Their update server seems universally throttled. It should somehow selectively throttle, like default to a slow download but if the user is sitting right there and needs to use the damn laptop, allow a button to manually release throttling and download quickly.
I’ve had nothing but problems with win update. Since I’ve switched to the win10 alphabet version recently to get extended update support, update seems to fail and require manual download of update packages. It’s been a real pain.
I use windows like once a year to update some random bios or firmware and it always takes a goddamn long time. I needed to use intel eeupdate to fix wrong checksum on my ghetto cheap intel 10g nic and it took like an hour of update bootloop in my seldom used windows drive. I still have some linux computers using ide drives and its faster to update.
Just use a win pe boot environment.
is there a free way to set that up? I’ve literally just been moving an internal drive between computers and using a linux live to add it to the boot with efibootmgr if it has one of those early half uefi mobos
Author is kind of a whiny idiot. This doesn’t invalidate the issue, but basically everything they do sets themselves up for failure.
They also illustrated that it is getting better - and it is. Windows 7 updates - especially from SP1 - were voodoo science (if you weren’t lucky enough to have imaging/etc). Windows 8 was better, 10 even more so, and 11 is just 10 but otherwise awful.
The early days of windows 10 was rough. Every major update they just reinstalled the OS.
Buuut it meant that you could install the latest version, and at worst only have a few more updates before you’re fully updated. Vs like 7 you’d install SP1, then spend 3 hours installing subsequent updates and rebooting.
That said sometimes windows like purposefully throttles installing updates and I just want a button that says “install as fast as fucking possible”. I know it slows down on battery, but plugged in please just go as fast as you possibly can.
Working on updates
20 % complete
Please dont turn off your computer.
On Linux, when you update, it downloads the latest thing and installs it. 10 minutes tops. On arch you gotta watch it a bit more, but you signed up for that.
On windows it updates almost as frequently as Linux. Except it takes much longer to update. A new install can sit there churning for more than a half hour. Why? Didn’t I just download the latest iso? Even the incremental ones are painful. It also does this sequential crap where it updates, reboots, and then updates again. (Sometimes even a third time). Then you’ve got the bugs. I don’t think there’s been a single windows update in over a year that just went smoothly. I’ve run across two that flat out refused to install (blocking further updating), and one that broke things.
Windows update is bad enough for a regular use case. It’s downright painful if you haven’t booted windows in a while (think dual boot setups) where you have to pay this update tax just because you switched to windows to do that one thing.
The author is not being whiny, they are 100% correct.
This situation was the reason for me killing off my dual boot system and making it Linux only. I had kept Windows around for a few specific tools and games, but it was a roll of the dice if I could even use it when I needed because of the update situation.
I have a seperate drive and I physically unplug my windows drive when I’m not using it. when I do, plunplug Linux then plug in windows, hate myself for a while, then revert back.
I refuse to let microslop even see the Linux install since I know they are malicious criminal company and will tamper with shit just because.
I just kept them on separate drives, but you make a good point that one shouldn’t underestimate Microslop’s ability to fuck with your shit.
Switching to Linux was so helpful. Windows whenever there was an update literally ate up my performance for some reason. 50% RAM just gone (6 GB total). I bet it was just a lack of optimization for less powerful PCs but it was still aggravating
To be fair sometimes if you update Linux too sparingly it results in conflicts. Of course the likelihood of that happening depends on the distro. Also the vast majority of Linux updates don’t require a reboot.
Your experience is not typical.
Windows only updates once a month. Rarely there is an out of band patch.
Updating after install is long, but it is optional, and it only happens the one time you install. If you’re reinstalling often then you’re doing it wrong.
I haven’t seen multiple restarts in many years.
You can always roll back an update if something goes wrong
.net updates are the worst. They appear to compile on each machine but it usually happens as a background task after restarting a restart.
But other updates are fine if you haven’t missed the previous month. They install in the background with lower priority. They download from other devices on your network, or from other devices closer to you than Microsoft’s cdn to reduce internet transit.
If you miss a month it will need to download the entire update, usually 1gb in size. Otherwise they only download a minimal amount of files.
Hotpatching is probably coming to everyone as they made it free for most business use. Updating Windows then wont require a restart except for 1-2x per year.
Yeah, Microsoft’s patching schedule is so rigid that it’s a meme. Anything outside of Tuesday is a patch for something under active exploit.
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I have encountered a windows update that refused to install with a mysterious error code. After searching through the logs, I discovered it was refusing to proceed because it found an installer for an old version of the Netware client (that wasn’t installed) that it knew was incompatible, in a non-common directory (C:\PreviousHardDrive\Backups). It was searching the whole hard drive against a database of incompatible programs.
