9 ms·

Windows Will Die: 90 Minutes to Do 5 Minutes of Work

25 points by gavinhoward 4y ago

cable2600 4y ago
Sure the sub$500 PCs and laptops will struggle to run Windows fast enough to matter, they run Linux faster anyway. But the $1000 and up Mega Max hardcore PCs will run Windows just fine only problem is that they are gaming machines and corporate doesn't want to spend the money on gaming machines. Just upgrade to better hardware or run Ubuntu.
- adrianmsmith 4y ago
  From the article: > And my machine is beefy with 32 GB of RAM and a 16-logical-core CPU.
  - etherael 4y ago
    For the tldr crowd the root cause is Windows' insistence on automated self maintenance and updates etc. If you keep a mostly stale out of date windows VM around for when you absolutely have to use it and linux is your daily driver, things will constantly break and require extensive self maintenance on the windows front. If the situation was reversed the most you'll get from linux is notification that there are a very large amount of updates available that you can install when you like. For this reason I don't think the core argument is really sound, because in almost all corporate environments windows is the daily driver and the regular maintenance doesn't come in massive temporally divided chunks of work that make up the large cited overhead in this instance but instead trickles in on a mostly daily basis. If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux.
    - NeoTar 4y ago
      For this use case would it then be faster to simply download a new VM image each time you needed Windows? That is to say if Microsoft creates images with all the required patched applied?
      - jiggawatts 4y ago
        Microsoft does. Unfortunately the VHDs are fairly big to download, and the ISOs are infrequently updated. For local development, I can install Windows in under 2 minutes on a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD in a virtual machine from an ISO image. Patching it takes longer, about 5 minutes, but I generally do other things while that occurs in the background. These days I find the most convenient method to get the "latest" fully-patched version of Windows in a VM is to spin one up in a public cloud. Both Azure and AWS have sufficient free tiers to make this perfectly viable for most developers doing testing or whatever. I just tested Azure's deployment time, and it's about 2 minutes to create an up-to-date VM from scratch.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
      > If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux. They have been doing this for years and intensify their efforts (e.g. by hiding the local user option during install). And I don't see a massive movement towards desktop Linux - Microsoft understands the power of inertia well and they will abuse it as much as they can get away with it.
      - etherael 4y ago
        Absolutely, thus if. I am no longer under the illusion that any significant fraction of the global population of which the market consists will eventually figure this out and migrate away. There is every possibility that they won't and will remain a captive audience providing a steady revenue stream regardless of how they are exploited. They do this for every other industry in the world, why not software? Humans simply aren't, at scale, what the mythology would prefer we believe. They probably really are closer to livestock. One can accept this and work with reality or lie to oneself and deny it and continue to insist otherwise in the face of endless evidence to the contrary. After decades, I have given up and go with the former. Especially in the face of the most egregious examples of livestock like behaviour from the vast majority of humanity in the immediate past.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Also from the article: >I have Windows on a separate hard drive in my machine. >First, once Windows booted, which took the expected two minutes, Emphasis "hard drive" and "two minutes" boot time. Windows 10/11 is absolutely going to shit the bed if it's asked to run off an HDD because Windows nowadays runs with the assumption it lives on an SSD. You know what happens when tons of random reads and writes hit a drive? An SSD just shrugs and goes about the requests. An HDD literally screeches to a halt as it frantically thrashes across the platters. So the only thing that's dying here is his overworked HDD and maybe a bit of his wallet to buy an SSD to replace the HDD with.
derefr 4y ago
Presumably this happened because of how rarely the OP boots Windows. It was likely feverishly applying months of security hotpatches to itself in the background, trying to outpace the user clicking on an email attachment. People who use Windows primarily, and leave it running and idle when they’re not using it (even just asleep is fine, for a laptop), don’t have this problem; Windows does this stuff incrementally, and mostly when you’re not using it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ghusto 4y ago
  I think he's mostly ranting, and his conclusions on the death of Windows are conclusions on that ranting -- i.e. nonsense -- however! Saying the reason Windows does this is X, doesn't excuse anything. It's insane that this is how it works.
  - kichimi 4y ago
    Not really, the old way was that updating was an event and a task within itself, and your mom doesn't want to sit there waiting for updates to complete to write a letter or browse facebook. Silent, backgrounded incremental updates are the better fit for 99% of users. Full disclosure: I use linux as my daily driver and don't have a windows installation.
    - ghusto 4y ago
      But it's not the old way, at least not for for MacOS (and last time I checked, Linux, which you use?). Granted, the MacOS version upgrades are indeed _a thing_, and pretty annoying, but that problem still exists even with the incremental upgrades Windows does. There's just no way around certain types of upgrade that touch core components.
- miken123 4y ago
  > even just asleep is fine, for a laptop Except that Windows never-ever-ever reliably sleeps. There is always something, some program, some driver, whatever, waking it up from sleep.
