me that it happens even without looking for crazy. My wife's grandparents bought a nice Dell all-in-one desktop, running Windows 7, despite 8 being out. Then Win 10 came out just a few years later (less than 3), and Microsoft force updated them. Well, Dell didn't have drivers to support Win 10 (and still don't), so I had to do all sorts of crazy gymnastics to get their monitor back. Content updates regularly break these fixes, of course.
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      You know, I remember back in the day when this law called the CFAA made "unauthorized usage" illegal. So.. Ive seen it used against a number of individual hackers. Why not companies?

gscott 8y ago

Those forces an automatic restart while I'm working and have windows open... it closes all the windows and loses all my work. This is such a wonderful feature.

sevensor 8y ago

As anybody who's been using Windows since the 1990s knows, you have to save your work to a floppy every 5 minutes if you don't want to risk losing it.

Karupan 8y ago

I’ve twice lost my WSL Ubuntu installation after an update. Poof, just gone after the reboot. Has anyone else experienced this? (Win 10 Home)

yuters 8y ago

Does Windows 10 updates still have the Focus stealing problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stealing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stealing) ?

Scramblejams 8y ago
Yep. And when corporate IT has installed some batch script that runs periodically and flashes a console window that steals focus while you're in the middle of typing, and then after it disappears 0.1 seconds later, for some reason nothing is in focus, that's super awesome. If I didn't develop software, geek out on building my own IT infra, or play PC games, I'd really try to stick to an iPad. :-( Edit: Could anyone suggest any tools for finding the culprit here? It’s over way too quickly to catch in Task Manager. Like, I’d love a little live view of all the UI windows that have been created in the last 60 seconds, with a snapshot of the process tree that started each one.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  I've never once experienced focus stealing during Windows 10 updates. They don't give you any indication that they're occurring in Home, Pro, or Enterprise.
  - yuters 8y ago
    I know a fullscreen focused pop-up occured on its own asking to select a time to "apply updates and reboot" on Windows 7. I was wondering, since it occured last during a very time sensitive task at my work and was the breaking point when I decided to switch OS. If it's not happening again I might consider going back to Windows.
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      There are no longer Task Bar notifications in Windows 10. Windows 10 has an Action Center which is similar to the Android Notifications Panel. Anything pushed to the user shows in there and doesn't steal focus. It can however briefly obscure part of the screen with the notification toast.

sisu2019 8y ago

To start with I am super unhappy with the content and execution of recent windows updates. Its not okay to keep resetting my preferences and it's not okay to rip out control dialogs that worked very well the past decade with some demented metro app (rip display and sound device setting). But I have not had a single unexpected reboot on my win10 install. It's because I always update at the next time of convinience. Updating is required maintenance of any software system and you can't afford to ignore it. I also see some consequences of questionable behavior blamed on windows. You should never have hours worth of unsaved work open. NEVER. Don't blame windows or whatever, just dont ever do that or at least bear your shame quietly. Also, please for the love of god, stop lobbying for OSes to faithfully restore your open apps on reboot. The only way to solve a lot of problems is to be able to really reset the state of everything which is not worth trading for your ability to better compulisvely hoard chrome tabs. That shit is not healthy btw. Finally, reboots are necessary on all major operating systems, even linux. Remember Windows user used to be free to apply updates when they wanted but you, yes you, MS hater of yesteryear kept blaming MS for the large number of unpatched and therefore insecure Windows systems. So they don't give users the freedom to postpone indefinitely and of course it's also not right. So what can they do?

Zanni 8y ago
It's less unsaved work (that would be madness), but unsaved context. The physical arrangement of windows and browser tabs and file locations is significant, and losing it all to a reboot (intentional or otherwise) destroys that context. Want users to reboot more often and on your timetable? Preserve and restore context.
- vic20forever 8y ago
  Meanwhile, in a smoky apartment on the bad side of town[1]: Warning: this hard locked my MBP. [snip] It was a pain in the ass to recover: my only option seemed to be to power down and power back up again, at which point OSX helpfully remembered the state my machine was in and dropped me back into the blacked-out display and maxed fan. Some combination of NVRAM reset, SPC reset and safe mode was required to get back in. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265107

