Longest update for me was ~5 minutes in W10, mostly new definitions for the Defender and security patches. You can consult the property of the updates in the M$ page and also undo the last update, if you want. Memes of Windows are nice, but this one was valid 15 years ago, back then it was true that you could die in an update, but not now.
On powerful PC’s, yeah, my home PC is a rather powerful one and it would take me around a couple minutes to update.
However, I remember two years ago having to use Windows 10 on a school PC (which was a crappy thinkpad) and it took around 1.5 hours to update after I did the mistake of arriving too early and deciding to update the laptop as “might as well, got nothing better to do”, then not being able to do anything for 1 hour.
Though admittedly, the laptop wasn’t updated for a while (guessing around half a year?) so it probably was catching up to updates.
School PCs is quite a broad range. Could be a failing district with 10 year old computers on 5400 rpm drives which a Linux machine would also run slowly on.
You underestimate just how crazy clean Linux is. For a while I ran Debian out of an USB 2.0 thumb drive on a machine that was already slow ten years prior – hardly a hickup. In-place updates didn’t even take more than 15 minutes (which, considering how slow my storage was, is great).
Not underestimating. This dudes not even taking into account how shitty a school spinning disk drive can be with how many hours they are on, how cheap they are, how many times they’ve been written to, etc. Im IT at a school I know how bad they get.
I have Linux running on a 10 year old machine with 5400 rpm drives, and it does just fine streaming video to multiple TVs at once… Helps that there are 5 of them configured as raid-5…
Well, 2 weeks after that happened, I asked my teacher if I could install Linux onto the PC and they agreed. Went for a minimalist arch setup since that’s what I’m familiar with already, and it worked fine. Updates were still somewhat slow but they’d only take around 1-2 minutes maximum, excluding the download times for packages, and it ran smoothly.
That being said, Windows 10 on that craptop was fine for browsing, and boot times weren’t too bad, only taking 30s on average. It’s just that updating the system and using VS (since we were forced to use it as IDE until I switched to Linux, at that point I just went with neovim) were two major pain points.
My home PC updates like that, but our work PCs take forever, and Windows pushes an update almost every week. It can actually take over an hour to apply an update at times.
I don’t think anyone says it breaks things – it’s just glacially slow with no meaningful change. Sometimes, it changes for the worse, like the time I had to delete an unwanted desktop shortcut to Edge on every PC.
A work PC may have extra steps for workstations, but it isn’t normal. Maybe caused by an third party security soft or much defect sectors in the HD. Not even updating from W10 to W11 took much more time as you say.
Anyway you can pause the updates until a certain date and time in the advanced settings of the Updates page.
Anyway you can pause the updates until a certain date and time in the advanced settings of the Updates page.
Which is what I’ve resorted to doing on certain weeks when we need to allow people to access them. My employer is very small without much funding, so I’m not a tech person, but I’m the “tech person,” if that makes sense. They never were the best computers in the first place and are used by many people, so obviously that contributes, but they do take excessively long to install updates.
My major beef with my home PC and Windows updates is that I can’t totally disable automatic restarts, which is a pain since sometimes there’s a reason I want to leave it locked and running overnight without disruption. I’ve tried regedit, group policy, and taking ownership of the Update Orchestrator folder, but regardless if I’ve got it locked, Windows decides it’s not in use and should be restarted. At least it stopped recommending Windows 11 when I disabled TPM in bios, but once I get more comfortable using Linux, I’ll be done with Windows forever.
It’s not like I’m neglecting updates, either. I manually check at least once a month. But it still occasionally will hit me with an unexpected/unwanted restart when I least expect it.
In my PC Windows inform me that there is an update in a little Pop up, where i can select if i want to restart or not, no automatic restart, i can restart when i want, or shut down in the night and see on power on in the morning, how Windows install the updates (some minutes), before showing the log screen.
That’s what I’d like to happen, but that’s not consistently what happens. In fact, last time I saw the notification, I decided I could wait until the next day, but Windows went ahead and restarted for me during the night regardless. My computer was locked when this occurred, which leads me to believe Windows assumed I wasn’t “active” and could therefore restart.
I can’t explain it, but I can assure you it did happen.
Edit: Oops, I guess it doesn’t show in my screenshot, but I have “Configure automatic updates” set to:
3 = (Default setting) Download the updates automatically and notify when they are ready to be installed
Windows finds updates that apply to the computer and downloads them in the background (the user is not notified or interrupted during this process). When the downloads are complete, users will be notified that they are ready to install. After going to Windows Update, users can install them.
