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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
If normal home Windows users are expected to edit the registry these days to manage basic settings the "Linux is too complicated for home users" argument seems to no longer be valid.
The Group Policy editor is a very straightforward GUI for quickly updating the registry for you though. It's no more complicated than using Windows Explorer to find your files.
Even editing the registry "directly" using regedit is very easy. Much easier than finding and editing config files on Linux because everything you need to edit can always be found in the same spot in the tree to the left, no matter what version of Windows you're running.
Meanwhile, your Linux desktop will have you entering arcane CLI commands to fix things after a bad update (which happened to me just last week on both of my Manjaro workstations).
My main job responsibility is research programming (Matlab/Python), so I consider myself fairly computer-literate, but about 10% of my time is spent as a sysadmin, and Group Policy is super confusing to me. I have no idea if what I put down is being applied or not, or where to look for something. It's far from straightforward. Maintaining our openSUSE Linux cluster is far more intuitive to me.
>I have no idea if what I put down is being applied or not
I'm not sure what you mean here. Obviously not all settings can be applied immediately, so I'm not sure how that's any different from modifying a random .conf file and not seeing the changes in real time.
> or where to look for something
google? At least all the setting are in one place and obeys some hierarchy.
OK, I assume that I should restart or at least log out and back in when I change system settings.
Usually I'm following instructions that I found online and they tell you what to do there. I definitely don't go into Group Policy and edit things all willy-nilly.
This seems to be the case on many OSes. I was documenting my workstation setup recently and I'll share one entry here:
### Firefox opening to manjaro.org instead of new-tab
- Look for settings in Firefox to disable this. No findeee!
- Search the net to discover others talking about this. Many say just
uninstall `manjaro-browser-settings`.
- Remove `manjaro-browser-settings`.
- Failure: Firefox still behaves the same.
- Decide to uninstall Firefox and reinstall it. However, I will install
Chrome first.
- Use _Add/Remove Software_ app preferences to enable AUR repository,
then refresh databases.
- Install Chrome from AUR. It works.
- Uninstall Firefox and reinstall it.
- Success: Firefox no longer opens to manjaro.org.
- (There might have been a reboot somewhere in there - it doesn't
hurt to sprinkle them in randomly when
practicing voodoo computing!)
Also it seems like with this OS, if I don't reboot after an update or changing certain settings - things start breaking.
Maybe one day, we'll have the perfect OS! But as far as I know it doesn't exist yet. :)
It's not going to work. My anecdote on this was my wife was working from home one day, she goes to her computer in the morning and it immediately starts a huge Windows update that takes over an hour (she doens't have the greatest machine) so she lost a whole hour of work.
The interesting thing is, normally that would be the "best" time to do the upgrade since she would normally be at work. But instead it was the worst time and no way to stop it.
I don't see why Microsoft is so against giving user some control of the process.
Great idea. Rather than let the user, who knows more about their schedule, workflow, and needs, than anyone at Microsoft, determine when updates should be applied, we will instead use fancy Machine Learning to pick a time and force it upon them.
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.
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.
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
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.
VMware has well implemented integration tools that take care of mouse transfer, clipboard, and resizing the desktop. Windows in a Linux VM works well there.
Modern x86's have instruction set extensions to make VMs almost free of any overhead. The only performance hit you have is for the memory you don't allocate to the VM.
> The only performance hit you have is for the memory you don't allocate to the VM.
Also disk I/O. Increased disk latency can kill the VM performance, and it will increase, if the virtual disk is inside a (sparse) file, inside a filesystem.
I use Windows 10 Enterprise via KVM on Fedora 29. It works quite well, even for more intensive tasks. I do not have a dedicated GPU, so I am not sure about image editing. The only thing I've noticed that is a bit annoying (and it happens in almost any virtual environment) is real-time audio for stuff like video conferencing. When I conference with people who insist on using WebEx or Skype for Business, the audio though the Windows VM is always popping and skipping slightly. Never enough to disrupt the meeting, but it can be annoying.
In my case I don't think there's much that's Windows only that I can't use on my Phone (like Office) or Tablet. The only laptop I'm keeping with Windows is my Surface Book 2, I did boot Kubuntu on it to test it out, it looked beautiful but unless Microsoft officially supports Linux on their devices I don't think I will bother, it's nice and works, so I can't complain.
The only other machine I have with Windows is a desktop I never turn off, so it updates itself when I'm not around.
There was a time my business relied on a Windows-only browser app for several banking operations. The thing I liked most about the VM is that it was immutable - the moment I rebooted, it went back to its previous state.
For updates, I made it mutable, applied only the updates and made it immutable again.
If you're running Windows to play games, you need your virtualized Windows to be able to take 100% control (or close to 100%, anyway) of the GPU to get equivalent performance to playing the same game on Windows running directly on the hardware. This "GPU passthrough" turns out to be complicated to do, particularly on VirtualBox, which ('cuz it's free) is the virtualization platform your average hobby user is likely to be using.
(Which is too bad, because I would love to be able to stop dual booting just to be able to play some games.)
I've found the performance penalty in practice to be only a few percentages, since virtualization is supported at the hardware level / HyperV. Essentially undetectable. YMMV. Parallels Desktop and/or VMware Fusion are superior (IMO) for GPU passthrough, but virtualbox can work.
As to why someone would want to run this; there is a case where dual-boot is the only alternative : the practical difficulty, if you're a developer who runs Docker -- it doesn't play well with VirtualBox. https://forums.docker.com/t/running-docker-and-virtualbox-on...