timellis-smith 4y ago
I have a Windows dual boot which I occasionally use. The last time was to stream some sports which requires silver light so no Linux. I booted in 5 minutes before the start of the game but it was unwatchable due to the fact that Windows updates were running at 100% for the first half an hour
- kaetemi 4y ago
  I have this issue on my older laptops with Windows 10 that I rarely use. The culprit is some Windows Store "optimization" process (wsappx). It'll run for days at 100% if you don't boot Windows for long enough. I hear the exact same from friends. It's clearly a blatant bug that's been going on for years now, and Microsoft doesn't give a shit.
- dgeiser13 4y ago
  Just tell Windows not to install the updates.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
> I don’t boot into Windows often; it’s only to ensure my software works on it. There's the issue. And it's the same issue I constantly hear from people who use Windows similar to how the author does. The problem? They use Windows so infrequently that every time they boot into, and out of, it it start downloading/installing/preparing updates + background tasks that have accrued over weeks/months. Is this situation ideal for the author's use case? Absolutely not. But does it actually get in the way of office work, like the author references? Absolutely not, since those machines will be booting daily and get hiccups, not slogs.
- ghusto 4y ago
  Agreed, but as a sidenote: It's crazy that this is how it works. No other OS does this. I can not not into MacOS or Linux for years, and this still wouldn't happen.
  - nikau 4y ago
    You can turn all the auto updates off if you have windows pro and above. I cant say ubuntu is immune for example, I've booted into a rarely used ubuntu installation on my laptop before and wanted to test something, and apt was locked due to the update manager running in the background.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    To be fair, even Windows 7 will not do this (assuming you've configured it to be), it's really Microsoft's insistence on Windows 10 that we have this mess.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    I don't think it's crazy that windows tries to do all this work behind the scenes so the user doesn't have to worry about it. I do find it crazy how poorly Windows seems to be at running forced system background tasks without absolutely throttling a system, without notice, though.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
desindol 4y ago
Sounds a lot like pebkac…
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  I wanted very much to say the above. Doesn't sound like the author put very much effort into identifying what was going on, fails to understand that Windows is doing what it was intended to do for the non-technical users (i.e. updating), fails to understand that there are good reasons for wanting Windows to do that for non-technical users (even if they might not agree with those reasons), and doesn't bother to take any of the commonly known steps to avoid the issue (i.e. either let it update regularly or break the the update mechanism (not recommended)). So what was the point of the article other than to demonstrate they don't have a clue as to how to properly operate Windows and can't be bothered to invest the time to do so? And if they couldn't be bothered to do so, what are the chances they actually bothered to learn how to operate Linux or any other OS at anything other than a surface level?
  - bromuro 4y ago
    What makes a user “non technical”?
    - abudabi123 4y ago
      A "non technical" user will gift away a brand new with stickers on still Microsoft Windows laptop stuck on wake from sleep and the technical Linux/BSD user will throw it in the trash because life is too short.
bhedgeoser 4y ago
Why doesn't he use a VM on his beefy 32GB ram, 16 logical core cpu.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  And how exactly would it solve his problem?
  - timbit42 4y ago
    He could boot it an hour before he needs to use it and let it update while he works on the Linux side.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jiggawatts 4y ago
The comments in this thread are mostly valid, but are actually skipping over several more fundamental mistakes that the author of the article is making. From the sounds of it, he's multi-booting an entire physical machine into Windows, which is the wrong workflow to use in 2022 as a developer! (He mentions being forced to copy the files out to a USB stick.) In case it's not obvious (it wasn't obvious for the article author) my recommendations for scenarios like this are: - Use virtual machines. The benefits here are that you don't have to do horrible things to your disk partitions, you can use snapshots and roll back to them, and you can have many OS versions running in parallel for testing. More importantly, even if catching up with patches took 90 minutes, you can let a virtual machine do that in the background instead of locking up your entire PC as in traditional multi-booting. - Use cloud-hosted virtual machines. Same benefits as the above, but without taking up disk space locally. Especially useful if you have multiple computers and you like to shift between them. There are generous free tiers available in both AWS and Azure. Both provide up-to-date base images for VMs that take about 2 minutes to deploy instead of 90 minutes. Deploying an image and installing Visual Studio from scratch would take less than 90 minutes! - Use Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions. Both have free tiers and let you run automated builds using Windows-based runner images maintained by Microsoft. They're always up-to-date with patches, Visual Studio updates, and various related tools. This is the superior option for building packages of things where you don't need a fast edit-build-test cycle.
- teclordphrack2 4y ago
okasaki 4y ago
Windows won't die because the people making the decisions to buy it aren't doing any productive work and don't know how bad it is. They just see an established, unbelievably wealthy corp and think "that will do." There's no way out of this. Whining will just get you labelled as a weirdo by your boss.
