Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

It's not the first time this has happened to me and it won't be the last. I pulled a laptop that I hadn't used for six months out of a drawer, then waited through three hours and four rounds of reboots for it to update Windows 11 completely. It probably didn't help that the laptop in question, a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, was …

[Ken G]

"If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

Then they could, but it would be painful and probably not profitable. It's also possible they just don't want to.

[alain williams]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

Ask who feels the pain: Microsoft or the user ?

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

You would think...

...that a company which has been in the OS business for nigh on 40 years, would have "gotten it right" well before now.

Apparently, it takes longer for some companies.

[hedgie]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

From their business perspective, they've "gotten it right". They have a gargantuan market share, and most home and business users will take any garbage they spew out as a result. The quality of the product doesn't matter if they've grabbed their users by the short and curlies. It'd probably take a lot more twisting before companies start looking at Linux on their desktops, and thanks to Orifice, if they switch platforms they're more likely to be getting Macs and *still* paying M$ for a copy of Office.

[short]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

I think the plan is to make locally hos(t)ed versions so godawfully bad that we just rent one on Azure when we need to do something that requires it.

Or, of course, there is no plan, and this is honestly the best they can do.

I fired up my spare windows laptop at the weekend after a six month break, and it was very much as described. How much CPU time can it possibly take to check for compatibility, and whatever else was pinned at the top of task manager inbetween reboots?

[mIVQU#~(p,]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

The Azure hosted ones are really bad too.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

Of course they are really bad, they are running Windows !

[intrigid]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

No they couldn't. All of the talent from the Windows glory days have long since retired, been forced out, or put into subservient roles in the company.

[FIA]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

..or just works on XBOX these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is what I find most frightening.

From a very low starting point, they have got worse, which does not bode well for the future.

And probably explains why numpty AI appears to be intelligent.

It's like our local "intelligent traffic lights". They are only intelligent when compared to the actual people who designed and decided to implement the system.

14 years later they still don't work properly.

At least the driverless cars will clear the streets of "jaywalkers".

[Omnipresent]

Re: "If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS"

They are criminals engaging in high crimes against humanity, and who's going to stop them? You? lol. I have no idea why people STILL, to this day, STILL expect some "good", or right outcome from these people?! Blows my mind. It doesn't exist people, it never existed.

They have set the example. Every criminal who ever dreamt of "taking over the world" has the freedom and power to chase those human eradicating aspirations "to the moon" with no consequences. There is no law (unless you pay for it). We live in a lawless, corrupt society controlled by crime lords now. All because pootin gave them the ok. The tech bros are pootin bitch boys too. All of these "macho" very fem boys chasing money and infamy will be paid in full in the next life. Satan is going on a resort building spree (with a loan from frump of course) to make room for the new followers. The EVIL knows no end, nor can it be stopped, because you are being controlled and manipulated into NOT PUTTING IT DOWN. Every time you touch a phone or laptop, you are being enticed into the cult. You are touching evil, until you drink the kool aid.

[blu3b3rry]

This and more

The other part I can't wrap my head around is why the hell the update service swallows so much in terms of system resources.

If I update one of my tinkering computers that has been sat powered off for a few weeks, it happily runs in the background and lets me get on with whatever else I want to do without consuming both CPU cores and a good chunk of RAM. This is even possible on my elderly Core2Duo laptop.

Run W11's updater on the 2022-ish Dell laptop I have for work. Core i7 32GB ram, so a pretty powerful machine, yet the CPU hits 100% usage, with 2-3GB RAM getting swallowed for good measure. Not exactly what you want for a background process.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: This and more

Damnit, that'll teach me to post before caffiene kicks in. That should have said "Elderly Core2Duo laptop running Ubuntu".

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: This and more

That's OK. Without knowing the exact distro I think we could have worked out either it was that or an old version of Windows that doesn't get updates any more.

[Doctor Syntax]

PS

"an old version of Windows that doesn't get updates any more"

AKA Stable

[John Robson]

Re: PS

Dead is stable...

[The Travelling Dangleberries]

Re: This and more

We have a lot of Linux devices at home including three early Intel macbooks with Core2Duo CPUs running LinuxMint from SSDs.

If I am downloading and installing updates, using a browser at the same time then it will update without becoming unresponsive. The fan might start hissing but that is to be expected. The rate limiting factor in the process, given that the SSDs are quite quick is our slow 4G internet connection.

I only get to see Windows 11 on my PIC's work laptop supplied by their employer. Then only occasionally, fortunately.

My main concern with the Windows 11 laptop is that, looking at my pihole logs it has gone from trying to phone home to the mothership once every 4-6 seconds to trying to phone home almost every second. That one laptop, when it is on accounts for over 25% of daily pihole domain block events.

If Windows 11 didn't need to try to send data back to MS so often then maybe it would run and update a little faster.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: This and more

I withdrew a comment asking if anyone had done exactly that, and that is zero surprise that they're phoning home. That's where the money is, data exfiltration.

[FIA]

Re: This and more

Run W11's updater on the 2022-ish Dell laptop I have for work. Core i7 32GB ram, so a pretty powerful machine, yet the CPU hits 100% usage, with 2-3GB RAM getting swallowed for good measure. Not exactly what you want for a background process.

Does your works laptop have some kind of IDS or virus killer installed? A process that touches a lot of system files probably gets watched a lot.

I find the difference between my home Windows install and my work one is night and day because of this kind of software.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: This and more

It's a stock Windows 11 Pro image, no IDS or anti-virus software installed beyond Windows Defender.

I've watched Task Manager out of curiosity and could see it was mostly the update service swallowing resources.

[gaston]

Re: This and more

There is also an incredible amount of disk activity. I have and old Dell Latitude running Windows 10 and it runs on a rotating internal drive. Updates take more than twice as long as on laptops with a SSD. I’ve considered moving it to an old SSD just to be rid of these hassles.

a reason I keep it around is to access various legacy media. I have and old Zip drive, a floppy drive, and a CD rom that I can swap into a bay in case i “rediscover” old media.

Microsoft maybe the worst culprit but Dell update also takes a long time to scan. However Dell does sort its updates to the latest version and allows multiple driver downloads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This and more

Windows can use MSU and MSP files that contains only deltas - they are smaller but they do require far more I/O to be installed.

Moreover they can trigger a system restore point to be created - and that's additional I/O.

[Sudosu]

Re: This and more

Grabbing all of your private data to feed Copilot takes a long time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This and more

Windows has been hard disk unfreindly for years and keeps getting worse. A recent major windows 11 update ran the hard disk in one latptop at 100% for about 20 hours as it downloaded and installed. I will be moving to SSD exactly for that reason (when I can work out a reliable way to do it). But I hate to think of the wear on the drive from updates reagardless of it being HDD or SSD..

Even a Windows 10 PCwith a hard disk that is used several times a week becomes unusable for a few hours nearly every week due to updates.

[david 12]

Re: This and more

FWIW, that 100% is the update process examining your computer to see what is installed, what is running, what kind of hardware you have etc, as part of the process of trying to ensure that a chunk of the millions of all-slightly-different-from-each-other don't fail the update in an un-recoverable state.

As we know, even out-of-the-box laptops with the same model number update differently, and once users get involved the situation expands explosively.

[Lee D]

Windows Update

Fun fact:

Bought a Framework laptop for Christmas. Went back to Linux. Because I did not see a path from Windows 10 and I've grown increasingly frustrated even with that.