> As to why someone would want to run this; there is a case where dual-boot is the only alternative : the practical difficulty, if you're a developer who runs Docker -- it doesn't play well with VirtualBox. https://forums.docker.com/t/running-docker-and-virtualbox-on....
Not quite. That only applies to "Docker for Windows/Mac", while a developer primarily running Linux would presumably run native Docker.
More generally, the actual problem here is that there can generally only be one hypervisor running at a time, since it grabs exclusive control of some system resources. Docker itself isn't a hypervisor, but DfW/M use the native hypervisor of their respective OS (Hyper-V and Hypervisor.Framework, respectively) to run the Linux distro boot2docker (where the actual Docker Engine is ran), and neither of those like to coexist with Virtualbox.
There is also the older Docker Toolbox (for both Windows and macOS) that used Virtualbox as its backing hypervisor, and so will happily coexist with other Vbox VMs.
But all of this is about coexisting hypervisors at the same "level". Some hypervisors (such as KVM) support nested virtualization, in which case you could run any (one) other hypervisor inside a VM managed by that hypervisor. For testing purposes I have ran DfW inside KVM, and it worked fine (if a bit slow).
Apparently a eGPU will solve this. Plug the eGPU into the host machine/laptop, pass through into the windows VM, and itt'l work (apparently) without having to mess about with, well, anything. Would love to hear if someone has actually had any success with this approach.
eGPUs won't help at all there. If your chipset and CPU support IOMMU virtualization (generally any Skylake+ or Ryzen CPU will, chipsets tend to vary more) then you can already do it with your internal discrete GPU, otherwise those will block it anyway.
However, even then the GPU's PCIe slot will need to be in a separate IOMMU group (generally only the case if it is connected directly to the CPU, bypassing the chipset, usually the case for 1-2 slots per mobo at most), which I strongly doubt Thunderbolt slots would be prioritized for.
Now there is Proton by Valve. it's a wrapper for wine and a few other components. Most games just work now. There are of course some exceptions like ring of elysium doing kernel patches for ring zero DRM and Anti-Cheat. But I would say 90% of my steam library just works out of the box.
It's not even just for games. I test my app (Aether, https://getaether.net), on a Windows VM, and I noticed that the performance characteristics of some apps change if you do that. Some parts of some apps can slow down two orders of magnitude, especially if it's doing anything related to painting frames.
I can do dual boot, but then I lose my dev environment, it's valuable to be able to apply a patch, compile a new version and try it on the Windows machine.
I finally gave in and ordered a Windows desktop box for testing yesterday.
I'm dualbooting so that I can use Reason (music software) and the occasional game, but I'm picking up Renoise which runs on Linux (and is more suited to mouse-less composition.) I'll probably still arrange, mix, and master in Reason though (but I'll do that on my gaming machine which is still running win7.)
That "Option to force download over a metered connection set" from the flowchart is yours to control via the Allow updates to be downloaded automatically over metered connections policy. It is not forced on you by MS. So setting the connection to metered will pause the updates.
I still use Windows for work but 10 pushed me to use Linux exclusivley for personal use. I was an MS fanboy through Windows 7. Since, I've been learning non-MS development environments and loving it. My next job will not use .NET, SQL or Azure. I'm thankful they're messing up so bad.
Out of curiosity, why not .NET? I'm not the biggest fan of Windows 10, but I'm liking the open-source direction that MS has taken with .NET Core and other tools.
Well because its just another embrace/extend/extinguish.
And its not worth the upgrade treadmill of minor version bumps for essential features. Look no further than Linux/PowerShell that requires security turned down, and has almost no features. Its a hook to get you to use Windows.
Open source isn't enough. The tricky, some times forced, telemetry in their software is unforgivable. It's been a while since I checked, maybe they addressed those concerns, but it's too late, the trust is destroyed.
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
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.
Yeah that is a pain in the ass. I don't understand why macOS updates take so long. My guess is it also updates the recovery partition as well?
It is the same with a macOS clean install though. Windows 10 takes like 4-5 minutes to do the copying files stuff on an NVMe SSD then another 2 minutes for the "setting up devices" but you can be in the post-install setup bit in under 10 minutes on a decent machine. macOS takes like 30 minutes and the drives in the MacBook Pro are stupidly fast so I just don't understand wtf it is doing.
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.
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).
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.
Years ago I followed a guide I found online [0] which involves renaming the "Reboot" scheduled task file and creating a folder with the same name in its location, so that the OS fails to re-create the task file. Haven't had an unexpected reboot since.
This technique was familiar to me from the Kindle jailbreaking scene, in which creating a directory with a certain path would cause the Kindle's auto-updater to error out when it tried to `rm` what it saw as a preexisting partially-downloaded update file (the Kindle's OS is Linux-based, so the file-delete operation fails on a directory).
Uptime is not in itself a number to chase as long as that interruption doesn't come at the cost of your time and effort. Home users don't care about uptime, they care about using their computer without forced interruptions.
And that's what MS should be focusing on: doing the updates as unobtrusively as possible.
Perhaps that’s fine for home users but I’ve lost days of test data thanks to Windows deciding that it’s a good time to update. Windows 10 is not a suitable OS for any kind of professional work IMHO.
Edit: that’s not mentioning how Microsoft’s aggressive telemetry is probably exfiltraring sensitive corporate info unintentionally.