- avnigo 4y ago
  > people making the decisions to buy it Most people just buy a laptop and expect to get Windows on it because that's what they know, unless they know they want macOS and go with a MacBook. Otherwise, if you want a Linux machine, you'd have to hope the manufacturer gives you the option of shipping without Windows, or end up buying it and then formatting. As long as that's the default, Windows won't die, and I would think Microsoft will like to do anything to keep it the default. When I buy a computer, I want Windows to be opt-in, not opt-out. Ideally, computers should come with a network installer like Raspberry Pi started doing [0], giving you the option at first boot to choose what operating system you want. [0]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/network-install-beta-test-your-help-required/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/network-install-beta-test-y...
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    I don't think that is good idea. It limits the options too much. It should only come with absolutely empty unformatted disk. Everything else is too much intrusion. Best case would be even without any UEFI or similar key material in place. So user would have to choose their own.
antics9 4y ago
In my office I do traditional office work by the computer. Windows and it's Office applications is such a pain for your visual and muscle memory. That is one reason for why it being really slow to work with. The second reason is the sluggishness in each and every application Microsoft ships. The third reason is the one the author experienced. Really slow and intrusive updating which gets worse the longer you go without rebooting or booting into the os.
kaetemi 4y ago
Sad that so many comments here blame the user for what's obviously really bad programming in Windows Update and Windows Store.
- kaetemi 4y ago
  Just booted up my laptop. CompatTelRunner is spinning two processes, one UpdateSoftwareInventory and one DoScheduledTelemetryRun. Meanwhile Edge and OneDrive have updated. I'm 10 minutes in. Spinning 100% CPU. Wuauserv and BITS are peeking in the background while telemetry is hogging everything.
- kaetemi 4y ago
  15 minutes in. Wuauserv is stealing the show. Spinning 100%. Meanwhile, Google and Adobe took their turns in updating as well. 50 minutes in. Still going 100%. 90 minutes in. TiWorker -Embedding (servicingstack) is now spinning. Meanwhile I believe Windows 95 already finished installing from floppy disks on my old Pentium laptop.
- Pedrit0 4y ago
  A dev/engineer who spends time to whine on internet about a product because of a specific issue while he has not spent a second to investigate the root cause of the issue needs to take a lesson. What would you think about someone who wrote an article stating that "Ford is gonna die soon because it took 5 minutes to start my car this morning and I have strictly no idea why" ? I guess you would think this person is somehow not very smart...
  - kaetemi 4y ago
    I'm 3 hours in and my laptop is still spinning 100% on Windows maintenance services. What root causes? It's simply bad OS programming. Don't gaslight users just because it works on your machine and in your use case. A dev/engineer who believes 3 hours of self-maintenance on bootup is normal needs to re-evaluate their priorities.
    - Pedrit0 4y ago
leni536 4y ago
In the author's place I would seriously consider cross-compiling to Windows and test it under wine.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
People until WinXP: Windows is constantly vulnerable, M$ should do something! MS: *invents Windows Update* People: *disables Windows Update* People: My Windows has died for another MS Blaster variant! M$ should do something! MS after Win8: *makes intrusive, hard to disable, forceful Windows Update which... forces the Windows to be updated, duh* People: My Windows is unusable! M$ should do something! ... Sure, quality of the how the process was implemented desires better (I'm too in the victim list of the forced reboot after update), but, BUT! the overall quality gone better. With Win10 not from a fresh install it's just a couple of monthly updates from the last month (Quality and Security Update rollups?), not all updates for the last N months you didn't booted it up. > Linux is my daily driver, but I have Windows on a separate hard drive in my machine. And if that Windows is really on a hard drive... For all "BUT MUH LINUX!1111" people out there - try to use a recent Ubuntu/RHEL with a desktop environment on the hard drive. Chances you forgot how slow HDDs are.
- anthk 4y ago
  OpenBSD user here, with an HDD under an Atom netbook, 1GB of RAM. CWM+Links/lynx, Luakit otherwise. Windows 10 would crawl here.
- orwin 4y ago
  Well, uh, quite fast? The last Lubuntu boot faster than my windows, while on an HDD partition, and the windows is installed on the SSD partition. I think that my linux mint was on an HDD too, and while not the "latest" ubuntu, booted faster than my windows too, on a worse computer. I don't really care about that tbh, its booting fast enough. The only thing that bother me on windows is the telemetry eating my internet when i'm in a train (fuck microsoft, i'm earning a lot so i can afford unlimited data, but when i was an intern i couldn't have afforded this). And on my work laptop, the company security bloatware (Symantec endpoint protection anyone?). Also HyperV. I don't understand why the company forbid WSL and then ask us to run container on our workstation, HyperV is probably the worst virtualizer. I think that's it.
  - CoolCold 4y ago
    Mine pretty much respect Metered Connection settings and even OneDrive disables sync automatically. Not tried to trace telemetry though.
Pedrit0 4y ago