While I was doing this, I had my old (up-to-date) Windows 10 machine sitting on one side, and my shiny new Framework on the other.

And for 2 days, I didn't need to touch the Windows machine at all. I was too busy having fun and trying out games on the Framework (the new ones have a RTX 5070 in them, and Steam Proton is amazing).

Anyway, there was a file on my old Windows NVMe that I needed, and it wasn't worth dismantling the old laptop to get at its two NVMe's, so I thought I'd just turn it on and grab them quickly.

Without prompting, Windows Update process on boot. Spinning circles. Okay, fine. Well... I'll do something to occupy myself.

It was at this point that I realised that the reason I was having occasional problems with the Framework was that I'd installed Ubuntu 24 LTS instead of 25, and I was reading their pages and it clearly said you needed 25 because of a particular kernel that had the drivers that would stop the problems I was having (and they were right). Dammit. Look back at the Windows machine... still churning. Oh, sod it, I'll just start on that.

So I did a dist-upgrade to 25 (which involved looking things up, like the config file changes to go from LTS to normal distro, the commands to do so, the download of a full distro upgrade, etc.). It did it. I was still browsing and gaming while it did it all, I hadn't needed to do a thing, I barely noticed it was running. Look over to the Windows machine... STILL churning (and that had 64GB and NVMe, so I don't know WHAT it was doing). Okay, sod it. Yes, Linux, you can reboot to start the new kernel. Linux rebooted. Literally seconds. Logged back in. A full Ubuntu 25 machine. Tested out some applications and games. Problems "fixed" (really just me being a dolt and trying to get Linux on it ASAP and not realising I needed 25). Windows? Still churning.

In the space of a few minutes I'd upgraded the entire OS and every application on Ubuntu, and was inconvenienced to the tune of one reboot, under 30 seconds, at my option whenever it was convenient. Meanwhile, Windows was in a 45-minute long update cycle that I had no warning of or control over, and that was JUST the OS. And it wasn't "upgrade to 11"... it was just a normal monthly set of Windows 10 updates that had released in the TWO DAYS since I'd turned it off. I still literally managed to get in a full game of Counterstrike (about 20 minutes) on the new laptop before the old one then rebooted twice and finally let me log in and get the files I'd been needing. And then I turned if off again immediately.

The next day, I removed the NVMe's from the old laptop and copied/installed them into the new one and juggled all the partitions around between drives. No way I was going to subject myself to that again, I'll just mount the drive directly from now on if I need a file.

It was just... such a perfect illustration of Microsoft and Linux's attitude towards users, towards updates, towards code efficiency, towards consent, etc. that I found it quite amusing. And that it happened AS I was obsoleting Windows in my home to become entirely Linux again.

[Yes Me]

Re: Windows Update

I'm an unconditional fan of InControl. Seemed to calm down Windows Update on Windows 10 very nicely, and since I switched to a Windows 11 machine for various reasons, it has done the same. Security updates still come through, but not pointless feature updates.

[beardman]

FreeBSD FTW!

No background processes for updates (unlike Linux these days). Update takes exactly the time to download files and write them onto the disk, so it's internet link speed and disk speed limits only. Reboot in seconds and forget about it until next convenient time when I decide to run update again.

Daemon icon, because *BSD.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Re: FreeBSD FTW!

This is an example of overcomplication which affects Linux very badly.

Somebody probably looked at a UNIX programming book and said to themselves: I want to write a daemon. Now I have a tool, all it needs is something to do. Let me think of something...

A cron job would work better. It is more predictable, it doesn't consume resources when it is not running, etc. It's not more 'noise' in `top`.

[keithzg]

Re: FreeBSD FTW!

That's also the experience if you use for example Debian in most default installs, and trivial to set even if otherwise; not gonna yuck your yum, but you can also have the simple "it updates simply when I tell it to" setup on Linux in the year 2026 just fine. Though I do tend to install the `unattended-upgrades` package and let it auto-install security updates at least personally.

[Craig 2]

It's the same for Edge, if you don't use it for a month and then fire it up to check something, you have to go through the Microsoft nagging bullshit every time.

and... You have to read carefully what you're clicking: "Don't untick the box if you do not don't not want to not set as default"

[DJV]

"then fire it up to check something"

^^^ That's the stage I ALWAYS avoid for my own sanity.

[Joe W]

Isee your "edge"

and raise you a "discord"

Every bloody time - I only use it to connect to a mate's server for pen-and-paper rpgs (ok, we use Maptool as well), so every time we run a session discords downloads a couple of 100 MB. I install it and then it bloody starts with checking for and installing updates. Conan's Codpiece, didn't I just download the latest version?

[David 132]

Re: Isee your "edge"

Much as it pains me to criticize my favourite browser, I must admit that Firefox's update process irks me. If I have to update a machine that hasn't been used in a while, FF always seems to update via intermediate versions - version 96 (numbers picked at random) will update to version 114, which will update when it restarts to version 123, which will then update to version 140...

I sort of understand the technical reasons for doing it this way, but it usually makes me think "why did I click Help->Update, when it would have been much faster to just go to the Firefox site and directly download the latest installer..."

[RichardBarrell]

Re: Isee your "edge"

Since you are using it infrequently, you might have a better experience using the web version of Discord? Go to https://discord.com and hit "Open Discord in your browser", or go to https://discord.com/app This way you don't get the huge updates because the web version just uses your browser. As opposed to the app version which bundles its own copy of Chromium, which is where the >100MB updates come from.

[Dave K]

It's a pain in the backside. I have a laptop which I use when travelling. Sometimes (depending on required company events), it might not get powered up for 2-3 months at a time. Then when I do power it up, it always insists on running like a pig for ages, taking 15 minutes to shut down due to the application of updates etc.

I have to admit that I ended up installing "Windows Update Blocker" as it gives me an easy way to enable/disable updates, plus an easy way to see the current status of the Windows Update service. It's not ideal, but it at least stops the thing from trying to update when I'm trying to shut the laptop down in order to board a flight, or any of the other infuriating times when Windows decides to spend ages updating at a deeply inconvenient time.

I then typically try and remember to power it up at home every now and then, enable updates and let it catch up. But even then (prior to installing the blocker tool), it had a habit at times of thinking it's all up-to-date, only to discover a nice fat update that needs to be installed the moment I'm in a hotel room or airport with crappy slow Wifi or something.

[Paul Crawford]

We are mostly using Linux so can laugh here, but we have a Win10 laptop for some jobs that need Windows natively (configuring tool for some hardware, etc). It is not so bad as the other tales above but still has notable outages, but that is due to us setting it to a specific Win10 build to prevent it being pushed to win11 without our consent.

[sabroni]

Windows Update Blocker

I have my windows pcs set to show me that updates are available but to not install them until I let it. I never find updates running when I've not told it to. When I go to power off I get extra options in the list to allow me to install the updates if I want. When I boot the PC it might flash up a message to say updates are available but it NEVER tries to install them without my consent.

So what does "Windows Update Blocker" do? Because it sounds like your problem is you don't know how to configure Windows Update.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows Update Blocker

Windows Home's update doesn't allow to not install updates, only pause them for a week.