> they care about using their computer without forced interruptions
> MS should be focusing on: doing the updates as unobtrusively as possible
How exactly did your problem happen? There are ways to manage this so it doesn't cause this kind of loss. It's not ideal that you have to use them but if you work with valuable data you should take all precautions out of principle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which if you're not careful could lead to undetectably unpatched systems - installed version is up to date, files on disk match if you check to verify, but some process that didn't get properly restarted is still using the (effectively) undetectable old version. Combine that with taking pride in triple digit uptime days and you could have something sticking around for a long time.
That's both a correct and useful answer and one that proves my point in practical terms. If you know enough to run pmap over the process space of the server to look for issues like this, you also know enough to force restarts of the affected services post-update.
I could see this being something to add to automated monitoring tools run on a schedule, but I don't know enough to estimate the viability or usefulness of actually doing so - would it end up being a rule that in 99.999% of cases would only actually match if it happened to fire as the server was in the process of shutting down?
Tooling around that already exists: if you install the needrestart package on Debian, it will check every time apt upgrades something, so that you can restart daemons and such.
You miss the whole point of the parent comment --- it's referring to the fact that the binaries can be patched in memory as well as on disk.
Renaming and deleting upon the next reboot is perfectly reasonable and gets you something similar to the POSIX behaviour (existing processes continue to hold the old version open, new processes will use the new version.)
You can do that even without the NOPs or any other special preparation beforehand --- API hooking is one example that's used all the time, and there's no shortage of code samples out there to do it.
the point of using a nop is that the patch can be done atomically. otherwise you run into race conditions if a thread's currently executing the instruction(s) you're patching.
Given that the patching mechanism can (must --- due to what gets updated sometimes) be implemented in kernel mode, it's not hard to ensure that all threads are away from the "construction zones", even a "stop the world" type scan if necessary, which is still going to be far less disruptive than rebooting. The point is that this is not an open problem, and has been solved before multiple times.
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.
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.
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 :)
Aye, I've had long-running performance analysis experiments running against SQL Server killed because the dev machine orchestrating the tests was rebooted without warning. That was some time after the normal "patch Tuesday" window. IIRC it was due to an update in Flash for Edge. A feature I don't use in any browser in a browser that I don't use (but can't uninstall or otherwise disable) caused a delay to my work. I was not best pleased.
"Windows Subsystem for Linux" amuses me. A tool for when you want Linux, but would feel lost without random reboots!
Windows updates aside I think it's a good idea to save periodically. Especially before leaving your computer unattended for longer periods. A power outage or random process crash could also kill all your work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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)
I think the variation in experiences is the variation of people with Cortana on. With Cortana on, I've never had a bad experience with app search in Windows 10. Using machines (such as work laptop) with Cortana off there are some very weird moments where search just stalls out that it shouldn't.
I think there are two trends that should help:
1) In Insider builds for the upcoming 19H1 release (round about March) they split app/local-machine search from Cortana UX again, and it's getting a lot more standalone testing because of that. (Pushing Cortana back more to the core voice search / assistant focus.)
2) Microsoft is in the early stages of the process of a big Bing "Enterprise" / "Cortana for Business" push. That may also help reduce some of the search differences between consumer uses of Windows and enterprise uses of Windows.
> I think the variation in experiences is the variation of people with Cortana on. With Cortana on, I've never had a bad experience with app search in Windows 10. Using machines (such as work laptop) with Cortana off there are some very weird moments where search just stalls out that it shouldn't.
My problems have been less with stalling out, than horribly bad guesses at what I'm looking for.
Sometimes it correctly figures out a misspelling, but most of the time it doesn't. Sometimes it won't find a multiword application name unless you type in the first few characters of the first word of the application name. Sometimes you can type in the correct name, and it just pretends the app doesn't exist at all.
Considering that MS makes a search engine and Apple does not, it's suprising how much better Spotlight is at launching apps (I used to get 95+% accurate guess rate) than the Windows Start Search thingamabob is.
I have Home edition on my home desktop, and I see updates way more than 3 times per year as well. It doesn't really bug me unless the update takes more than a few minutes.
The search is absolutely terrible. And it's inconsistent. Sometimes I can type "no" and it'll come up with Notepad++ immediately. Other times I have to get all the way to the first + before it finds it. And still other times, it can't find it at all. That goes for all programs too, not just Notepad++.
I've somewhat tried using tools like Everything [0] but never given them more than a few tries before uninstalling. Maybe I should do it again.
I started using it in the WinXP days, stopped during Win7, (never used win8), and Win10 regressed in this department so badly I've returned to using this ancient software...
> I've somewhat tried using tools like Everything [0] but never given them more than a few tries before uninstalling. Maybe I should do it again.
I've tried a bunch of stuff too, and even bought one (Listary), but from a muscle memory perspective, nothing beats hitting the Windows key with my pinky. I guess I could remap the Windows key, but I think that would have too many negative side effects.
I was on Mac as my daily driver for about a decade (but have no desire to go back), and Spotlight worked great as a launcher.
For me the updates always seem to reset and further reduce privacy settings. I don't want cortana or ads, and now I need to hack the registry to get rid of this stuff? What a joke.
If you don't like it, don't use it. I don't like Cortana or ads either, so I don't use Windows, and I don't have any of these problems with forced updates that everyone here is complaining about.
Honestly, I've been watching Windows users complain about Windows for many years now (decades?), and it's somehow both tiring and amusing. I guess humans just never learn.
Yeah, the multitudes of people experiencing problems with Windows over the years must be lying or just stupid, because you personally have nevere encountered those issues.