I really doubt that Windows will globally die because you experienced boot issues. If you were a non-lazy dev/engineer, you would have parsed your event log to understand the reason it took so much time to boot and you would have fixed the issue. But you rather invested your time in writing a rant on internet. A clue: when you boot your Windows system on rare occasions, at the moment it boots it will update or finish the installation of updates from the previous boot. Which can explain some important boot duration. My take: complain less, investigate more and configure your Windows system for your specific usage.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > If you were a non-lazy dev/engineer, you would have parsed your event log to understand the reason it took so much time to boot and you would have fixed the issue. Might as well switch to Linux at this point. Why put in that much effort into a proprietary system that you paid for just to make it work reasonably?
  - Pedrit0 4y ago
    If I understand well the guy's need, he only boots this Windows partition for some compatibility software testing... Which means he has to use this Windows. Moreover, being a daily Debian user, let me tell you that bad suprises after patching happen too when using a non-proprietary system... But at one point, whatever the system that you use, investigating the root cause of the issue should be the first taken by a professional, rather than complaining on internet.
- ghoward 4y ago
  Funny how you assume that my Windows system is not configured to my usage. I've turned off Windows Defender. I've turned off background tasks that I don't want. I've uninstalled every piece of software I don't want. I've turned privacy up as high as I can. And it's still a slog.
  - Pedrit0 4y ago
    Well, now you get that these were not the adequate steps to fix your issue, you might want to try to configure / use differently the system updates, which in my opinion could be the root cause of your issue ? And why, more importantly, haven't you checked your event log to understand the issue rather than wasting time to complain on Hacker News ?
anthk 4y ago
If you have to suffer Windows, disable updates via GPO's and get WSUS Offline Update.
thefz 4y ago
I've been using Windows on a development machine that has seen the last 5 releases of VS installed and then upgraded every time. It was a Windows 10, migrated in place from Windows 8 computer, with a mechanical 5400rpm drive and 16GB RAM. I complained as much as I could to my manager about its boot times (10 minutes to even have an operational OS), but once it booted, it was ok. I could work all week just by hibernating it and shutting it down only when leaving on Friday. It ran SSMS along VS and other software like Meld, Teams, Outlook, two browsers, and Sublime text. It was fine. I have been using MS OSes since DOS4, and while Linux is my daily driver at home, I think modern Windows is ok. It can be operated instantly by anyone with low computer knowledge. It is kind of reliable. Posts like this just follow a stupid sentiment. All of it reads like "OMG, Windows is so bad, amirite" and boiling it down it ends up just being virtue signaling to show the world the author uses Linux.
gavinhoward 4y ago
Author here. I love how most of the comments here are saying something to the effect of "he's holding it wrong!" or "this is PEBKAC." And this especially when people have to make a lot of assumptions about my setup, including if Windows ran an update or not! Because I never said it did in the post. When I shut down, it did, but the first boot, it did not. The 15 minutes of hang there was not because of an update. (I had happened to boot into it recently enough.) That 15 movie hang is pure bad programming. It also shouldn't matter if I use spinning rust. Sure it might be slower, but the actual time to login screen wasn't bad, so it is possible to still be usable. I'm not sure the 15 minute hang after boot was caused only by that. HDD may be slower than SSD, but it's not that much slower. Also, if there are updates that install within 3 minutes, and Windows hangs on "Finishing Updates" for 45, there's still bad programming. In addition, I have disabled Windows Defender permanently by the Windows Registry, so there should be far less thrashing of my HDD. For those people saying that I don't know what I'm doing in Windows, maybe I don't, but I know enough to do that. (I don't visit any website in Windows that I don't trust. I usually only visit my self-hosted Gitea instance. I feel safe enough, especially since I could just reinstall and don't keep anything important on there.) On top of that, none of you have explained why my typing speed is 50% of maximum, at least in Visual Studio. As for why I don't use a VM: I don't fully trust emulation of Windows from experience, I need to do actual testing, and I used to have Steam on Windows for Kerbal Space Program. (I used to; I uninstalled it before the first boot talked about in the post.) You're welcome to ask me more questions about my setup and criticize me without assumptions, but please don't assume things about my setup.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  I had a Surface book die due to the battery swelling which warped the glued down display. This happened because stupid me left the machine on all the time because I got tired of all the windows updates. Little did I know that Windows had the habit of maxing out the CPU to 100% for some reason. The little fans in the Surface book couldn’t handle the heat. The only reason why people like the PC as far as I can tell is because of Steam.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >HDD may be slower than SSD, but it's not that much slower. It's at least something around 100~200x slower to do tons of random reads and writes on an HDD than an SSD. Updates and other background tasks that have been delayed and now going all at once are going to hammer the system drive in a random manner, so this difference in speed will have a massive effect.
DavideNL 4y ago
I logged into Windows 11 this week and suddenly it installed some update automatically (i tried to disable automatic updates), which, rebooted and started a terribly slow firmware update !? I just wanted to do 15 minutes of work, ended up wasting nearly an hour (meanwhile i had given up and grabbed my Macbook...) Windows Update is horrible, in my opinion...
ghoward 4y ago
Author here with an update. The hang on shutdown turned out to be because I kept a USB thumb drive plugged in.