To do more requires registry tinkering :

https://www.easytechguides.com/defer-windows-updates/

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows of any version since 3.1 should never be raw-dogging the network. Put it behind a proxy and only let specific applications through.

In essence, if Windows update can access the Microsoft server, you have failed. Updates should be applied deterministically offline and responsibly.

(This is basically the same trivial advice as "don't log in as administrator for day to day work")

[Andy Non]

Windows circles of hell

I left Windows 11 on my new computer as a dual-boot option. I haven't actively used Windows for more than a decade, using Linux Mint instead. However, for the last few months Zoom has been problematic on Linux, taking 100% CPU and the graphics slow and stuttering, so I've started booting into Win 11 for Zoom which works fine. But my god, the Windows updates! Before booting into Windows I always do a backup of my Linux files, I got bitten once by a Windows update years ago which trashed the dual boot and took over the entire computer. It won't get me like that again. I leave Windows to update overnight every few weeks and typically the following morning it is sitting there waiting for me to enter the Motherboard level password. Then it requires several cycles of spinning circles, updating your computer, don't turn it off, shutdown, motherboard password, reboot etc. Windows update is such a pain compared to Linux updates. All because Zoom has become a bloated sack of rocks on Linux.

[alain williams]

Re: Windows circles of hell

All because Zoom has become a bloated sack of rocks on Linux.

Try using https://meet.jit.si/ it works well on all operating systems that we use, PC as well as 'phones. You can use its own app or via a browser.

Open source, you can run it on your own servers but do not need to.

[Andy Non]

Re: Windows circles of hell

Unfortunately I'm not the host / admin, so have to go with what the rest of the group uses.

[keithzg]

Re: Windows circles of hell

Have you tried just using Zoom in your browser? I luckily don't have to use Zoom for any reason these days, but a few years back I remember that sometimes being a much less troubled experience than the "native" app.

[Andy Non]

Re: Windows circles of hell

Yes, I used to do that, however Zoom in their wisdom changed the browser interface so you could only get "speaker view" and not "group view (all participants)". This was pretty crap as you never knew who was in the meeting unless they spoke. Zoom has reached the enshitification stage.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Windows circles of hell

Zoom was always shitty, it just happened to be in the right place at the right time during the pandemic to get the adoption it needed to be the de-facto tool. If Skype hadn't been vacuumed up by Microsoft, that would probably be the standard video-calling app now instead.

[Albert Coates]

Re: Windows circles of hell

"If Skype hadn't been vacuumed up by Microsoft..."

I used to hack around with various of bits of code for my own enjoyment, and every time I opened up a hex debugger, Skype running in the background would highlight random strings of numbers it thought were phone numbers, and invite me to dial them.

[Bill Gray]

Re: Windows circles of hell

However, for the last few months Zoom has been problematic on Linux

Interesting you say that. I've not had any problems. But I've been running on four or eight-core systems, and it does use two or three cores, which seems rather excessive to me. And I'm running Xubuntu 22.04 and most likely have a different graphics card from you. So it's to be expected that our mileage would vary.

When I read in The Fine Article that the author's temple had a Windows machine used solely for Zoom®, I had the thought (expressed ad nauseam in these fora, I realize) "just install Linux". Your ideal case for so doing is one where you aren't doing anything Windows-specific anyway. In this case, with the laptop being essentially an appliance to run Zoom, I'd install a minimal distro (Lubuntu, maybe) and see what happens. But there'd be some risk they'd run into the same problem you did.

[Sudosu]

Re: Windows circles of hell

Yeah I took the mostly full plunge last September when I switched my main gaming rig to Bazzite and left Win 10 (I refuesed to upgrade) on a second partition.

I kind of dread the day I have to boot back into Windows...and yes I was bit by that dual boot "bug" on another machine when that patch came out.

[Dan 55]

Wintendo

I had a NUC under the TV used as a console for playing games. It didn't get much use so when it did get powered on it spent more time updating than playing games. I say had because due to Intel quality engineering it just died one day never to return.

It would be the perfect excuse to replace it with a Steam Machine which like a Steam Deck would update quickly, painlessly, and usually without the need for rebooting... oh, now the global economy is shot to shit and they can't launch it.

[Paul Crawford]

"Perhaps I’ll recommend a Chromebook the next time it’s due for a refresh"

Your least-worst affordable option. At one time I would have only suggested Chromebooks for the technically inept who don't value privacy, but now with MS raping your consent in oh so many ways I no longer see Google as any worse than MS.

Few people really need a traditional OS with all of its capabilities, so Chromebooks are fine, or an iPad is probably as good if not better for video calls, etc, if they don't really type very much.

[Chloe Cresswell]

new machines

The worse thing I find for updates on a new machine it letting it do it.

It will download update, reboot, download updates, reboot.. and eventually find there's a new version of windows 11.

As we're always using pro or higher and can jump parts of the setup annoyance, I've taken to getting it to the desktop asap, then pulling the update assistant (which then needs the windows 11 compatibility checker to check the machine running windows 11 can run windows 11, another MS classic there!) and jumping it to the current release before letting updates run.

It's a pain in the bum that MS is trying to make harder to do.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: new machines

Well just think of poor Satty and his portfolio! You're selfishly thinking of youself and not at all considering how expensive you're making it! Just use your PC like a dumb terminal and use his servers for your OS like a good boy, so he doesn't have to keep paying extra to steal your data, you thief!

[Dwarf]

Win7

A couple of weeks ago, I had to do a fresh install of Windows 7 to use a legacy app that doesn’t run on Win10 or Win11

It took several hours to install 165 different patches and updates.

But, once installed, a bit oh history could run and I could get the job done.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a Macbook which only gets used occasionally, and the same applies to that - and the updates are often much larger than the Microsoft ones.

This isn't a Windows-only issue.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is absolutely 100% not the case - they are not the same thing at all. MacOS will download the update in the background silently and then prompt you a couple of times to reboot to finish the install - the reboot takes slightly longer than normal.

I'm not going to re-document what's in the article - but people can be faffing around with Windows for hours, or even days, to get it fully updated, with updates coming in waves - you finish one set of updates, reboot, just to be met by another set. And lets not even start on the issues of updates being rolled back, or updates for updates for updates (and so on and so on). The whole system is a complete mess.

No other operating system is as bad as Windows for updates. Not Linux, not MacOS, not iOS, not Chrome OS, not Android, not BSD. None of them have the same issues.

And the worst thing? Whilst update systems have slowly improved on every other modern OS they've gradually got worse and worse on Microsoft. It was literally more reliable to install a Service Pack 30 years ago than it is to do a Windows feature update now.

[Dan 55]

The problem with Android is you often don't get updates.

[Roland6]

Not had that problem (getting updates), just have the problem of vendors not releasing updates for my phone to get…

/pedantic

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is absolutely 100% not the case - they are not the same thing at all. MacOS will download the update in the background silently and then prompt you a couple of times to reboot to finish the install - the reboot takes slightly longer than normal."

Sounds like I've offended the Mac faithful by pointing out the reality!

Windows will also download and install in the background, and then request a reboot. It's pretty unusual for it to need multiple reboots, and normally only if it's really, really out of date and an annual feature update has appeared.

If you want the device up to date before using it, the Mac might well actually take longer as the downloads tend to be larger.

This is all from actual experience - not ideology!