CydeWeys 8y ago

It's unbelievable how badly Windows has gone downhill since 7. Settings have become nonsensical and split across different panels, application search in the start menu is frequently worthless, and all sorts of shit you don't want is advertised or installed to you. Despite having paid well over $100 for it I feel like I'm being subjected to a freemium model. I get that Microsoft no longer makes most of their money from Windows, but that doesn't mean it needs to become terrible!

maxxxxx 8y ago
“I get that Microsoft no longer makes most of their money from Windows” Is that even true? I thought it’s still the cash cow.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  There's some figures here: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/29/how-microsoft-corporation-makes-most-of-its-money.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/29/how-microsoft-corp... Windows revenue is well below Office and Cloud revenue, and even below Xbox revenue. This makes sense; a typical user is probably only paying an average of $100 on Windows, and infrequently at that. The last time I bought Windows was many years ago, when 7 came out. I took advantage of the free upgrade to 8 and then 10 since then.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Maybe Google should learn from them how to get away from ads. It's pretty phenomenal that they have been able to shift their main revenue from OS to other things like Cloud. I know people like to sh.t on MS but I wonder many of the current tech stars will be able to stay alive and healthy during several major technology changes like MS has done for decades now,.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      Seems kind of like a tangent, but, advertising is a field that has existed for many hundreds of years. It's not the same kind of thing as Microsoft Windows, which is a specific type of software product. I'd say the fairer comparison is that Microsoft is still completely dependent on selling software, just like Google is still completely dependent on selling advertising.

Animats 8y ago

The big question with Windows updates today is "what are they doing to screw me over this time?" From forced installs of Candy Crush to the Big Brother features of "telemetry", every update is a probable hostile code install.

lvs 8y ago
I don't understand why everyone is tolerating (nay, engendering!) the level of invasion and subjugation that's baked into all the modern operating systems, linux aside. I want to spend $99 on a perpetual license and not be monetized any further! It's gone way too far now, and there has to be a way back to sanity. I suspect laws will be necessary and the industry will need to shrink. Some will lose their pointless jobs, but so be it. It's a dystopia you're building anyway.
- unityByFreedom 8y ago
  I mean.. it costs money to continue to develop software. The idea of paying for an OS is different from the idiocy of Windows-forced updates. I understand people think of an OS as a static thing but when hardware changes you need to rewrite some of the stuff that sits on top, plus security updates.
  - lvs 8y ago
    Then just price in the cost of security updates into the up-front price. Done and done! This "innovation" in tech business plans to maximize perpetual revenue from users is (obviously) anti-consumer and dystopian. It's disingenuous to say that you can justify what's happened solely based on the cost of updates.
    - unityByFreedom 8y ago
      Price in the cost of all future security updates? Why would I want to buy software updates for life? That sounds incredibly expensive. And if a company were successful at selling this model, they could be taken over by some greedy businessmen who cut costs in order to get short term profit.

lmilcin 8y ago

As a contractor I spend considerable amount of effort and money to have my work tools in good shape. I buy top-notch hardware and am not afraid to buy software if it helps my life just a little bit. I can't understand how Microsoft thinks it is okay to force updates on me and then not even bother to make sure those updates work. After having couple of high-cost delays due to my laptop deciding reboot while doing important analysis or deciding not to boot at all due to Windows update failures I was forced to drop Windows and a dozen Windows-only tools I have used along with it. Macbooks are non-starters. The laptops are barely usable. I am heavy keyboard user and touch-typist and I can't envision using a laptop without physical function keys. A laptop that can die due to dust speck? Apple, please make a laptop for people that actually work and need reliability and usability more than shedding another half millimeter of thickness. I don't want to say Linux is perfect. It is extremely irritating to spend hours trying to get basically anything working. I just want a machine that works and that I can rely to work next day when I open it to start my work day. Why is it so hard in 2019?