25 points by gavinhoward 4y ago

Sure the sub$500 PCs and laptops will struggle to run Windows fast enough to matter, they run Linux faster anyway. But the $1000 and up Mega Max hardcore PCs will run Windows just fine only problem is that they are gaming machines and corporate doesn't want to spend the money on gaming machines. Just upgrade to better hardware or run Ubuntu.

adrianmsmith 4y ago
From the article: > And my machine is beefy with 32 GB of RAM and a 16-logical-core CPU.
- etherael 4y ago
  For the tldr crowd the root cause is Windows' insistence on automated self maintenance and updates etc. If you keep a mostly stale out of date windows VM around for when you absolutely have to use it and linux is your daily driver, things will constantly break and require extensive self maintenance on the windows front. If the situation was reversed the most you'll get from linux is notification that there are a very large amount of updates available that you can install when you like. For this reason I don't think the core argument is really sound, because in almost all corporate environments windows is the daily driver and the regular maintenance doesn't come in massive temporally divided chunks of work that make up the large cited overhead in this instance but instead trickles in on a mostly daily basis. If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux.
  - NeoTar 4y ago
    For this use case would it then be faster to simply download a new VM image each time you needed Windows? That is to say if Microsoft creates images with all the required patched applied?
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      Microsoft does. Unfortunately the VHDs are fairly big to download, and the ISOs are infrequently updated. For local development, I can install Windows in under 2 minutes on a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD in a virtual machine from an ISO image. Patching it takes longer, about 5 minutes, but I generally do other things while that occurs in the background. These days I find the most convenient method to get the "latest" fully-patched version of Windows in a VM is to spin one up in a public cloud. Both Azure and AWS have sufficient free tiers to make this perfectly viable for most developers doing testing or whatever. I just tested Azure's deployment time, and it's about 2 minutes to create an up-to-date VM from scratch.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
    > If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux. They have been doing this for years and intensify their efforts (e.g. by hiding the local user option during install). And I don't see a massive movement towards desktop Linux - Microsoft understands the power of inertia well and they will abuse it as much as they can get away with it.
    - etherael 4y ago
      Absolutely, thus if. I am no longer under the illusion that any significant fraction of the global population of which the market consists will eventually figure this out and migrate away. There is every possibility that they won't and will remain a captive audience providing a steady revenue stream regardless of how they are exploited. They do this for every other industry in the world, why not software? Humans simply aren't, at scale, what the mythology would prefer we believe. They probably really are closer to livestock. One can accept this and work with reality or lie to oneself and deny it and continue to insist otherwise in the face of endless evidence to the contrary. After decades, I have given up and go with the former. Especially in the face of the most egregious examples of livestock like behaviour from the vast majority of humanity in the immediate past.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Also from the article: >I have Windows on a separate hard drive in my machine. >First, once Windows booted, which took the expected two minutes, Emphasis "hard drive" and "two minutes" boot time. Windows 10/11 is absolutely going to shit the bed if it's asked to run off an HDD because Windows nowadays runs with the assumption it lives on an SSD. You know what happens when tons of random reads and writes hit a drive? An SSD just shrugs and goes about the requests. An HDD literally screeches to a halt as it frantically thrashes across the platters. So the only thing that's dying here is his overworked HDD and maybe a bit of his wallet to buy an SSD to replace the HDD with.

derefr 4y ago

Presumably this happened because of how rarely the OP boots Windows. It was likely feverishly applying months of security hotpatches to itself in the background, trying to outpace the user clicking on an email attachment. People who use Windows primarily, and leave it running and idle when they’re not using it (even just asleep is fine, for a laptop), don’t have this problem; Windows does this stuff incrementally, and mostly when you’re not using it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ghusto 4y ago
I think he's mostly ranting, and his conclusions on the death of Windows are conclusions on that ranting -- i.e. nonsense -- however! Saying the reason Windows does this is X, doesn't excuse anything. It's insane that this is how it works.
- kichimi 4y ago
  Not really, the old way was that updating was an event and a task within itself, and your mom doesn't want to sit there waiting for updates to complete to write a letter or browse facebook. Silent, backgrounded incremental updates are the better fit for 99% of users. Full disclosure: I use linux as my daily driver and don't have a windows installation.
  - ghusto 4y ago
    But it's not the old way, at least not for for MacOS (and last time I checked, Linux, which you use?). Granted, the MacOS version upgrades are indeed _a thing_, and pretty annoying, but that problem still exists even with the incremental upgrades Windows does. There's just no way around certain types of upgrade that touch core components.
miken123 4y ago
> even just asleep is fine, for a laptop Except that Windows never-ever-ever reliably sleeps. There is always something, some program, some driver, whatever, waking it up from sleep.