Android can be worse than either Windows or Macos as it doesn't do cumulative updates so it can require rebooting quite a few times as it works through all the available updates in sequence.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the key point - you update MacOS, or Linux, or Android, and it triggers an update that goes from version X.XX.01 to version X.XX.02 (or whatever). Contained within that update will be things unique to your environment and hardware, but it's generally presented to the user as a single OS version update.

Microsoft doesn't do that. Every Windows patch issue is stored as, and referenced against, a Knowledge Base number - let's use KB1234567890 as an example. This KB will address a specific problem with a specific piece of software. Easy right? Not in Microsoft-land, because KB1234567890 will have patches 1, 2 and 3. These then get stored up in a "KB1234567890 cumulative update" - but wait, now there's patches 4 and 5. Now you have "KB123456789 update Roll-up". You can see where this is going can't you? KB1234567890 Roll-up 2, and 3, and 4". Before we know it, 1234567890 has 11 different patch revisions, never ending Roll-up packs, and an ever increasing cumulative patch.

And they released 200 of these for your OS last month. And 30 of these for Edge today. And another 97 for Office last week. And ......

All individual updates. Individual patches. Individual files. All tiered. Some applying instantly. Some needing to be applied before another can be applied. Some requiring reboots. And yada-yada-yada round and round we go.

They may present this to you as a single rolled up patch-Tuesday release these days, but this hellscape is still going on in the background.

Meanwhile, MacOS/Nix/Android jumps from version 26.4 to 26.4.1.

You don't see the difference or why one would be preferable over the other?

Let's frame this another way: I can directly compare the version (and patch status) of MY MacOS (etc) device with yours, right now, by comparing version numbers. Can we do that Windows beyond telling me it's version 24h2?

(p.s. we're all speaking from experience - we're all IT professionals here, some of us managing huge fleets of mixed environments)

[doublelayer]

That's a very different point, and I can mostly agree with you, although you do have Windows build numbers if you want a very specific way to confirm whether we're on the same Windows part of this. For driver updates that come from others even though Microsoft is distributing those, they aren't as easy to compare but that's to be expected when the different machines you're comparing will need different sets unless they're the same model.

But nothing in the original comment said otherwise. That was a discussion of the time it needs to install updates and the difficulty involved if you haven't used a machine for a while. In both cases, they end up needing to download a lot of data to update, and my anecdotal experience is similar in that Mac OS updates tend to be larger files. That's not a problem for me with my relatively fast connection, but the last time I turned on my old Mac and downloaded a minor Mac OS update, it was 20 GB so not so enjoyable with a slow connection. They both need to reboot, with Windows generally needing to do this more times and Mac OS generally needing only one, but not a short one. Neither is pleasant, but it makes it hard to sell one of those as the uniquely bad option.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not even mention that the KB patch is for EVERY version of windows.

[WolfFan]

Err… when I have to update Apple stuff (and I have a lot of Apple stuff at home and the office) I just let the update process download in the background. Once the download is complete, there’s a little red badge on System Preferences/Settings/whatever, telling me that the update is ready. I can tell the system to apply the update when I want to. Note that because the update is downloaded in the background while I’m doing something else, it literally doesn’t matter how big it is; it’s an issue only if there’s a shortage of storage on the target system, and the installer will put up a dialog box requesting permission to temporarily remove some applications, which will be automatically restored when the update is done. And if storage is that short, there are other things that need fixing. I have had the little red badge on System Prefs/Settings for over a month on occasion. And when I finally tell the system to update, the procedure takes a few minutes and a maximum of one reboot.

Ubuntu also behaves well. Updates are just not a big deal.

Meanwhile, over on Windows…

[Anonymous Coward]

"Err… when I have to update Apple stuff (and I have a lot of Apple stuff at home and the office) I just let the update process download in the background. Once the download is complete, there’s a little red badge on System Preferences/Settings/whatever, telling me that the update is ready. I can tell the system to apply the update when I want to. "

Windows does exactly the same - it will download available updates in the background, then allow you to reboot when ready. If it's a corporate device, there might be a relatively short enrorcement of this (but not normally less than 24 hours). Windows will only want one reboot most of the time. If it's not been turned on for months you might get a couple, but the same applies each time.

it's really rather ridiculous the way the fruity fanboys seem determined to claim that their favoured toys are somehow better. There really is very little difference in the haslse of updating between Windows and Macos (Android is worse than either for multiple reasons).

[doublelayer]

Really? Nothing is as bad? Why don't I describe an experience I had updating an Android device that hadn't been used for a while. Good news, the manufacturer is, for now, releasing security updates monthly. Bad news, the process for bringing them up to date is:

For each month between the last time this installed updates and today (thirteen in this case), download an update file, wait for about twenty minutes as it verifies, then the phone reboots for ten minutes but only after you've pushed a button because there's no just install them all option, then it has to copy to the secondary partition (several more minutes), then it decides that, since you've just installed an update, it doesn't need to check for and install updates for a while so you have to manually go to the update screen and push to check so it will start again, which you cannot do while it's copying so you have to remember to come back and try it until it lets you. If we're blaming Windows for something kind of similar, why is Android getting credit for avoiding that? Especially as Windows will install many of the updates in parallel so you don't have to reboot for January's patch Tuesday, February's patch Tuesday, March's patch Tuesday. I come here not to praise Windows but to insist we stop pretending it's the only one to do something unpleasant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep - as a system admin with experience of all of these platforms, I would say that Android is definitely the most hassle of all the mainstream OSs when it comes to updating. The lack of cumulative updates really doesn't help, requiring multiple sequential updates and reboots with a new device or one which hasn't been used for ages.

[Phil Koenig]

My still supported Mac Mini 2018 running Sequoia these days seems to take at least 3-4 restarts before it's done with a periodic update. (For this device now those are just security patches, no new features or anything like that)

Not a huge deal because it does not generally require user interaction in the middle of that process but not quiiiite as quick and simple as some are claiming.

(Pretty sure Apple also bundles firmware updates into some of those OS updates, so unlike PC machines that's not a separate task. A nicety of having only one hardware manufacturer. No GPU driver updates either because it's all bundled with the OS unless you're one of the few people using a eGPU.)

[VicMortimer]

There's always one....

No. It's not the same.

Updates are annoying. But the level of annoyance is not even close to the same.

Apple is just better at this.

Linux distros are just better at this.

Micro$loth is really, really, really bad at this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, there's always at least one who isn't a fanboy and points out the reality!

As an admin who has managed Windows, Apple and Android, there really isn't a lot to pick between Microsoft and Apple when it comes to ease of updating. Android is definitely more hassle, and is far less consistent as update release timing is determined by the device manufacturer, not the OS provider.

[ComicalEngineer]

W10 - W11

I was in a business meeting with a client middle of last year with an engineer who had come across to the UK from Spain. About 30 minutes into the meeting her laptop suddenly decided to update itself to W11. Just over 2.5 hours later and after the 3rd reboot her machine finally displayed the W11 desktop. With all her icons and shortcuts rearranged.

Her PC is managed by the company IT function

In the afternoon part of the meeting her PC then started nagging about installing updates!

Thankfully i will be retired when W10 support ends.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: W10 - W11

"I was in a business meeting with a client middle of last year with an engineer who had come across to the UK from Spain. About 30 minutes into the meeting her laptop suddenly decided to update itself to W11. Just over 2.5 hours later and after the 3rd reboot her machine finally displayed the W11 desktop. With all her icons and shortcuts rearranged.