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> Why is it so hard in 2019? To be honest: mass-market software developers realized that they can abuse their users with few repercussions, so they've changed their practices to suit themselves rather than their users. The attitude started with web apps, and now it's completed its dominance by spreading to operating systems. Stability takes a lot of work. Users love it, but developers hate back-porting patches.
diffeomorphism 8y ago
> I don't want to say Linux is perfect. It is extremely irritating to spend hours trying to get basically anything working. If this is a machine for work, why are you not buying one with linux preinstalled? For instance the dell precision models: https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop_us https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lap...
- gtm1260 8y ago
  Sure that helps you with the initial cruft of drivers and stuff, but later on down the road there will be many obscure things that don't work right on your specific distro w/ some weird specific fix/workaround that can only be found after googling for hours.

MrStonedOne 8y ago

As somebody who has experience with live updating software on windows while its running with no downtime, Windows updates has no excuse. You can use symlinks to blue green deploy the software, swap the symlink over, and restart the software to have the new version take effect with little downtime. You can do this with dlls and having the software manually unload and reload the dll for the same. locks on symlinks apply to the target, not the symlink, this is piss easy to implement, and heres the kicker! Windows already uses symlinks for all of its dlls and exes as part of the winsxs store, so they could already use this to update without restarting, and even when a restart is needed, they could just stage it in the background, and do a normal reboot without the need for a pre shutdown and post startup stage. This exists, right now, as something you can do in windows, windows 10, windows 7, windows xp. It works for all of them. Microsoft has no excuse.

gtm1260 8y ago
This! The pre shutdown and post startup stages are infuriatingly slow, and the message that says 'Please Don't shut off your PC' makes me want to strangle it with its power cable.

cwyers 8y ago

The fundamental issue here is simple: 1) In 2019, in order to be secure, a computer needs some bare minimum of sysadmin. 2) Computers are like people -- herd immunity helps a lot. Unmaintained PCs are not merely a threat to their owners, but can be used as part of botnets for all sorts of things that jeopardize security for lots of people. 3) Most users are incapable of being their own sysadmin, and there are a lot of people who either don't understand that they even have such a need or suffer from a lot of Dunning-Kruger. So, with the switch to Perpetual Windows, Microsoft has taken on a lot of things that people either ignored or did poorly before, and they want to know why they can't go back to ignoring them or doing them poorly. A not insubstantial part of the reputation Windows 10 has for being user-hostile is because of the difficulty of doing this at scale combined with the fact that some users act pretty hostile themselves, from a herd immunity perspective. Those are the Windows equivalent of anti-vax parents who complain about the school system being hostile to them just for bringing back measles. Windows is never going to be as secure as Android/iOS, with their ability to bring a new security model to things. But Windows 10 is a lot more secure than any Windows before it, and a lot of the reasons people think Microsoft are "ruining" Windows are part of why it's getting more secure.

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> In 2019, in order to be secure, a computer needs some bare minimum of sysadmin. That is true only of security patches. > So, with the switch to Perpetual Windows, Microsoft has taken on a lot of things that people either ignored or did poorly before, and they want to know why they can't go back to ignoring them or doing them poorly. No. Prior to Windows 10, users weren't forced to install feature updates on MS's aggressive schedule. They were given much more software stability. I don't think anyone would be complaining if all MS did with Windows 10 was force home users to install security updates regularly. The problem is that in addition to that, Microsoft decided to also aggressively force half-baked feature updates on them and simultaneously draft them as release testers for professional editions.
Mirioron 8y ago
>Windows is never going to be as secure as Android/iOS, with their ability to bring a new security model to things. But Windows 10 is a lot more secure than any Windows before it, and a lot of the reasons people think Microsoft are "ruining" Windows are part of why it's getting more secure. You know how to make it even more secure? Don't allow the user to use the computer at all: require the user to tell a Microsoft employee what they want to do and have the MS employee do it.

studentik 8y ago

Archlinux updates operating system, all drivers and all installed programs with one command. Takes 5 minutes. Windows update is a joke.

pulse7 8y ago

It's obvious that Satya Nadella IS NOT USING these Microsoft products (Windows 10 Home)! Bill Gates used to use Windows and complained about it, so it got better before it was sent out to the public. How can one use Windows 10 Home, when all CPU + Memory + Network work all the time performing updates, updates, updates... If you are not using a computer for 2 weeks, you will not be able to use it for the first 30 minutes, because Windows will need to... update... Updates make Windows an unusable product!