timellis-smith 4y ago

I have a Windows dual boot which I occasionally use. The last time was to stream some sports which requires silver light so no Linux. I booted in 5 minutes before the start of the game but it was unwatchable due to the fact that Windows updates were running at 100% for the first half an hour

kaetemi 4y ago
I have this issue on my older laptops with Windows 10 that I rarely use. The culprit is some Windows Store "optimization" process (wsappx). It'll run for days at 100% if you don't boot Windows for long enough. I hear the exact same from friends. It's clearly a blatant bug that's been going on for years now, and Microsoft doesn't give a shit.
dgeiser13 4y ago
Just tell Windows not to install the updates.

xboxnolifes 4y ago

> I don’t boot into Windows often; it’s only to ensure my software works on it. There's the issue. And it's the same issue I constantly hear from people who use Windows similar to how the author does. The problem? They use Windows so infrequently that every time they boot into, and out of, it it start downloading/installing/preparing updates + background tasks that have accrued over weeks/months. Is this situation ideal for the author's use case? Absolutely not. But does it actually get in the way of office work, like the author references? Absolutely not, since those machines will be booting daily and get hiccups, not slogs.

ghusto 4y ago
Agreed, but as a sidenote: It's crazy that this is how it works. No other OS does this. I can not not into MacOS or Linux for years, and this still wouldn't happen.
- nikau 4y ago
  You can turn all the auto updates off if you have windows pro and above. I cant say ubuntu is immune for example, I've booted into a rarely used ubuntu installation on my laptop before and wanted to test something, and apt was locked due to the update manager running in the background.
- zinekeller 4y ago
  To be fair, even Windows 7 will not do this (assuming you've configured it to be), it's really Microsoft's insistence on Windows 10 that we have this mess.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  I don't think it's crazy that windows tries to do all this work behind the scenes so the user doesn't have to worry about it. I do find it crazy how poorly Windows seems to be at running forced system background tasks without absolutely throttling a system, without notice, though.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

desindol 4y ago

Sounds a lot like pebkac…

ThrowawayR2 4y ago
I wanted very much to say the above. Doesn't sound like the author put very much effort into identifying what was going on, fails to understand that Windows is doing what it was intended to do for the non-technical users (i.e. updating), fails to understand that there are good reasons for wanting Windows to do that for non-technical users (even if they might not agree with those reasons), and doesn't bother to take any of the commonly known steps to avoid the issue (i.e. either let it update regularly or break the the update mechanism (not recommended)). So what was the point of the article other than to demonstrate they don't have a clue as to how to properly operate Windows and can't be bothered to invest the time to do so? And if they couldn't be bothered to do so, what are the chances they actually bothered to learn how to operate Linux or any other OS at anything other than a surface level?
- bromuro 4y ago
  What makes a user “non technical”?
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    A "non technical" user will gift away a brand new with stickers on still Microsoft Windows laptop stuck on wake from sleep and the technical Linux/BSD user will throw it in the trash because life is too short.

bhedgeoser 4y ago

Why doesn't he use a VM on his beefy 32GB ram, 16 logical core cpu.

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
And how exactly would it solve his problem?
- timbit42 4y ago
  He could boot it an hour before he needs to use it and let it update while he works on the Linux side.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jiggawatts 4y ago

The comments in this thread are mostly valid, but are actually skipping over several more fundamental mistakes that the author of the article is making. From the sounds of it, he's multi-booting an entire physical machine into Windows, which is the wrong workflow to use in 2022 as a developer! (He mentions being forced to copy the files out to a USB stick.) In case it's not obvious (it wasn't obvious for the article author) my recommendations for scenarios like this are: - Use virtual machines. The benefits here are that you don't have to do horrible things to your disk partitions, you can use snapshots and roll back to them, and you can have many OS versions running in parallel for testing. More importantly, even if catching up with patches took 90 minutes, you can let a virtual machine do that in the background instead of locking up your entire PC as in traditional multi-booting. - Use cloud-hosted virtual machines. Same benefits as the above, but without taking up disk space locally. Especially useful if you have multiple computers and you like to shift between them. There are generous free tiers available in both AWS and Azure. Both provide up-to-date base images for VMs that take about 2 minutes to deploy instead of 90 minutes. Deploying an image and installing Visual Studio from scratch would take less than 90 minutes! - Use Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions. Both have free tiers and let you run automated builds using Windows-based runner images maintained by Microsoft. They're always up-to-date with patches, Visual Studio updates, and various related tools. This is the superior option for building packages of things where you don't need a fast edit-build-test cycle.

teclordphrack2 4y ago

okasaki 4y ago

Windows won't die because the people making the decisions to buy it aren't doing any productive work and don't know how bad it is. They just see an established, unbelievably wealthy corp and think "that will do." There's no way out of this. Whining will just get you labelled as a weirdo by your boss.