Her PC is managed by the company IT function"

Assuming it was properly managed, the company IT department must have pushed out W11. We did that, several years ago now, and users were warned in advance. If any raised it being a particular issue for it to happen at a particular time, we just moved them to another batch (we didn't do them all at once).

Really not sure how else you think this sort of thing ought to be done - the alternative of getting the laptops in would be even more disruptive. A lot of posters on here clearly have no experience of business IT support - if updates have to go out, you aim to minimise the disruption but it's often not possible to completely avoid it.

[MJB7]

Re: W10 - W11

"Assuming it is properly managed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Your approach seems almost entirely sensible, but I bet a lot of places just decide "we'll force an update on this group at this time".

Your approach does need users to read emails from IT, and then think about what they will be doing - which may be asking a lot from them.

One improvement would be to allow them to defer the update by up to 24 hours (to allow for an emergency customer visit).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: W10 - W11

"One improvement would be to allow them to defer the update by up to 24 hours (to allow for an emergency customer visit)."

Which requires that your deployment tools allow that - if they don't, there isn't a lot you can do. But yes, when I've done this I've always used the least-draconian available settings for this sort of thing so if it was possible to remind for several days before enforcing, I would do.

Of course, even where this is possible, there are plenty of users who will just keep deferring until they reach the end of the available period (often for no good reason), then find it enforces it at a very inconvenient time. Not a lot which can be done about this.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: W10 - W11

" there are plenty of users who will just keep deferring until they reach the end of the available period (often for no good reason)"

Could it be that there actually is a good reason? Windows updates are intrusive, they need to get things done and there isn't a slack time to allow update to take over the machine. As a fleet administrator your percieved priorities are different to your users'.

[werdsmith]

Re: W10 - W11

I have a business managed windows laptop. The release of updates is managed entirely by the business. There is never any question of being forced to update when it’s not convenient.

[asgalon]

Just as useless as ever.

I keep one secondary Windows bootable on a Linux workstation because occasionally someone was too lazy, stupid or incompetent to make their unavoidable applications accessible through other systems. And every time I have to switch it on, it starts some sort of update orgy, most of the times with more than one reboot. Luckily, since the demise of the Internet Exploder public services seem to have discovered that modern browsers use (mostly) standardized ECMA-Script, so it has been many months since I last had to start the box in windows. Soon I will reclaim the 250GB it blocks on the hard disk.

[Tron]

The update procedure depends upon the quality of the OS code.

You could have a much smaller OS that would hardly ever need an update, and could function safely without being updated, if the design and coding were both of good quality. Design and coding are two different things.

I don't use W11. I hope it can be used offline without needing updating, at least once it is set up, as many people use PCs for work and keep them safe by keeping them permanently offline.

[bakery24]

This week I was despairingly looking up "any way to lock out Windows Update" knowing that no, there isn't, as despite having my network set as 'metered' (so in theory Windows Update should only download stuff when I tell it to), Windows Update will just run whenever it fancies, usually in the middle of a Zoom call, and hog all the bandwidth. Basically, any time my PC slows down randomly, or takes an age to boot up, check task manager and, oh yeah, there's Windows Update, or occasionally OneDrive, starting itself up and hammering all the resources.

And W11 just has a Russian doll of processes and services to force Update to run. Disable Modules Installer? At some startup it'll randomly force it to Automatic again. Set Windows Update to manual - it'll just override that. Disable Update Orchestrator - there's another service (WaasMedic) that you can't control that just sets everything to run automatically.

Honestly, just ship an OS than works; allow power users to run their machine behind a firewall and leave them to it - don't constantly be ramming unneeded and unasked for updates down our machines' throats!

[werdsmith]

Are you using Windows Home for business use?

Otherwise, Windows updates are completely controllable. And even with home you have an opportunity to defer.

[news.bot.5543]

What annoys me more now is that it'll pop up saying "Hey, we're applying the update in 5 minutes, and it'll reboot" when I'm out on lunch, so I don't see it and come back to a machine that's closed all my work.

Still,I don't use Windows at home anymore, so I get some respite.

[Anonymous Coward]

It shouldn't be hard for Windows to keep track of which apps and files you have open, save your document files, and then reopen everything after the reboot.

For 20 years or so, Windows has had a hibernation function that does something similar, so why doesn't Windows Update also do it?

[Doctor Syntax]

Hibernate will preserve the in-memory state of your open applications. Update runs and replaces a library or two, maybe the whole application. You now have the problem of the restored in-memory image not being the same as the current software. If Windows could handle that situation it could probably handle updates in a more elegant manner, more like Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would require support from the applications, they would need to be able to be asked to save files writing any data in memory, and then re-opened keeping track of their last state. Applications can be notified about a reboot and can register to be restarted ad reboot.

Windows has the tools to allow it - if developers don't know about them and/or don't bother to write their applications properly, the issue is not Windows.

[Phil Koenig]

The problem in this case, as "Dr Syntax" notes - is that if the OS has updated the app that was running at the time of the OS update, you can no longer use those hibernation images because the app is not the same as it was before the OS updates started.

If the open apps are 3rd-party apps, then that would not be a concern.

[Doctor Syntax]

Close your work before popping out to lunch.

[news.bot.5543]

Don't know if that's supposed to be a joke (there's no icon, or smiley), but what about any other reason you step away from your desk for 5-10 minutes?

I'm frequently going to see coworkers about things. I'm supposed to shutdown every time I step away from the desk? I'd spend more time opening and closing, and finding what I'm working on... Interesting strategy

[Freezus]

"Microsoft periodically releases 'baseline' rollups..."

And then you're left with the joyful task of trying to convince your machine to accept older patches when your (or your lovely Cyber Essentials Plus partner's) vulnerability scanner decides they are 'missing'

[theOtherJT]

Microsoft made a rod for their own back...

...with their shitty packaging.

Now, MSI packages are actually good*. They have mechanisms to do sort of everything you might want from a package manager. The MSI system is not an inherently bad system.

BUT MICROSOFT DON'T ALWAYS BLOODY USE IT!

Admittedly it's been the better part of a decade since I was a Windows admin on the regular, but back then it was obvious that MS often don't follow their own guidelines for packaging. This is insane. Even when they do use it they don't always use it properly; only filling out the "install" part of the package manifest so that it either doesn't remove cleanly or doesn't upgrade cleanly.

...and then we have MSIX.

Not only is it not really better, but in a lot of cases it's actively worse - because by containerizing it they introduced a bunch of the problems and overhead we all know and love Snap packages for. And just like Snap vs deb you find yourself in the same situation where bits of your system are installed using one, bits are installed using the other, and then the update system has to manage both and sometimes they're properly independent from one another and then sometimes they're not because something packaged one way has a dependency on something packaged the other way and if we're updating this we also need to update that, but that's a separate kind of update process so hold on a second while I spawn a new process thread to deal with that and try and resolve the dependency hell...

It didn't need to be like this if they'd just insisted in the MSI spec that you simply were not allowed to leave bits of it out, and then ensured that everyone who worked there actually used the sodding thing instead of wrapping self extracting .exe files.

*or at least not actively bad.

[Wally Dug]

Windows 10 - No Security Updates, But Copilot Installed

I still use this Windows 10 laptop, although for nothing too serious other than a few (trusted) news websites and it's just laziness on my part that I've not migrated to Linux Mint yet. It doesn't get security updates but yet today, the start menu proudly announced that Copilot was New!