When did I say the people experiencing problems with Windows must be lying or stupid? I don't have these problems because I don't run Windows, plain and simple. Did you miss the line that said "so I don't use Windows"?
Yeah, I wish I could delete comments here indefinitely after submitting them. There've been several I regretted and wished I could remove after a few days.
I think it's not that you don't understand the problem, just that you haven't experienced it.
My Windows 10 machine installs updates that require reboots more than 2 or 3 times a year, but it is configured (and I believed this is the default) to install them and reboot at night, when no-one is using the computer.
So when all goes well, I hardly ever see the computer install an update or reboot because of it: normally this happens when I'm not using it. But last year it got stuck in a cycle of trying to install an update, failing, uninstalling and trying again later. Each attempt took about 15 minutes and required, if I remember correctly, two reboots: one after the attempted installation and one after uninstalling the update. It tried so many times! It seemed to want to try more when I actually needed the computer for something work-related. :)
After trying a bunch of things I found in forums (it seems like it is a very common problem), none of which solved the problem, I reinstalled Windows 10. It's back to normal, updating at night, but I know at any moment Microsoft can screw up another update.
> it got stuck in a cycle of trying to install an update, failing, uninstalling and trying again later
To me, this is one of the biggest issues with Windows Update: it's unreliability. When an update doesn't install, there's no reliable way to get it to work without shutting down services and deleting the updates folder; all technical tasks that most users don't know how to do.
I'm on insider updates and this happens occasionally on builds, but most of the time the updates apply just fine.
> the biggest issues with Windows Update: it's unreliability
I have the same experience, and i always took this for granted... but after i bought a Macbook i learned there are actually operating systems where updating is flawless.
I have two pet theories on why this subject comes up as much as it does on HN.
1. Windows Updates were a known quantity for years. Patch Tuesday and so on. Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours - it's almost as if some middle manager MBA who recently graduated said to themselves "how much technical jargon can we throw at 'em?" To what end? I'm not sure. The tin foil hat crowd (which I've been somewhat forced to join) would say that 1. dovetails into 2.
2. Increasing disrespect for the users, which many of we on HN see and hate (see rest of this paragraph), and the vast majority don't see. Privacy invasions which cannot be stopped (minus 'hacks') a la quartering of the kings solders, settings reverting themselves in willful violation of the user's express wishes, and the biggest insult of all, denial of user-control over updates, a feature that has been with Windows for decades. Update control being yanked away from the users, in addition to the telemetry and setting reverting themselves are viewed by many as Microsoft machinations aimed at turning the users into the used.
3. Many people here have company provided Windows PCs that have software on them that forces you to restart for updates far more regularly than Windows itself.
>Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours - it's almost as if some middle manager MBA who recently graduated said to themselves "how much technical jargon can we throw at 'em?"
Controls how often/whether you get feature updates. They're not applicable to home users as they only have access to CB.
Jargon is jargon - to those who know it, it's easy to remember. To those who don't? It might as well be Konami Codes.
Hard for us, who are familiar with this jargon? Not a chance, to your point. To the dad who opens IE, types Google.com into the bing bar, clicks the google.com link, then types his internet search - those words might as well be Elian script.
It's not hard. It's that I am out of control of when my PC gets to reboot. It is a small inconvenience, but it should be something I don't have to put up with at all. I've had file updates cut short over "inactive" reboots. 10+ GB downloads that I was hoping to use the following day that never finished due to a restart.
Number 2 really hits the nail on the head. I don't get annoyed when Steam updates and wants to restart. I don't get annoyed when Firefox updates and wants to restart. I don't get annoyed when I have to (rarely) restart my linux machines. Why? Because I have a fairly large degree of certainty that the updates for these are either going to be beneifial for me, or at worst won't screw me over. For Windows, which has done nothing but show disdain towards it's own users, seeing an update causes me nothing but fustration and anxiety (the same goes for Nvidia drivers too).
Also, add the fact that nearly all of these install their updates in the background, and that their restart is actually just a standard restart that will take no longer than a usual cold boot helps a lot, when compared to Microsofts "applying updates screen" where you never know if you're going to be there 5 minutes or over an hour. It's just a terrible situation every time it occurs when others have shown that it really doesn't need to be.
> I don't get annoyed when Firefox updates and wants to restart.
This was true for me until recently on my work machine I went to open a new tab and Firefox forbade it until I restarted for updates. Can do whatever I want with the other tabs, but can't make a new tab. Multiprocess blah blah, it didn't used to be this way. Every tech organization successfully wages war on its own users from time to time and will disappoint you sooner or later.
But yeah, respect for users. Many kinds of malware treat your machine with more respect than Microsoft does.
> Windows Updates were a known quantity for years. Patch Tuesday and so on. Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours
Patch Tuesday is still Patch Tuesday. New patches come out on the same Tuesday every month that it has just about always been that Microsoft implores everyone to install ASAP. (It's always been posted as "ASAP". That's not a recent change in all this.)
The big change is that Microsoft doesn't want to any longer accept "We'll get to it when we get to it" as an answer to "ASAP", and most of the alphabet soup is just variations on what and when "ASAP" is allowed to mean. (But again, the change here isn't that Patch Tuesday means "install these things ASAP", that's always been the messaging on Patch Tuesday. A lot of people just felt entitled to ignore that for as much as years in some cases.)
> But again, the change here isn't that Patch Tuesday means "install these things ASAP", that's always been the messaging on Patch Tuesday. A lot of people just felt entitled to ignore that for as much as years in some cases.