avnigo 4y ago
> people making the decisions to buy it Most people just buy a laptop and expect to get Windows on it because that's what they know, unless they know they want macOS and go with a MacBook. Otherwise, if you want a Linux machine, you'd have to hope the manufacturer gives you the option of shipping without Windows, or end up buying it and then formatting. As long as that's the default, Windows won't die, and I would think Microsoft will like to do anything to keep it the default. When I buy a computer, I want Windows to be opt-in, not opt-out. Ideally, computers should come with a network installer like Raspberry Pi started doing [0], giving you the option at first boot to choose what operating system you want. [0]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/network-install-beta-test-your-help-required/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/network-install-beta-test-y...
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I don't think that is good idea. It limits the options too much. It should only come with absolutely empty unformatted disk. Everything else is too much intrusion. Best case would be even without any UEFI or similar key material in place. So user would have to choose their own.

antics9 4y ago

In my office I do traditional office work by the computer. Windows and it's Office applications is such a pain for your visual and muscle memory. That is one reason for why it being really slow to work with. The second reason is the sluggishness in each and every application Microsoft ships. The third reason is the one the author experienced. Really slow and intrusive updating which gets worse the longer you go without rebooting or booting into the os.

kaetemi 4y ago

Sad that so many comments here blame the user for what's obviously really bad programming in Windows Update and Windows Store.

kaetemi 4y ago
Just booted up my laptop. CompatTelRunner is spinning two processes, one UpdateSoftwareInventory and one DoScheduledTelemetryRun. Meanwhile Edge and OneDrive have updated. I'm 10 minutes in. Spinning 100% CPU. Wuauserv and BITS are peeking in the background while telemetry is hogging everything.
kaetemi 4y ago
15 minutes in. Wuauserv is stealing the show. Spinning 100%. Meanwhile, Google and Adobe took their turns in updating as well. 50 minutes in. Still going 100%. 90 minutes in. TiWorker -Embedding (servicingstack) is now spinning. Meanwhile I believe Windows 95 already finished installing from floppy disks on my old Pentium laptop.
Pedrit0 4y ago
A dev/engineer who spends time to whine on internet about a product because of a specific issue while he has not spent a second to investigate the root cause of the issue needs to take a lesson. What would you think about someone who wrote an article stating that "Ford is gonna die soon because it took 5 minutes to start my car this morning and I have strictly no idea why" ? I guess you would think this person is somehow not very smart...
- kaetemi 4y ago
  I'm 3 hours in and my laptop is still spinning 100% on Windows maintenance services. What root causes? It's simply bad OS programming. Don't gaslight users just because it works on your machine and in your use case. A dev/engineer who believes 3 hours of self-maintenance on bootup is normal needs to re-evaluate their priorities.
  - Pedrit0 4y ago

leni536 4y ago

In the author's place I would seriously consider cross-compiling to Windows and test it under wine.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

People until WinXP: Windows is constantly vulnerable, M$ should do something! MS: *invents Windows Update* People: *disables Windows Update* People: My Windows has died for another MS Blaster variant! M$ should do something! MS after Win8: *makes intrusive, hard to disable, forceful Windows Update which... forces the Windows to be updated, duh* People: My Windows is unusable! M$ should do something! ... Sure, quality of the how the process was implemented desires better (I'm too in the victim list of the forced reboot after update), but, BUT! the overall quality gone better. With Win10 not from a fresh install it's just a couple of monthly updates from the last month (Quality and Security Update rollups?), not all updates for the last N months you didn't booted it up. > Linux is my daily driver, but I have Windows on a separate hard drive in my machine. And if that Windows is really on a hard drive... For all "BUT MUH LINUX!1111" people out there - try to use a recent Ubuntu/RHEL with a desktop environment on the hard drive. Chances you forgot how slow HDDs are.

anthk 4y ago
OpenBSD user here, with an HDD under an Atom netbook, 1GB of RAM. CWM+Links/lynx, Luakit otherwise. Windows 10 would crawl here.
orwin 4y ago
Well, uh, quite fast? The last Lubuntu boot faster than my windows, while on an HDD partition, and the windows is installed on the SSD partition. I think that my linux mint was on an HDD too, and while not the "latest" ubuntu, booted faster than my windows too, on a worse computer. I don't really care about that tbh, its booting fast enough. The only thing that bother me on windows is the telemetry eating my internet when i'm in a train (fuck microsoft, i'm earning a lot so i can afford unlimited data, but when i was an intern i couldn't have afforded this). And on my work laptop, the company security bloatware (Symantec endpoint protection anyone?). Also HyperV. I don't understand why the company forbid WSL and then ask us to run container on our workstation, HyperV is probably the worst virtualizer. I think that's it.
- CoolCold 4y ago
  Mine pretty much respect Metered Connection settings and even OneDrive disables sync automatically. Not tried to trace telemetry though.