That is an common error, shut down Windows is not the same as Power off, with the normal shutdown Windows stay in standby mode and permits to restart faster (not much with an SSD), with this it can still work in background and even restart the system by itself. If you want to avoid this, you must change the power settings, only in this way you have an Power off that really is a Power off.
Windows only seems to be easier to handle as Linux, but it isn’t, it’s quite the opposite, only the very basic settings are more at hand.
Is there another setting I should be using in addition to this? Which power settings must I change?
Windows only seems to be easier to handle as Linux, but it isn’t, it’s quite the opposite, only the very basic settings are more at hand
So true. I’ve always assumed Linux would be beyond my comprehension, but it’s actually much less frustrating than Windows so far.
Edit: After looking around the control panel, I do see that I accidentally had “automatically restart” checkmarked under system failure, but in this case I don’t think that would have applied since it was a pending update, not a system failure.
Even with Fast startup diseabled, it remain a certain hibernation function (hiberfil.sys). Desactivating the Hibernation service fix this problem. Hibernation service is anyway not so important, above its a big memory hog, because duplicate every process to use it as backup if you shut down the system, so if you boot again are also booting this processes, apps or what yo had open before. But in change, it slows down the whole system. At least in my Windows it works as it should. Cold boot last a little longer, but with an SSD are only seconds.
PS, instead of the Control panel, use the GodMode function which Windows has
Create a new folder in the Desktop or anywhere
Rename it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
(instead of GodMode you can use any other name, but you can’t change what’s beyond the point)
Done, the folder has change its icon and when you open it, you have an ordered list with access to all possible Windows settings (more than 200), even those that are hidden. As say, something like a Control panel on steroids.
Can I forward all our users problems to you when I switch them to Linux?
Don’t forget, all have different hardware setup and different needs. So most likely would need different distros just to perform what they can now on Windows.
Maybe just install some SSD next time instead of complaining about Windows.
You misspelled a word. Let me correct that for you:
“This bad OS takes 3 more minutes to update completely, oh the horror”
Thank me later.
Just kidding. One thing that is unarguably better with Linux is, is the fact that you can update whenever you want and you can do it in the background while using your computer.
Longest update for me was ~5 minutes in W10, mostly new definitions for the Defender and security patches. You can consult the property of the updates in the M$ page and also undo the last update, if you want. Memes of Windows are nice, but this one was valid 15 years ago, back then it was true that you could die in an update, but not now.
On powerful PC’s, yeah, my home PC is a rather powerful one and it would take me around a couple minutes to update.
However, I remember two years ago having to use Windows 10 on a school PC (which was a crappy thinkpad) and it took around 1.5 hours to update after I did the mistake of arriving too early and deciding to update the laptop as “might as well, got nothing better to do”, then not being able to do anything for 1 hour.
Though admittedly, the laptop wasn’t updated for a while (guessing around half a year?) so it probably was catching up to updates.
School PCs is quite a broad range. Could be a failing district with 10 year old computers on 5400 rpm drives which a Linux machine would also run slowly on.
You underestimate just how crazy clean Linux is. For a while I ran Debian out of an USB 2.0 thumb drive on a machine that was already slow ten years prior – hardly a hickup. In-place updates didn’t even take more than 15 minutes (which, considering how slow my storage was, is great).
Not underestimating. This dudes not even taking into account how shitty a school spinning disk drive can be with how many hours they are on, how cheap they are, how many times they’ve been written to, etc. Im IT at a school I know how bad they get.
I have Linux running on a 10 year old machine with 5400 rpm drives, and it does just fine streaming video to multiple TVs at once… Helps that there are 5 of them configured as raid-5…
Well, 2 weeks after that happened, I asked my teacher if I could install Linux onto the PC and they agreed. Went for a minimalist arch setup since that’s what I’m familiar with already, and it worked fine. Updates were still somewhat slow but they’d only take around 1-2 minutes maximum, excluding the download times for packages, and it ran smoothly.
That being said, Windows 10 on that craptop was fine for browsing, and boot times weren’t too bad, only taking 30s on average. It’s just that updating the system and using VS (since we were forced to use it as IDE until I switched to Linux, at that point I just went with neovim) were two major pain points.