So, Microsoft, you don't care about my security, yet you'll happily give me your AI garbage?

Thanks - it's been uninstalled.

Again.

[Wally Dug]

Re: Windows 10 - No Security Updates, But Copilot Installed - ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!

Just about to shut down the laptop and notice that Copilot has been installed again!!!

[David Hicklin]

Re: Windows 10 - No Security Updates, But Copilot Installed - ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!

Strange it is not on my windows 10.

Are you using the Micro$lop login ? I do everything local so maybe that it the difference....or ShutUp10...or even OpenShell...

[Wally Dug]

Re: Windows 10 - No Security Updates, But Copilot Installed - ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!

No, a local login. And it's back again today.

But it will be coming off again.

[Nugry Horace]

It has got better - bringing a Vista machine from newly-installed to fully-updated was a days-long process, like Windows 7, except that you had to stop halfway through and manually load three or four specific patches in the correct order.

[Luiz Abdala]

Schedule? Service packs?

Steam is very clear about this. It schedules every game update you got instead of pushing them right away. I love that format.

Also, how about the concept of service packs? You know, several patches bundled together?

Every patch since Windows 11 was launched condensed in cumulative 6-month service packs doesn't sound so bad. You just need to download the last one, regardless if the machine was offline 30 days or 30 months.

[FIA]

Re: Schedule? Service packs?

Also, how about the concept of service packs? You know, several patches bundled together?

If you have a very out of date windows, it is probably easier just to download the 'upgrade to the latest version' exe and run that. That is in effect the latest service pack.

As the author was running an insider build, he probably ended up installing several interim versions of windows that weren't really needed.

[mickaroo]

Been there… Done that…

I posted this a year or three ago.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/1/2023/11/15/november_2023_patch_tuesday/

Maybe I should have copyrighted it and made some cash off you late-arriving laggards.

[aardvarkus]

Answer: Pisspoor design. EOL.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Security updates for unwanted features

There would be far fewer updates if they made all the new "features" of Windows opt-in rather than forcing them onto you by default, then we'd only need the security updates and bug fixes for these if we actually wanted them.

Copilot shoe-horned into everything, I'm looking at you.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Security updates for unwanted features

I though there used to be a setting to select the level of updates you got? It so has been gone a long time.

One reason for the current situation is that users used to defer and defer updates....which caused bad press for Micro$lop when some vulnerability slipped through (crap Micro$lop again type headlines), so they made it that you WILL update if you like it or not.

[Phil Koenig]

Re: Security updates for unwanted features

There would be far fewer updates if they made all the new "features" of Windows opt-in rather than forcing them onto you by default...

The 'features' will continue to be forced down everyones throat until they change their business model from "User as product" Google/Meta style, back to the traditional "fee for service" model. (Which I'm told will happen on the Twelfth of Never..)

The only place that still exists in MS-world is in the corporate IT realm, where you pay real money every year for things like Windows Enterprise and server products. Windows Enterprise gives organizations the ability to neuter a lot of that stuff.

For the average non-corporate Windows instance, the free "ShutUp 10++" utility by O&O software has been my go-to for years.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Another win for Linux

I am forced to use a Win11 machine at work. Regular forced reboots end my productivity for 30 to 45 minutes each week as after the actual boot it takes me time to get back into the multiple VPNs and relaunch/login to the apps I need. The Win11 reboot boots into some sort of updater mode, performs the update complete with a reboot percentage counter, then boots itself out of updater mode.

Mint says there is an update available most every day. However, the only indication is a small icon in the lower right corner. No workflow interruptions. I can take as little or as long as I want to apply. Most of the updates take place in the background, requiring no reboot. In the event a reboot is needed, it simply says a reboot is needed. Nothing is forced. I can wait to reboot a month later if I want. Further, the reboot itself is quick and painless, taking mere seconds.

M$ probably feels that as the main OS provider there's no need to change any of this. The plebs can just eat the gruel they're given and be thankful for it.

[ecofeco]

Re: Another win for Linux

My ancient duel core machine takes forever to do a major Linix update. My slightly newer, but still 10 years old, quad core is done in minutes.

Anything newer than that, and it's done as fast my Internet connection. And the packages and patches are a lot smaller than M$. A LOT.

[Blackjack]

You can use Zoom on Linux

Yes you would still have toa update but it would be less of a pain.

[Paul Crawford]

You used to be able to use zoom in a browser, but they stopped that and insist on some shitty app even for Linux. At least Google meets and Teams work (more or less) fine in a browser.

[ecofeco]

I found this out the hard way this year. Completely borked an important meeting.

I was not happy.

[Paul Crawford]

Previously it was the crap that is Webex that had the works-in-browser feel but needed a shitty plugin that was often out of date and you needed admin credentials on the machine to update it. Of course, you only found out once the meeting started and you were allowed to join. Cue many minutes of wasted time...

Thankfully I have not had the misfortune of using that for years now.

[David Hicklin]

No! Not Webex !

Now I need to take a lie down....

[FIA]

It probably didn't help that the laptop in question, a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, was running an Insider build of Windows

So... you installed a version of Windows that updates regularly, and you're annoyed it needs updating regularly? ;)

[naive]

Windows The agentic AI OS

That is not even capable to resize background images over two different resolutions without bugging it up, ignoring people who complain about it for over a decade.

All the rest are down stream stream complaints. But it is not advisable to start using Linux at home, it will make one view the windows PC at work with an endless growing disgust.

[Anonymous Coward]

HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

Her mum asked me if i could help get printing working from her HP laptop to her new HP printer.

The printer was on the wifi, & i did a test print of. a web page from her ipad in seconds.

knowing the printer was on the wifi & worked as a printer, i then went to the laptop that was open & unlocked, went to the printers section searched for the printer & attempted to print, no print arrived, decided it needed a driver so tried downloading it, took a while to navigate the HP site & found an HP installation app that promised to install the right drivers, downloaded it, then ran it, it then decided it needed the serial number from the printer so i had to type that in, then it insisted on registering the printer so i had to find her email, add that in, await the confirmation link, then it spent 30 minutes doing god knows what and bombed out.

i then checked to see if it needed os updates & there was about a years worth so i set about updating which at first looked to be progressing well then just stalled.after an hour i restarted the laptop & tried installing the driver again. 30 minutes later i was able to do a test print & then print the document t she had typed up.

she doesn't need a laptop.

I should have showed her how to use the iPad to write her documents and powered off the laptop, would have saved a bunch of time..

I've not used a pc for work or otherwise in anger for a few years now, i'm amazed how anyone gets anything done.

work messaging systems are full of colleagues saying they are rebooting for windows updates, then driver updates etc, i don't have that issue on my work macbook pro or personal mac's.

pc's i have bought for home use get reimaged with esxi, freenas or something not windows.

I am now firmly of the opinion that if it isn't broke i'm not going to update it or not update to the next version, i appreciate thats a bit dangerous for windows systems but i don't run windows so...

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

Whilst Windows is horrific, you've found the company that's more horrific. That's right, HP.

Don't install any of their bloatware drivers, if you want to print, just use a basic postscript driver, by adding it manually. Microsoft aren't actually at fault in this instance.