Yeah, those damned users and their feeling of entitlement towards being able to control a thing they bought. Idiots.
Don't you just hate it when your OS vendor cares about herd immunity and user/application security? Such a terrible thing for them to worry about. It's a good thing our devices are so rarely if ever networked together in 2019.~
Do updates run in sleep mode? That's my point. Scheduling updates for a time your computer can't do it is pointless and it will just eventually get in your way.
Even if they do update, if you're putting your machine in sleep mode, I assume you'd have some state you didn't want to lose. Why would want a surprise in the morning?
the problem is not the update per se. it is the content. Which completely surprises you after the reboot!
Windows always peak at some new version and then goes downhill when changes are introduced for no good reason. 95/98, then 98+IE6 all over the place (even the desktop wallpaper!). XP, then vista. 8.1, then 10...
Now, after windows 10, the downgrades are incremental!
For example, surface tablet without a keyboard. When you wake the device the touchpad keyboard was always there. After some update, you have to touch the PIN input box to get a keyboard. And sometimes it doesn't show up. You have to lock and unlock the screen and then touch the pin input again. And that is just a very minimal example. Another example is that the first updates completely removed the windows 8.1 window theme, which was perfect for touch based systems. Another one i recall, an update removed the landscape/portrait toggle button and replaced it with a "lock screen rotation" one, that doesn't work in all orientations!
The problem of course is that your laptop is asleep at night so the update happens 10 minutes after you wake it up in the morning, just as you're getting into your work. They tend to not have a lot of warning either, so people get surprised when their laptop suddenly reboots in the middle of their presentation and their slides are replaced by a "don't power off your machine" screen.
I was visiting my home town and was doing some genealogy work with my mom. When my niece and nephew came over I closed my laptop, not thinking about saving my work. The next day, when I opened up my laptop I found that it had decided to install an update overnight while asleep not connected to power. I lost 2 hours of work due to said update, because the update forced close the app I was using. I hadn't agreed to any update at that time, and back on other versions of windows I have it set inform me of updates before it does it.
For a long while, windows 10 updates would fail on another windows only computer. Any update that needed a reboot would cause a loop where windows would fail to start after update, windows would reboot, uninstall the failed update, and try to reinstall the update the next day. Even a full wipe of the system did fix the issue.
My guess is HN users are more likely to have company issued machines with fairly aggressive update policies, making this pain point all the more obvious to them.
Yeah, unless you dual boot when I get stuck for 20mins+, before Windows decides to restart and then goes to "Restoring a previous installation" (or whatever the wording is..) and then I've wasted enough time and just carry on. Que next time I need to boot into Windows and I get to do the same shit again.. Until one time it just actually completes the update.
Oh, and I've been gaming numerous times (when the toast notification is hidden so I don't see it and click it) and then bam, my PC decides to reboot itself.
The problem is everything about it is user hostile and all the settings are opaque.
Updates went from a snooze button you could put off indefinitely for 15 min or 4 hours at a time (windows 7) to a one time 15 minute delay after which your computer automatically restarts (windows 10 on release). When you're in an hour-long skype business meeting or raiding a boss with 20+ other people, suddenly being shucked offline is terrible design. And it's not even just the restart, even the download (p2p in W10) can randomly render the pc unusable. And of course the restart is delayed for the installation which takes between zero and infinity minutes because the update wasn't tested properly before it was forcefed to a quarter billion machines. Then there's the actual content where windows update trumps the users decision to delete or limit microsoft apps and installs a bunch of telemetry bullshit you don't want.
Want to get in front of these problems? Good luck because there's no way to easily disable windows update. You can stop the service but it will randomly restart whenever it wants. You can use registry hacks to make it not restart and it will still randomly restart (did so a couple days ago). You can tell windows you have a metered connection but it will randomly ignore this.
Great startup idea: a utility that constantly turns windows update off, allows me to enable it for a few hours and redisables it afterwards. I would pay $20 for that right now.
Windows is my main dev environment ever since they came out with the Ubuntu vm and shell. I'm surprised your updates are so infrequent. I have some reboot event mess with me every couple weeks. Granted I tend to roam away from my computer when I'm thinking, but it's much more common for me.
> 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!
Erm, if Windows 10 has only made you your machine reboot 3 times in a year, you're probably running an old and insecure patch version.
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.
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.
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".
Frankly, I didn't know it had one either. I took a guess at currency conversion being one calculation where the results would need to be looked up daily, googled and found the above article.
Thank god I managed to click the right button about 100 times and retain my Windows 8 installation. Mots of my friends weren't so lucky. The clicked the close window button instead of "decline" or whatever it was called and got the "free upgrade".
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!
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.
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.
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.
The need for windows update to be working to install the VS2017 redist was a super annoying move by microsoft.
It wasn't required for previous versions of visual studio.
Because windows update is non-functional for so many windows users (mostly due to piracy) we we basically forced to change to static linking to avoid the need for the redist.
Of course, after we changed to static linking we started to run into a bunch of virus scanners giving false positives with their heuristics because all viruses are statically linked.
Thank you for that info, I didn't realize it was a deliberate move by Microsoft! Luckily my Windows installation wasn't pirated; I never did figure out why the updates stopped working.
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)
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).
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.
"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."
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?