Pedrit0 4y ago

I really doubt that Windows will globally die because you experienced boot issues. If you were a non-lazy dev/engineer, you would have parsed your event log to understand the reason it took so much time to boot and you would have fixed the issue. But you rather invested your time in writing a rant on internet. A clue: when you boot your Windows system on rare occasions, at the moment it boots it will update or finish the installation of updates from the previous boot. Which can explain some important boot duration. My take: complain less, investigate more and configure your Windows system for your specific usage.

matheusmoreira 4y ago
> If you were a non-lazy dev/engineer, you would have parsed your event log to understand the reason it took so much time to boot and you would have fixed the issue. Might as well switch to Linux at this point. Why put in that much effort into a proprietary system that you paid for just to make it work reasonably?
- Pedrit0 4y ago
  If I understand well the guy's need, he only boots this Windows partition for some compatibility software testing... Which means he has to use this Windows. Moreover, being a daily Debian user, let me tell you that bad suprises after patching happen too when using a non-proprietary system... But at one point, whatever the system that you use, investigating the root cause of the issue should be the first taken by a professional, rather than complaining on internet.
ghoward 4y ago
Funny how you assume that my Windows system is not configured to my usage. I've turned off Windows Defender. I've turned off background tasks that I don't want. I've uninstalled every piece of software I don't want. I've turned privacy up as high as I can. And it's still a slog.
- Pedrit0 4y ago
  Well, now you get that these were not the adequate steps to fix your issue, you might want to try to configure / use differently the system updates, which in my opinion could be the root cause of your issue ? And why, more importantly, haven't you checked your event log to understand the issue rather than wasting time to complain on Hacker News ?

anthk 4y ago

If you have to suffer Windows, disable updates via GPO's and get WSUS Offline Update.

thefz 4y ago

I've been using Windows on a development machine that has seen the last 5 releases of VS installed and then upgraded every time. It was a Windows 10, migrated in place from Windows 8 computer, with a mechanical 5400rpm drive and 16GB RAM. I complained as much as I could to my manager about its boot times (10 minutes to even have an operational OS), but once it booted, it was ok. I could work all week just by hibernating it and shutting it down only when leaving on Friday. It ran SSMS along VS and other software like Meld, Teams, Outlook, two browsers, and Sublime text. It was fine. I have been using MS OSes since DOS4, and while Linux is my daily driver at home, I think modern Windows is ok. It can be operated instantly by anyone with low computer knowledge. It is kind of reliable. Posts like this just follow a stupid sentiment. All of it reads like "OMG, Windows is so bad, amirite" and boiling it down it ends up just being virtue signaling to show the world the author uses Linux.

gavinhoward 4y ago

Author here. I love how most of the comments here are saying something to the effect of "he's holding it wrong!" or "this is PEBKAC." And this especially when people have to make a lot of assumptions about my setup, including if Windows ran an update or not! Because I never said it did in the post. When I shut down, it did, but the first boot, it did not. The 15 minutes of hang there was not because of an update. (I had happened to boot into it recently enough.) That 15 movie hang is pure bad programming. It also shouldn't matter if I use spinning rust. Sure it might be slower, but the actual time to login screen wasn't bad, so it is possible to still be usable. I'm not sure the 15 minute hang after boot was caused only by that. HDD may be slower than SSD, but it's not that much slower. Also, if there are updates that install within 3 minutes, and Windows hangs on "Finishing Updates" for 45, there's still bad programming. In addition, I have disabled Windows Defender permanently by the Windows Registry, so there should be far less thrashing of my HDD. For those people saying that I don't know what I'm doing in Windows, maybe I don't, but I know enough to do that. (I don't visit any website in Windows that I don't trust. I usually only visit my self-hosted Gitea instance. I feel safe enough, especially since I could just reinstall and don't keep anything important on there.) On top of that, none of you have explained why my typing speed is 50% of maximum, at least in Visual Studio. As for why I don't use a VM: I don't fully trust emulation of Windows from experience, I need to do actual testing, and I used to have Steam on Windows for Kerbal Space Program. (I used to; I uninstalled it before the first boot talked about in the post.) You're welcome to ask me more questions about my setup and criticize me without assumptions, but please don't assume things about my setup.

rawgabbit 4y ago
I had a Surface book die due to the battery swelling which warped the glued down display. This happened because stupid me left the machine on all the time because I got tired of all the windows updates. Little did I know that Windows had the habit of maxing out the CPU to 100% for some reason. The little fans in the Surface book couldn’t handle the heat. The only reason why people like the PC as far as I can tell is because of Steam.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>HDD may be slower than SSD, but it's not that much slower. It's at least something around 100~200x slower to do tons of random reads and writes on an HDD than an SSD. Updates and other background tasks that have been delayed and now going all at once are going to hammer the system drive in a random manner, so this difference in speed will have a massive effect.

DavideNL 4y ago

I logged into Windows 11 this week and suddenly it installed some update automatically (i tried to disable automatic updates), which, rebooted and started a terribly slow firmware update !? I just wanted to do 15 minutes of work, ended up wasting nearly an hour (meanwhile i had given up and grabbed my Macbook...) Windows Update is horrible, in my opinion...

ghoward 4y ago

Author here with an update. The hang on shutdown turned out to be because I kept a USB thumb drive plugged in.