Windows 10 to 11, or feature updates, are the worst. Sometimes literal hours with adequate RAM, storage space, and NVME drive. It’s insane.
Half the time it’s not even doing anything. Minimal CPU and disk usage. They want update to be a background thing, but sometimes I just want it to hurry up and be over with.
MS must be listening to me. I just did todays update and it had my CPUs E cores pegged at 100% usage for a few minutes installing updates.
No they aren’t.
Feature updates take the same amount of time as monthly updates. It’s been like this for years.
Recently spent almost four hours waiting for Windows Update on a brand-new PC. It wasn’t even apparent how long it would take, just kept grinding, rebooting, and grinding again.
For a three-decade OS that many bright programmers have worked on, Windows update sucks royally.
I think you may have misread my comment
back when i still dual-booted windows, one time i hadn’t used it in ~2 months, and the automatic update was so big it kept crashing my shitty wifi
i literally could not use windows with the internet on or else it would crash trying to download the updates…
“I enrolled my laptop into Windows 11 Insiders Program that delivers updates on a more frequent basis, turned it off for half a year and then got mad that I missed a bunch of updates, so I decided to sit there and mash the update button to constantly ping for updates instead of doing literally anything else while it’s updating, because I wanted to run tests and had to be fully up-to-date.”
Microslop got a lot of issues, but this is fucking ridiculous, the author sounds insufferable.
“But who in the temple is going to sit there for 10 minutes or more while this downloads new updates and reboots?”
Oh, idk, people who don’t enroll themselves into a faster paced update cycle.
“And may the gods help you if you buy a brand new PC that’s been sitting on a shelf for months or years. You might have hours of updates after you first take it out of the box.”
I don’t know a single piece of electronic that doesn’t require updating after purchasing. Hours, though? Is this guy on a 10kbps connection or where is this fantasy coming from?
This has nothing to do with the insider program though. They mentioned it because it makes the situation even worse just because of the large number of updates. I’ve had the same thing happen to me multiple times on my windows 10 copy that is not enrolled in the insider program.
I don’t know a single piece of electronic that doesn’t require updating after purchasing. Hours, though? Is this guy on a 10kbps connection or where is this fantasy coming from?
No, it’s slow regardless of your connection. That’s because you’re stuck in a loop of:
- windows wrongly reporting no updates available so you have to keep clicking on “check for updates” for a few minutes until it shows available updates, and then it only shows a small subset of the actual available updates
- the updates downloading and installing unreasonably slowly, sometimes freezing for several minutes with no indication of progress
- windows requesting a reboot, refusing to find any more available updates without you doing it
- slow reboot because it’s installing updates
- go to step 1 for several more times
For reference, I’ve updated arch linux setups after many months of not using them and the process takes ~10 mins at worst, and that’s an OS that assumes you update it regularly. You can probably do an entire major release update on debian/ubuntu in the same time that windows takes to install ~6 months of regular updates. It’s inexcusable and it’s pretty clear that windows doesn’t give a shit for anyone that doesn’t use it daily, which is exactly the point the article is making.
I’m on Fedora and for me it is as simple as
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y, Come back in 5 minutes and manually restart.There is no babysitting required. You can see the realtime progress of the entire process if you want to. It does not need reboots to install other updates. The updates don’t refuse to install if you’ve removed Edge Browser or any other ‘necessary’ (BS) software.
I’ve had Windows installed on the same machine since 8 through 11. Not even a full reinstall ever took longer than 20min at most, counting the downloads. 11 updates roughly once a month, sometimes 2-3 smaller updates a month if there were some issues, sometimes it can go a month without anything, and I had the “get updates first” ticked in the settings. Every single time it estimates a 4min update and it never takes longer than that. Not once did I have any of the issues you listed. Not sitting on some crazy new hardware either, an 11 years old SATA SSD and an ok internet. I very rarely skipped updates on my PC, but I did once update a very old laptop and it took 30min only because it had a measly 8GB of RAM and an HDD.
I’m now on Cachy and I do update every day or multiple times a day, but I wouldn’t go on a rant if I missed half a year worth of updates and then had to wait some time for it to install. In half a year, even slow distros had a major update. And I simply do not buy that anyone outside of HDD and unstable internet users had to wait more than 1h at absolute worst to install a half a year load of updates.