I'm not using live patches. But I can tell you, it doesn't matter if it works 100%. Because there're very few updates that force you to reboot your computer. So if there is kernel update once in a while, I'm ok with rebooting my pc. As files has been already updated in the background, it's really just a reboot. Not like in Windows, which actually start the update process as part of the boot, make your pc unusable for quite long time.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadWhen 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?
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.
There are also tools that make permanently disabling Windows update a one click affair.
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...
Using the policy editor is supported, while editing the registry is not, I'm afraid.
Even editing the registry "directly" using regedit is very easy. Much easier than finding and editing config files on Linux because everything you need to edit can always be found in the same spot in the tree to the left, no matter what version of Windows you're running.
Meanwhile, your Linux desktop will have you entering arcane CLI commands to fix things after a bad update (which happened to me just last week on both of my Manjaro workstations).
I'm not sure what you mean here. Obviously not all settings can be applied immediately, so I'm not sure how that's any different from modifying a random .conf file and not seeing the changes in real time.
> or where to look for something
google? At least all the setting are in one place and obeys some hierarchy.
Usually I'm following instructions that I found online and they tell you what to do there. I definitely don't go into Group Policy and edit things all willy-nilly.
This seems to be the case on many OSes. I was documenting my workstation setup recently and I'll share one entry here:
Also it seems like with this OS, if I don't reboot after an update or changing certain settings - things start breaking.Maybe one day, we'll have the perfect OS! But as far as I know it doesn't exist yet. :)
A bonus point: select Semi-Annual update channel to get rid of a targeted, somewhat experimental updates.
The interesting thing is, normally that would be the "best" time to do the upgrade since she would normally be at work. But instead it was the worst time and no way to stop it.
I don't see why Microsoft is so against giving user some control of the process.
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.
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.
I'd love to do all development in Linux again but dual booting was too annoying. The way you do it sounds interesting.
Modern x86's have instruction set extensions to make VMs almost free of any overhead. The only performance hit you have is for the memory you don't allocate to the VM.
Also disk I/O. Increased disk latency can kill the VM performance, and it will increase, if the virtual disk is inside a (sparse) file, inside a filesystem.
The only other machine I have with Windows is a desktop I never turn off, so it updates itself when I'm not around.
For updates, I made it mutable, applied only the updates and made it immutable again.
(Which is too bad, because I would love to be able to stop dual booting just to be able to play some games.)
As to why someone would want to run this; there is a case where dual-boot is the only alternative : the practical difficulty, if you're a developer who runs Docker -- it doesn't play well with VirtualBox. https://forums.docker.com/t/running-docker-and-virtualbox-on...
In this case, a dual-boot is a superior solution.
Not quite. That only applies to "Docker for Windows/Mac", while a developer primarily running Linux would presumably run native Docker.
More generally, the actual problem here is that there can generally only be one hypervisor running at a time, since it grabs exclusive control of some system resources. Docker itself isn't a hypervisor, but DfW/M use the native hypervisor of their respective OS (Hyper-V and Hypervisor.Framework, respectively) to run the Linux distro boot2docker (where the actual Docker Engine is ran), and neither of those like to coexist with Virtualbox.
There is also the older Docker Toolbox (for both Windows and macOS) that used Virtualbox as its backing hypervisor, and so will happily coexist with other Vbox VMs.
But all of this is about coexisting hypervisors at the same "level". Some hypervisors (such as KVM) support nested virtualization, in which case you could run any (one) other hypervisor inside a VM managed by that hypervisor. For testing purposes I have ran DfW inside KVM, and it worked fine (if a bit slow).
However, even then the GPU's PCIe slot will need to be in a separate IOMMU group (generally only the case if it is connected directly to the CPU, bypassing the chipset, usually the case for 1-2 slots per mobo at most), which I strongly doubt Thunderbolt slots would be prioritized for.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/
I can do dual boot, but then I lose my dev environment, it's valuable to be able to apply a patch, compile a new version and try it on the Windows machine.
I finally gave in and ordered a Windows desktop box for testing yesterday.
And its not worth the upgrade treadmill of minor version bumps for essential features. Look no further than Linux/PowerShell that requires security turned down, and has almost no features. Its a hook to get you to use Windows.
Hard pass.
They take more time and "2 minutes remaining" is just a lie. More likely it is 20 - 60 minutes.
It is the same with a macOS clean install though. Windows 10 takes like 4-5 minutes to do the copying files stuff on an NVMe SSD then another 2 minutes for the "setting up devices" but you can be in the post-install setup bit in under 10 minutes on a decent machine. macOS takes like 30 minutes and the drives in the MacBook Pro are stupidly fast so I just don't understand wtf it is doing.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://github.com/Maimer/update-active-hours
This technique was familiar to me from the Kindle jailbreaking scene, in which creating a directory with a certain path would cause the Kindle's auto-updater to error out when it tried to `rm` what it saw as a preexisting partially-downloaded update file (the Kindle's OS is Linux-based, so the file-delete operation fails on a directory).
[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-prevent-windows-10-reboot... (including the "Additional Steps")
Shift-shutdown didn't prevent this either.
Unexpected updates was a primary reason I am now using Linux full time (rather than part time as previously).
And that's what MS should be focusing on: doing the updates as unobtrusively as possible.
Edit: that’s not mentioning how Microsoft’s aggressive telemetry is probably exfiltraring sensitive corporate info unintentionally.
> they care about using their computer without forced interruptions
> MS should be focusing on: doing the updates as unobtrusively as possible
How exactly did your problem happen? There are ways to manage this so it doesn't cause this kind of loss. It's not ideal that you have to use them but if you work with valuable data you should take all precautions out of principle.