It's a bit fiddly to add a printer manually, and you might need to figure out its IP address or network name, but it can be done.

[ecofeco]

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

HP and Windows. Some lower circle of hell.

Linux and HP? It just works. Most of the time. Depending on the printer model, but so far, it's installed the driver, and only the driver and nothing more and connects instantly.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

I can virtually guarantee you that the Linux driver isn't some horrible piece of HP bloatware, but is a standard Postscript driver, and your distro has been smart enough to work this out for itself.

It's a while since I've had to set up a printer on Linux, but I seem to recall it being relatively painless, is Linux still using CUPS?

[Havin_it]

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

HP has a "bloatware" app for its printers (HPLIP) that contains not one but two CUPS drivers (new, hpcups; old, hpijs). It's OK I guess, the PyQt gui was useful sometimes (although it farms scanning out to xsane). Not been updated to Qt6 though, so being dropped by many distros at this stage (the drivers don't depend on this obv.)

Not needed anyway these days as CUPS (yes, still going strong) handles driverless/IPPAnywhere printing, and whatever the equivalent buzzwords are for scanning, with aplomb on any models that support them (which is anything not antique at this point). I'll say this for smartphone hegemony: it made the printing scene much more ergonomic and largely freed us from driver-hell by ensuring the hardware talks common standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: HP laptop took ~ 2 hours before i could print something, did a test print from ipad in 20s

Wasn’t my laptop or printer & it was a printer & scanner so I figured she might want to use the scanner at some point and assumed the hp app would install both.

No I didn’t test the scanner feature.

The point of my tale was that in Apple land it was trivial, but windows made it super difficult,

I’m not sure if it was the machine being busy trying to update or just the software needing an i9 with 48 cores and 200GB of ram so was slower in whatever was in that cheap laptop.

Whatever the issue, it’s not an issue in Apple land.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Use Powershell

When trying to force WU to work on my small flock on W11 machines, I came across the powershell module called get-windowsupdate. There’s some first time preamble but other than that it’s not unlike apt on Linux. You can set it to accept and auto install the updates, and auto reboot if nobody else is logged in. It also drags down Bios and driver updates you might not see on the GUI version. Google for it, you’ll be glad you did.

But first get the current version of Powershell off the Windows App Store!

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Use Powershell

Why the downvote?

Anyhow what really surprised me was that the Windows Update GUI wasn’t just a front end for a Powershell script.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Use Powershell

"Why the downvote?"

At a guess, one of those who insists that Windows is better because everything can be done from the GUI while Linux supposedly requires everything to be done from the command line. They don't like to be reminded that Windows also has a command line and that, like Linux, while things can be done from the GUI that can also, sometimes, be better done from the command line. The difference between their belief and that reality causes cognitive dissonance that has to be relieved by downvoting the post that caused it.

[frankyunderwood123]

Gaming rig experiences

I clung onto windows 10 and then windows 11 purely for gaming for the better part of 10 years.

During that time I saw Linux gradually get better and better for gaming - the Wine devs and of course Valve spurring on development at a hugely rapid clip.

My final use case was VR - but I gave up on that a year back and with that, I finally became totally windows free.

During this time I can so identify with this article.

As I moved more and more to Linux for gaming, my sessions with windows became fewer.

And when I did boot into Windows to "play a quick game", it was never thus.

It was never quick.

I resorted to blocking all updates, to removing all bloat - but still, I'd sometimes have to wait 10 minutes or more just to get a game started - updates and rebooting, drivers - just a constant barrage of annoyance.

I'm primarily mac based now, playing a lot of games on my m4 pro, but I still have my beefy PC Linux rig.

I can boot that up from cold and into a game in 20 seconds.

It's fantastic for streaming to devices - works great on Apple TV for instance.

I also often stream from Linux to macOs for more demanding games or ones which don't work with mac native or mac crossover.

Windows is rapidly becoming EOL for gamers. Yes, there may be many millions of gamers yet to move to Linux, but many have tried Linux and many more will.

Windows days outside of enterprise are numbered, at least for gaming.

I think you could argue that for non-gaming casual home users of compute, many are rocking Android or Apple devices for 99% of their daily needs anyway.

There's possibly some old PC knocking about with a printer attached and that'll be about it.

It's going to be a prolonged slow death for Microsoft if they keep on the path they are going down.

It all leads to cloud compute, doesn't it?

A cheap PC as a terminal - a dumb terminal.

It gets you online and then Microsoft owns you, calls the shots.

If you are running windows, they already do ...

[paddedcell]

Xbox updates

I experienced this update hell almost every time I turned on my Xbox One, which I didn't use very often.

It made me really regret not getting a PlayStation 4 instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood why Windows Update works the way it does. Literally every other OS can update in minutes, yet Windows Update takes fucking forever...especially if you have antivirus and various other background bullshit in play.

I wish I could blame hardware performance or network speed, but you can't...it's literally their shitty way of handling updates, the Windows Installer service, BITS and all the other bullshit that forms Windows Updates.

I've seen instances over the years where an update that is less than 200kb in size takes nearly an hour to install for absolutely no reason.

What makes it worse is you can't actually see what is happening...there is no meaningful progress bar and there is no debug output to follow to give you reassurance that something is actually happening. It's just a painfully slow, blind experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

".especially if you have antivirus and various other background bullshit in play."

Evidently if you have something that checks any accessed, new and modified files it will make an update process a pain.

Most Linux systems don't run an EDR/AV/whatever, and that explains a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ".especially if you have antivirus and various other background bullshit in play."

Saying "most" is a bit strong. I would say quite a lot of private endpoints probably have no AV, but in enterprise setups, they almost certainly do.

[Juha Meriluoto]

Even regular Windoze updates take ages... My Linux laptop installs a weeks worth of updates in one tenth of the time wifey's w11 taks ro find out what to install. And then it dowloads them... Zzz... and installs... Zzz.. and reboots...

[ecofeco]

Nothing new

It's been like this as long as I can remember.

[Altrux]

Windows is a joke

What on earth does Windows actually do when installing a 'feature' update? Is it literally replacing every file on the system? Why does it take HOURS, and multiple reboots, on a new and powerful machine? By contrast, if you leave a Fedora Linux machine unpatched for a few weeks: yes, there will be /hundreds/ of updates, but they will all install in just a few minutes, followed by a single reboot to bring up the latest kernel. Job done. Honestly, Microsoft, it's 2026 - why is your OS still so horrendously primitive and monolithic?

[DS999]

If Linux can do it

Why can't Windows?

So long as you're still on the same major version (i.e. you aren't using something like Fedora that iterates every six months) it'll download all the packages you need in one go, install them in one go, with only one reboot.

And Linux is doing it for a bunch of applications not just the OS like Windows. If you add in needing to update Office and other applications that aren't part of Windows proper you pretty much need to take your Windows laptop out of storage the night before otherwise if you take it out at 9am you may not have it ready to go before you're ready to knock off work for the day!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If Linux can do it

Because Windows works differently at the kernel level. For example in use file can't be raplaced - and once the file is actually replaced and run, it may perform post-installation tasks and initializations that are required before any other updates.

Windows, for example, won't stop an update waiting for you to peruse some text configuration file the update can't merge automatically - this kind of configuration updates are perfomed automatically by tthe update process (having binary configurations in a tree with a standard API helps...). How many Linux applications runs on outdated config files because new configurations are never merged properly?

