5 ms·

Compared to Windows, they are all blazing fast. I still wonder how it can take over an hour just to search for the latest Updates on a Windows 7/8.1 and/or Serv

Compared to Windows, they are all blazing fast. I still wonder how it can take over an hour just to search for the latest Updates on a Windows 7/8.1 and/or Server 2012 (R2) Box.

pizza234 7y ago
An hour if you're lucky :-) I think I haven't been able, in the last years, to update a Windows 7 SP1, without using hacks.
- Arnavion 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you two are doing. My Windows 7 machine has no problem finding new updates in ~1 min and installs them just fine also.
  - wott 7y ago
    Well, like I, they simply launch "Search for new updates" and "Install new updates", and each of those operations can take dozens of minutes. I mean, in the lucky cases the first one completes. The downloading step is the most infuriating, with a progress bar that never progresses for several minutes, although the download is just supposed to be a few tens or a few hundreds of Mo.
  - pizza234 7y ago
    Fresh installs have a large (for Windows Update standards, which are rock-bottom) number of updates to download, compared to a currently updated one. AFAIR (not 100% sure) some Windows Update fixes have been released after Windows 7 SP1 (which is the last available image), which means, in order to install a fresh system and update it, one has to install the O/S, then patch, then update. So this explain at least some cases. Although, I remember that even after patching, WU would hang.
    - Arnavion 7y ago
      For fresh installs, sure I can imagine it taking a long time. The typical case is an existing install though, for which it should be as fast as I said.
agumonkey 7y ago
Yes, it's quite a pity that Microsoft didn't put some weight behind it. It causes a never ending amount of pain to the average users too. Anybody ever used the peer to peer local caching ?
- wott 7y ago
  > Yes, it's quite a pity that Microsoft didn't put some weight behind it. It causes a never ending amount of pain to the average users too. Yes, I never understood why this was never improved across the years (and systems). The only explanation with which I could come up, is that the team in charge is still the same team who designed progress bars in DOS and Win 3.1 times, and they have been granted the role of tradition keepers.
KingMachiavelli 7y ago
In addition to taking hours, the Windows update is terrible opaque. Between the 'old' update & new update interfaces, the time spent 'looking for updates' can range from a minute to over an hour which means it's obviously doing more than just querying a server for available updates. During the 'installing' updates phase, the percent complete will stall & jump at random intervals without any indication of why it suddently went from 15% done to 25% done. And at the end of this long and ardouous process, you only have an updated OS and still have to manually (or use a tool like Chocolatey) update your non-MS software. It baffles me that this as considered acceptable considering these issues are still present even in domain environments with local WSUS servers.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I'm not entirely sure about this (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), but it seems to me that on Windows the problem is fundamentally harder than on Linux. On Windows, you can (or at least could on Windows 7, where this time spent was particularly awful -- though I think you can still uninstall individual updates) pick and choose which updates you install (and uninstall). The sheer number of combinations of updates installed is exponentially more than anybody can test, yet that flexibility is given to you. On Linux you don't seem to have this kind of flexibility as far as I can tell. Now, precisely what computation has to occur that's so much more work in Windows than on Linux is unclear to me, but it does seem like Windows has to solve a fundamentally harder problem.
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    All the Linux package managers I've used (admittedly, not that many) allow you to choose which updates to install. It's only dependencies that should be upgraded together, I suppose.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      But dependencies is exactly what I mean though. You can randomly uninstall an update to a common dependency on Windows. While keeping a later update that patches the same libraries installed. (!) I don't really get how they handle it (probably SxS magic), but somehow they do, whereas on Linux you can't do this.
amaccuish 7y ago
That, and that I'm constantly being told that there are new windows updates available, which are really just Defender definitions updates. Just install them for me and stop bugging me!
MartijnBraam 7y ago
Because windows update is downloading a multi-GB xml file (before compression) with info about all updates for all windows editions and other Microsoft products

Compared to Windows, they are all blazing fast. I still wonder how it can take over an hour just to search for the latest Updates on a Windows 7/8.1 and/or Server 2012 (R2) Box.

pizza234 7y ago

An hour if you're lucky :-) I think I haven't been able, in the last years, to update a Windows 7 SP1, without using hacks.

Arnavion 7y ago
I'm not sure what you two are doing. My Windows 7 machine has no problem finding new updates in ~1 min and installs them just fine also.
- wott 7y ago
  Well, like I, they simply launch "Search for new updates" and "Install new updates", and each of those operations can take dozens of minutes. I mean, in the lucky cases the first one completes. The downloading step is the most infuriating, with a progress bar that never progresses for several minutes, although the download is just supposed to be a few tens or a few hundreds of Mo.
- pizza234 7y ago
  Fresh installs have a large (for Windows Update standards, which are rock-bottom) number of updates to download, compared to a currently updated one. AFAIR (not 100% sure) some Windows Update fixes have been released after Windows 7 SP1 (which is the last available image), which means, in order to install a fresh system and update it, one has to install the O/S, then patch, then update. So this explain at least some cases. Although, I remember that even after patching, WU would hang.
  - Arnavion 7y ago
    For fresh installs, sure I can imagine it taking a long time. The typical case is an existing install though, for which it should be as fast as I said.

agumonkey 7y ago

Yes, it's quite a pity that Microsoft didn't put some weight behind it. It causes a never ending amount of pain to the average users too. Anybody ever used the peer to peer local caching ?

wott 7y ago
> Yes, it's quite a pity that Microsoft didn't put some weight behind it. It causes a never ending amount of pain to the average users too. Yes, I never understood why this was never improved across the years (and systems). The only explanation with which I could come up, is that the team in charge is still the same team who designed progress bars in DOS and Win 3.1 times, and they have been granted the role of tradition keepers.

KingMachiavelli 7y ago

In addition to taking hours, the Windows update is terrible opaque. Between the 'old' update & new update interfaces, the time spent 'looking for updates' can range from a minute to over an hour which means it's obviously doing more than just querying a server for available updates. During the 'installing' updates phase, the percent complete will stall & jump at random intervals without any indication of why it suddently went from 15% done to 25% done. And at the end of this long and ardouous process, you only have an updated OS and still have to manually (or use a tool like Chocolatey) update your non-MS software. It baffles me that this as considered acceptable considering these issues are still present even in domain environments with local WSUS servers.

mehrdadn 7y ago
I'm not entirely sure about this (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), but it seems to me that on Windows the problem is fundamentally harder than on Linux. On Windows, you can (or at least could on Windows 7, where this time spent was particularly awful -- though I think you can still uninstall individual updates) pick and choose which updates you install (and uninstall). The sheer number of combinations of updates installed is exponentially more than anybody can test, yet that flexibility is given to you. On Linux you don't seem to have this kind of flexibility as far as I can tell. Now, precisely what computation has to occur that's so much more work in Windows than on Linux is unclear to me, but it does seem like Windows has to solve a fundamentally harder problem.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  All the Linux package managers I've used (admittedly, not that many) allow you to choose which updates to install. It's only dependencies that should be upgraded together, I suppose.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    But dependencies is exactly what I mean though. You can randomly uninstall an update to a common dependency on Windows. While keeping a later update that patches the same libraries installed. (!) I don't really get how they handle it (probably SxS magic), but somehow they do, whereas on Linux you can't do this.

amaccuish 7y ago

That, and that I'm constantly being told that there are new windows updates available, which are really just Defender definitions updates. Just install them for me and stop bugging me!

MartijnBraam 7y ago

Because windows update is downloading a multi-GB xml file (before compression) with info about all updates for all windows editions and other Microsoft products