I now know there are (hacky, unsupported) ways around it. But on principle, I should not have to fight my OS for control of the computer.
I had to wonder why given that is available, why reboots on updates are required at all.
I'd expect the majority code covered by an update to be in shared libraries.
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.
Which if you're not careful could lead to undetectably unpatched systems - installed version is up to date, files on disk match if you check to verify, but some process that didn't get properly restarted is still using the (effectively) undetectable old version. Combine that with taking pride in triple digit uptime days and you could have something sticking around for a long time.
I could see this being something to add to automated monitoring tools run on a schedule, but I don't know enough to estimate the viability or usefulness of actually doing so - would it end up being a rule that in 99.999% of cases would only actually match if it happened to fire as the server was in the process of shutting down?
Renaming and deleting upon the next reboot is perfectly reasonable and gets you something similar to the POSIX behaviour (existing processes continue to hold the old version open, new processes will use the new version.)
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.
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.
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 :)
"Windows Subsystem for Linux" amuses me. A tool for when you want Linux, but would feel lost without random reboots!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I think the variation in experiences is the variation of people with Cortana on. With Cortana on, I've never had a bad experience with app search in Windows 10. Using machines (such as work laptop) with Cortana off there are some very weird moments where search just stalls out that it shouldn't.
I think there are two trends that should help:
1) In Insider builds for the upcoming 19H1 release (round about March) they split app/local-machine search from Cortana UX again, and it's getting a lot more standalone testing because of that. (Pushing Cortana back more to the core voice search / assistant focus.)
2) Microsoft is in the early stages of the process of a big Bing "Enterprise" / "Cortana for Business" push. That may also help reduce some of the search differences between consumer uses of Windows and enterprise uses of Windows.
My problems have been less with stalling out, than horribly bad guesses at what I'm looking for.
Sometimes it correctly figures out a misspelling, but most of the time it doesn't. Sometimes it won't find a multiword application name unless you type in the first few characters of the first word of the application name. Sometimes you can type in the correct name, and it just pretends the app doesn't exist at all.
Considering that MS makes a search engine and Apple does not, it's suprising how much better Spotlight is at launching apps (I used to get 95+% accurate guess rate) than the Windows Start Search thingamabob is.
The search is absolutely terrible. And it's inconsistent. Sometimes I can type "no" and it'll come up with Notepad++ immediately. Other times I have to get all the way to the first + before it finds it. And still other times, it can't find it at all. That goes for all programs too, not just Notepad++.
I've somewhat tried using tools like Everything [0] but never given them more than a few tries before uninstalling. Maybe I should do it again.
[0] https://www.voidtools.com/
I started using it in the WinXP days, stopped during Win7, (never used win8), and Win10 regressed in this department so badly I've returned to using this ancient software...
[0] https://www.launchy.net/
http://keypirinha.com/
I've tried a bunch of stuff too, and even bought one (Listary), but from a muscle memory perspective, nothing beats hitting the Windows key with my pinky. I guess I could remap the Windows key, but I think that would have too many negative side effects.
I was on Mac as my daily driver for about a decade (but have no desire to go back), and Spotlight worked great as a launcher.
Honestly, I've been watching Windows users complain about Windows for many years now (decades?), and it's somehow both tiring and amusing. I guess humans just never learn.
That's got to be it!
My Windows 10 machine installs updates that require reboots more than 2 or 3 times a year, but it is configured (and I believed this is the default) to install them and reboot at night, when no-one is using the computer.
So when all goes well, I hardly ever see the computer install an update or reboot because of it: normally this happens when I'm not using it. But last year it got stuck in a cycle of trying to install an update, failing, uninstalling and trying again later. Each attempt took about 15 minutes and required, if I remember correctly, two reboots: one after the attempted installation and one after uninstalling the update. It tried so many times! It seemed to want to try more when I actually needed the computer for something work-related. :)
After trying a bunch of things I found in forums (it seems like it is a very common problem), none of which solved the problem, I reinstalled Windows 10. It's back to normal, updating at night, but I know at any moment Microsoft can screw up another update.
To me, this is one of the biggest issues with Windows Update: it's unreliability. When an update doesn't install, there's no reliable way to get it to work without shutting down services and deleting the updates folder; all technical tasks that most users don't know how to do.
I'm on insider updates and this happens occasionally on builds, but most of the time the updates apply just fine.
I have the same experience, and i always took this for granted... but after i bought a Macbook i learned there are actually operating systems where updating is flawless.
Windows updates are such a huge mess.
1. Windows Updates were a known quantity for years. Patch Tuesday and so on. Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours - it's almost as if some middle manager MBA who recently graduated said to themselves "how much technical jargon can we throw at 'em?" To what end? I'm not sure. The tin foil hat crowd (which I've been somewhat forced to join) would say that 1. dovetails into 2.
2. Increasing disrespect for the users, which many of we on HN see and hate (see rest of this paragraph), and the vast majority don't see. Privacy invasions which cannot be stopped (minus 'hacks') a la quartering of the kings solders, settings reverting themselves in willful violation of the user's express wishes, and the biggest insult of all, denial of user-control over updates, a feature that has been with Windows for decades. Update control being yanked away from the users, in addition to the telemetry and setting reverting themselves are viewed by many as Microsoft machinations aimed at turning the users into the used.
Controls how often/whether you get feature updates. They're not applicable to home users as they only have access to CB.
>Active Hours
Controls when your computer will auto-reboot
what's so confusing about this again?