Windows installers may be far more complex and perform far more tasks than a Linux package.

[Not Yb]

It's the main reason I stopped using my Windows 7 laptop years ago.

I'd turn it on maybe once every 3 months, and watch it take 2 days to update the 'security patches' that had been missed. Might be an emergent property of the system, but it's definitely there.

[Tim Chuma]

Did the genie put a cork up your ****?

No s***!

The people I use laptops they don't update also don't bother connecting to the internet to do anything.

If you just have a virtual machine you can run most things.

There is that multi-gigabyte 1990s PC game collection you can download that runs all the programs on their own virtual machine so it runs much better.

[Anonymous Coward]

This will be downvoted to hell by the Reg users... but I rather take 4 hours of Windows updating than an hour of using Linux. Doesn't matter how good it may play Windows games if my gaming hardware can't work with them penguins.

[Northern Lad]

MS Just Got Too Big And The Rot Set In.

MS have gone the way of most successful companies, got too big and fat and slow. Taking on management teams who don't really understand operating systems but understand 'business', think of it like many of the games today which were great to start with then the accountants get a hold and its all about making money at the determent of game development. That's whats happened to MS.

The only thing in MS's favour is that there isn't really a competitor to Windows. Yes there are the Linux distro's and yes they are very good, (I'm typing this on my Linux Mint daily driver), but there is the driver support or integration for large document management and financial systems, and weather you like it of not most companies will want to carry on using MS Office.

So with money being the driver, a total hold on the business market, a constant push to make money in the consumer market via adverts and services that people don't want, there is little incentive in MS management to actually want to make a better more efficient product.

I will say that MS have been rattled of late by Valve/Steam and gaming with a lot more games becoming playable and even out performing Windows platforms. Didn't MS release a stripped down Windows version with all the crap stripped out? So it can and has been done but the accountants will not allow it to be released into the wild, unless they can find a way to make money out of it that is.

[Simon Harris]

Phone updates tend to take a minute or two

That's somewhat optimistic. My iPhone SE took something like half an hour to update to iOS 26, plus all the time pressing cancel on the 'would you like to learn more about this new iOS26 feature?' screens, and then I had to wait some more while the apps updated themselves too.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Phone updates tend to take a minute or two

Strange that I also have an SE and can't remember any of that, just lots of effort to dumb down the hideous glass effect and weird safari browser layouts.

[bloggsy]

What the hell (sorry) do you expect from this cowboy company?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It probably didn't help that the laptop [..] was running an Insider build of Windows"

Then your experience was not the not real user experience.

[abufrejoval]

Can't say most Linux are all that different

I did an inventory just the other day: I keep 28 personal computers in operation (not counting mobiles and tablets), 15 Windows, 17 Linux, 1 BSD installations; you might have already noted that some must be dual boot.

I'm not counting the VMs, some nested, of which there are many more, a good clutch running clusters on clusters 24x7, others on-demand, yet others, rarely.

Patch day is a busy day, but of course I never really have to wait for any system while patching is going on: I just have to monitor things and use a set of cascaded KVM to switch to another screen for work or fun.

But I can't say that it makes much of a difference which OS they run, they all need regular patching.

And if a release update is required, that typically also requires getting to the latest patch stage, before doing the release update, which in the case of a Proxmox cluster (also Ceph cluster), can be quite involved with Ceph versions/upgrades not being closely aligned with Debian or Proxmox base.

Supposedly read-only OS Linux variants are different, but that's mostly how they operate inside. It doesn't remove the update burden, nor can I say that it's a lot faster. Again, since I'm not exactly twiddling my thumbs while things are happening, "50%" faster might escape my attention. It's also not necessarily a single pass, but might require base OS and then apps/snaps updates, with Steam then updating next. And appliation updates like Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC and NextCloud are all over the place: some do their own in-place updates, some come as OS managed packages, some snap or flatpak, others may be Docker images from one source or another, I see mostly fragmentation, no clear winner: all cost time. GPU vendors may chose to reskin entire portions of the OS even with a propriety UI style, some terrible 'default dark' mode and an assortment of proprietary hot-key combinations, which have me suffer backflashes to DOS TSR (terminate and stay resident) applications.

Perhaps Steam in all this is the most painless in terms of how it's getting done. But it's also the worst offender in terms of frequency and volume: I guess they'd be long out of business if at least it didn't just usually work flawlessly (or automagic recovery).

Sure, I remember the days when I did a sysgen on my Unix perhaps twice a year, to incorporate the latest patches, which were never about viruses or trojans, just stability or new hardware back in the "golden old days".

The Internet has been turned into a weapon, just like very other instrument has been weaponized, so that tribute needs to be paid.

But I sure wish John von Neumann had put a bit more Harvard into the Princeton architecture before he pushed it to fame; he thought the virurs potential more exciting than dangerous and unfortunately didn't live long enough to fix his mistake.

[goblinski]

M'kay...

...I pulled a laptop that I hadn't used for six months out of a drawer...

...However, I wanted to run tests on this computer, so I needed it to be completely up-to-date

It is rare that I'd take Windows' side, but some days the WTF moments are really WTF ones. WTF?!?

The car sat on jacks for six months in winter in Alaska, and you could just start it and drive away shivering, BUT you absolutely needed the cabin to be warm, and it was the car's fault it didn't do it in 30 seconds?

Windowsbash clickbait at its best. The saddest part is that it distracts from all the bona fide and well deserved and justified bashing that we could concentrate on, as Windows genuinely has plenty of that.

[Anonymous Coward]

New machine

Just bought a new Windows 11 Pro micro PC to use with my new 65" TV. The PC came with a sticker over the ethernet port which said to not connect it to a network until the initial setup had been completed because otherwise the setup might be interupted by one or more OS updates.

[Stuart Castle]

Windows update is usually fairly painless on my main home PC. Well, apart from when someone releases a driver that torpedos the windows install..

Joking aside, it is farily painless. But then the PC is used daily, and properly shut down at the end of each day, so it's rebooted daily as well..

I also have another PC, that runs Proxmox on Linux (as a host OS). This has several Windows and Linux based VMs that are not used regularly, and Windows update can be fairly annoying on these, sometimes requiring several reboots (I've had it require up to five) as part of installing updates.

[Taliesinawen]

Why Microsoft can't just install in one go

> What I want to know is why Microsoft can't just detect exactly what files you need updated, download them all in one go, and then perform a single reboot.

To prevent piracy by making the install process fail if it detects its on new hardware.

[Stuart Castle]

Talk about a torture chamber for seldom used PCs. I've been handed a laptop to update to Windows 11. It's not been updated since at least 2024, and judging by the fact the clock was showing it was 2024, likely not been connected to a network since then. OK, I know the user could have reset the clock, but she has no reason to, and if she had connected it to a network, the clock would have updated.

I got it at about 2pm. It installed an impressively long list of updates, and is currently installing Windows 11. It's pretty much automatic, but soo slow.

[PB90210]

[Win10 home ESU] Patch Tuesday day 3... still stuck at 'installing 100%'

Tues: downloading 4 patches

Weds: downloading/installing/pending install. First reboot (.net). Crashes FF

Thurs: final 'installing 100%' for the monthly roll up still showing after a couple of hours

[Havin_it]

Just checking in, did anyone mention Gentoo yet?

/ducks