justfor1comment 8y ago

Windows: Updates are absolutely critical for the safety and security of your laptop. Me: Is this a security update? Windows: No, it's an UI update. Me: Please don't install this update. Windows: Restarting... Back in the Windows XP days you could install security patches without updating Windows to use the new UI, settings or other random things that the dev team decided to change. Wish Windows 10 brought that back.

president 8y ago

At this point, Microsoft will need to re-write Windows to get it to any level near an acceptable user-friendly OS. It'll never happen though.

politician 8y ago

It's hilarious how terrible Windows updates feel compared to MacOS updates. Windows insists on making users stare at an endless blue screen while admonishing them "don't turn off your computer." Meanwhile, MacOS completes the upgrades during boot up, and then has the courtesy to restore your apps - a trick that still makes me smile every time it happens. It probably takes about the same amount of time to apply the update, but feels much faster. Update on shutdown is a bad policy. It's disruptive every time. Getting off the plane? Don't turn off your computer! Running late for an appointment? Don't turn off your computer! Going to sleep? Don't turn off your computer! Just lost power in a windstorm? Don't turn off your computer!

wolco 8y ago
On non-laptops update on startup is worse. Shut down turn off and go do something else. Waiting 10 minutes to start is annoying.
norswap 8y ago
As long as you actually do the update as they come along. I've had to upgrade a Mac that hadn't received any updates since 2 or 3 years - it's a disaster, the app store barely even works anymore. Otherwise I pretty much agree.
thirdsun 8y ago
Counterpoint: Booting my Mac is when I'm going to work on something and seeing delays due to an pending update feels like an inconvenience. Shutdown is the time to do those tasks that block me from using my computer. I'm sitting at my Mac right now and see an update notification popup in the upper right corner - it has been nagging me for days and every time it returns I wish it would remind me on shutdown when I don't intend to use my computer for a while. I click on on "try again tomorrow" although I know that there's no way I'll interrupt my work when the notification returns the next day. This continues until I actually remember to start the update instead of shutting down my Mac.

tvanantwerp 8y ago

Microsoft needs to stop treating Windows like a scrappy start-up's single-page app that is constantly shifting its UI with the latest A/B test results. This is supposed to be a mature product with an expectation of stability and consistency--especially in the corporate environment.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

It amazing me how unprofessional the software industry has become. Users have had what they're willing to tolerate so steadily pushed against that they've all just become this industry's beta b----es. But hey, we get to drink beer and play games and get free food.

temporallobe 8y ago

These baffling updates are exactly the reason I dropped Windows like a hot potato over 2 years ago. I am a pretty serious hobbyist musician and used hugh-end DAWs for years on anything frim Win 98 to 7. As soon as 10 rolled around, constant unexpected forced updates would severely impede my workflow. I do indeed understand the need to update, but ok call me a control freak ...but I need to be in charge when and yes, IF that happens. Updating am OS could break a carefully configured machine that took lots of time and money to accomplish. I gave up snd tried Linux but quickly found that it’s useless for serious music production. I moved to Mac and it’s great except that you’re locked into a pricey walled garden, which is a price I’m willing to pay for stability and control. On a related note, I know professional producers (and I am friends with one of them) that maintain very old OS X systems for this very reason - these highly integrated systems can cost upwards of $15-20k and absolutely cannot be updated for fear of breaking something. They usually don’t have internet connections, so they’re not vulnerable to external threats anyway.

ionised 8y ago

They're right to be baffled. Windows 10 is a schizophrenic mess of half-baked ideas and abusive telemetry collection, which is a shame because the performance boost it gave to games wasn't insignificant.

masko 8y ago

Never have hours worth of work open? Why not? It's unsafe but I always save frequently, and have never lost progress. However, my issue is that the computer should behave THE WAY I WANT IT TO. It shouldn't close everything I'm working on just to restart and perform an update. My issue is that Windows constantly performs unintended actions. Wiping away my background services configurations, performing updates when I have work open and leave for 10 minutes, or run data telemetry services and spike my CPU usage. If it weren't for the native office 365 suite and touchscreen support (I use a stylus) for my school work, I would have switched entirely to a Linux distro as a daily driver.