Hard for us, who are familiar with this jargon? Not a chance, to your point. To the dad who opens IE, types Google.com into the bing bar, clicks the google.com link, then types his internet search - those words might as well be Elian script.
>what's so hard about this?
It's not hard. It's that I am out of control of when my PC gets to reboot. It is a small inconvenience, but it should be something I don't have to put up with at all. I've had file updates cut short over "inactive" reboots. 10+ GB downloads that I was hoping to use the following day that never finished due to a restart.
Also, add the fact that nearly all of these install their updates in the background, and that their restart is actually just a standard restart that will take no longer than a usual cold boot helps a lot, when compared to Microsofts "applying updates screen" where you never know if you're going to be there 5 minutes or over an hour. It's just a terrible situation every time it occurs when others have shown that it really doesn't need to be.
This was true for me until recently on my work machine I went to open a new tab and Firefox forbade it until I restarted for updates. Can do whatever I want with the other tabs, but can't make a new tab. Multiprocess blah blah, it didn't used to be this way. Every tech organization successfully wages war on its own users from time to time and will disappoint you sooner or later.
But yeah, respect for users. Many kinds of malware treat your machine with more respect than Microsoft does.
Patch Tuesday is still Patch Tuesday. New patches come out on the same Tuesday every month that it has just about always been that Microsoft implores everyone to install ASAP. (It's always been posted as "ASAP". That's not a recent change in all this.)
The big change is that Microsoft doesn't want to any longer accept "We'll get to it when we get to it" as an answer to "ASAP", and most of the alphabet soup is just variations on what and when "ASAP" is allowed to mean. (But again, the change here isn't that Patch Tuesday means "install these things ASAP", that's always been the messaging on Patch Tuesday. A lot of people just felt entitled to ignore that for as much as years in some cases.)
Yeah, those damned users and their feeling of entitlement towards being able to control a thing they bought. Idiots.
Almost everyone I know does do that.
Even if they do update, if you're putting your machine in sleep mode, I assume you'd have some state you didn't want to lose. Why would want a surprise in the morning?
Windows always peak at some new version and then goes downhill when changes are introduced for no good reason. 95/98, then 98+IE6 all over the place (even the desktop wallpaper!). XP, then vista. 8.1, then 10...
Now, after windows 10, the downgrades are incremental!
For example, surface tablet without a keyboard. When you wake the device the touchpad keyboard was always there. After some update, you have to touch the PIN input box to get a keyboard. And sometimes it doesn't show up. You have to lock and unlock the screen and then touch the pin input again. And that is just a very minimal example. Another example is that the first updates completely removed the windows 8.1 window theme, which was perfect for touch based systems. Another one i recall, an update removed the landscape/portrait toggle button and replaced it with a "lock screen rotation" one, that doesn't work in all orientations!
I was visiting my home town and was doing some genealogy work with my mom. When my niece and nephew came over I closed my laptop, not thinking about saving my work. The next day, when I opened up my laptop I found that it had decided to install an update overnight while asleep not connected to power. I lost 2 hours of work due to said update, because the update forced close the app I was using. I hadn't agreed to any update at that time, and back on other versions of windows I have it set inform me of updates before it does it.
For a long while, windows 10 updates would fail on another windows only computer. Any update that needed a reboot would cause a loop where windows would fail to start after update, windows would reboot, uninstall the failed update, and try to reinstall the update the next day. Even a full wipe of the system did fix the issue.
Oh, and I've been gaming numerous times (when the toast notification is hidden so I don't see it and click it) and then bam, my PC decides to reboot itself.
Updates went from a snooze button you could put off indefinitely for 15 min or 4 hours at a time (windows 7) to a one time 15 minute delay after which your computer automatically restarts (windows 10 on release). When you're in an hour-long skype business meeting or raiding a boss with 20+ other people, suddenly being shucked offline is terrible design. And it's not even just the restart, even the download (p2p in W10) can randomly render the pc unusable. And of course the restart is delayed for the installation which takes between zero and infinity minutes because the update wasn't tested properly before it was forcefed to a quarter billion machines. Then there's the actual content where windows update trumps the users decision to delete or limit microsoft apps and installs a bunch of telemetry bullshit you don't want.
Want to get in front of these problems? Good luck because there's no way to easily disable windows update. You can stop the service but it will randomly restart whenever it wants. You can use registry hacks to make it not restart and it will still randomly restart (did so a couple days ago). You can tell windows you have a metered connection but it will randomly ignore this.
Great startup idea: a utility that constantly turns windows update off, allows me to enable it for a few hours and redisables it afterwards. I would pay $20 for that right now.
Erm, if Windows 10 has only made you your machine reboot 3 times in a year, you're probably running an old and insecure patch version.
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.
Its the feature updates that are the problem. And you literally can't defer those on Home.
About as much as websites that autoplay videos.
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".
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.
What you have to do is use group policy to manage your firewall (secpol.msc) and tell it to ignore local firewall rules.
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!
Decided to upgrade to SSD at the same time since prices have dropped so drastically.
It wasn't required for previous versions of visual studio.
Because windows update is non-functional for so many windows users (mostly due to piracy) we we basically forced to change to static linking to avoid the need for the redist.
Of course, after we changed to static linking we started to run into a bunch of virus scanners giving false positives with their heuristics because all viruses are statically linked.
This will block all updates. If you want you can get manually download updates from Microsoft: 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).
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.
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."
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028458/windows-met...
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-witho...
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.
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.