How is this unreasonable? What is Windows supposed to do? Personally come to your house to ensure you are still getting updated? You don’t even have to use it daily, as the author said - they chose to stare at the update button (which again I don’t even understand the point of anyway, Windows won’t magically offer you more updates if you click it more times, this is the same logic as clicking the pedestrian push button more than once), which means for regular users the updates would’ve installed in the background or outside of working hours and they wouldn’t even notice.
An W11 update in February took my work computer 1 hour to update, even Windows put “estimated 50 mins” on the Windows Update screen. Decently fast processor, 16GB RAM and SSD.
I think our IT manager paused updates for everyone in late January because of all the issues it was causing, then that Friday afternoon I walked around the office and saw a bunch of people taking a “second lunch” because their computer was in the process of updating Windows.
What is Windows supposed to do?
Correctly report that there are pending updates when there are?
Download them in one batch, requiring only one restart?
Download and install them at a reasonable speed on my 1Mbps connection and SSD?
And I simply do not buy that anyone outside of HDD and unstable internet users had to wait more than 1h at absolute worst to install a half a year load of updates.
Apparently from the comments here this doesn’t affect everyone. If you don’t believe that this can happen to anyone because it doesn’t happen to you, I’m not interested in convincing you.
My Windows 11 laptop was about an hour of updates when I first got it.
Which is fine, I’m pretty sure I went and made dinner while it was doing that, it’s not like you’re required to actually do anything for that to happen.
Well, to be fair Windows is a paid product and as such one would expect excellent ergonomics, including an if statement checking whether the current system is close enough to the latest update before starting the process without query.
I boot my Linux desktop to game once in a while. I’ll usually patch it and reboot it first. I have fast internet and I’d be blown away if it ever took more than 5 minutes. Windows, however… Holy shit. Some updates or upgrades take hours.
My opinion is that linux’s biggest issue is vendor support. Imagine if vendors supported Linux like they do windows. It would be a substantially better OS to use. Imagine adobe and ms office just ran out of the box no problem. Who would want to use windows? It’s so bad now.
over and a while?
You’re saying it like Microsoft doesn’t punish you for using Windows frequently.
use ‘policy plus’ and disable windows update
use Linux to disable windows
It’s a torture for seldom used Linux PCs as well. In short any PC that isn’t updated for a long period of time is going to spend a long period of time updating with the possibility of breaking things.
I elaborated on another post, I can’t replicate this. I manage hundreds of windows PCs and run into this problem from time to time and it’s brutal slow to update. Sometimes hours.
My gaming desktop, which hardly gets used because I mainly use a steam deck now, also runs Linux. Maybe 5, 10 minutes at most to patch it.
When I enroll a new device at work I have literally one day only to let it run through autopilot (hybrid setup) let all policies (GPO and MDM) trigger and install all the updates (windows and vantage (Lenovo))
Ironically this still an improvement over the HP devices filled to the top with slop…
But imagine giving such a device to a new coworker 😂 as MS intends you to do with autopilot (i set it up with my account and switch the primary after all updates are done)
This whole thing drives me nuts. I started doing it this way with my own account then switching. But licensing is a pain because then you need to pay to have an admin account manage this. No unlicensed admin can join a device to AAD. And when you license it you have to manually change it with PowerShell. Such a pain in the ass.
Now I just either autopilot or ship to site and tell the user to log in with their email lol. It’s slow going but saves a bunch of hassle.
We have policy to have an admin account and a normal business premium (with enterprise windows add-on)
So I enroll them to my main 😂 since we have a hybrid setup, I have like 50 dead objects under my account in intunne (hybrid generets a dead object beside the real one during autopilot)
I just switch the primary user in intune
Ya I’ve been considering this for some time. Just annoying. Microsoft just wants to nickel and dime us all to death lol
Seems a like of people here have never used windows (10) on a hdd
I maintain a small Windows dual boot for taking certification exams (that don’t run on Linux). It’s torture to update it once every 6 months. 3-4 hours requiring multiple reboots.
You can use Chris titus util to delay the feature updates and keep security updates. That’s what I did for my dual-boot
That’s what I’ve done (Use MassGravel for Enterprise version of 11 because fuck it why not for best results?) and haven’t had any issues with Windows 11 since. Had to hop back on my Windows SSD for a game that just came out and had one update after a whole year of running strictly Linux!
Why lie?
Bullshit does that take multiple hours, windows updates are typically pretty fast.
Umm, no
Umm yes
😂it takes a fucking day to install all updates on the new PCs i set up at my workplace and download speed on our side is definitely not the bottleneck
At least it does the heavy lifting in background so my coworkers don’t realise how slow it is, but maybe it is by design, so that it doesn’t impact workflow 🤷🏻
But definitely not what i call “fast"