Great, now install Tiny11.
Which is a minimalist Windows 11, and see how much faster that runs as well.
Or did you think there was only one version of Windows OSes?
Maybe it was in deep freeze? I know the schools in my area do that for any computer the students use incase they fuck with it.
My home PC updates like that, but our work PCs take forever, and Windows pushes an update almost every week. It can actually take over an hour to apply an update at times.
I don’t think anyone says it breaks things – it’s just glacially slow with no meaningful change. Sometimes, it changes for the worse, like the time I had to delete an unwanted desktop shortcut to Edge on every PC.
A work PC may have extra steps for workstations, but it isn’t normal. Maybe caused by an third party security soft or much defect sectors in the HD. Not even updating from W10 to W11 took much more time as you say. Anyway you can pause the updates until a certain date and time in the advanced settings of the Updates page.
Which is what I’ve resorted to doing on certain weeks when we need to allow people to access them. My employer is very small without much funding, so I’m not a tech person, but I’m the “tech person,” if that makes sense. They never were the best computers in the first place and are used by many people, so obviously that contributes, but they do take excessively long to install updates.
My major beef with my home PC and Windows updates is that I can’t totally disable automatic restarts, which is a pain since sometimes there’s a reason I want to leave it locked and running overnight without disruption. I’ve tried regedit, group policy, and taking ownership of the Update Orchestrator folder, but regardless if I’ve got it locked, Windows decides it’s not in use and should be restarted. At least it stopped recommending Windows 11 when I disabled TPM in bios, but once I get more comfortable using Linux, I’ll be done with Windows forever.
It’s not like I’m neglecting updates, either. I manually check at least once a month. But it still occasionally will hit me with an unexpected/unwanted restart when I least expect it.
In my PC Windows inform me that there is an update in a little Pop up, where i can select if i want to restart or not, no automatic restart, i can restart when i want, or shut down in the night and see on power on in the morning, how Windows install the updates (some minutes), before showing the log screen.
That’s what I’d like to happen, but that’s not consistently what happens. In fact, last time I saw the notification, I decided I could wait until the next day, but Windows went ahead and restarted for me during the night regardless. My computer was locked when this occurred, which leads me to believe Windows assumed I wasn’t “active” and could therefore restart.
This was after already having set group policy not to allow it.
I can’t explain it, but I can assure you it did happen.
Edit: Oops, I guess it doesn’t show in my screenshot, but I have “Configure automatic updates” set to:
That is an common error, shut down Windows is not the same as Power off, with the normal shutdown Windows stay in standby mode and permits to restart faster (not much with an SSD), with this it can still work in background and even restart the system by itself. If you want to avoid this, you must change the power settings, only in this way you have an Power off that really is a Power off. Windows only seems to be easier to handle as Linux, but it isn’t, it’s quite the opposite, only the very basic settings are more at hand.
These are the settings I’ve had for a long time, if that’s what you’re referring to. I thought disabling fast startup would make it completely power off when it shuts down.
Is there another setting I should be using in addition to this? Which power settings must I change?
So true. I’ve always assumed Linux would be beyond my comprehension, but it’s actually much less frustrating than Windows so far.
Edit: After looking around the control panel, I do see that I accidentally had “automatically restart” checkmarked under system failure, but in this case I don’t think that would have applied since it was a pending update, not a system failure.
Even with Fast startup diseabled, it remain a certain hibernation function (hiberfil.sys). Desactivating the Hibernation service fix this problem. Hibernation service is anyway not so important, above its a big memory hog, because duplicate every process to use it as backup if you shut down the system, so if you boot again are also booting this processes, apps or what yo had open before. But in change, it slows down the whole system. At least in my Windows it works as it should. Cold boot last a little longer, but with an SSD are only seconds. PS, instead of the Control panel, use the GodMode function which Windows has
Create a new folder in the Desktop or anywhere
Rename it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
(instead of GodMode you can use any other name, but you can’t change what’s beyond the point)
Done, the folder has change its icon and when you open it, you have an ordered list with access to all possible Windows settings (more than 200), even those that are hidden. As say, something like a Control panel on steroids.
Can I forward our users to you when they want to work and need to wait 30-40 minutes before the stupid Windows update has completed?
Can I forward all our users problems to you when I switch them to Linux?
Don’t forget, all have different hardware setup and different needs. So most likely would need different distros just to perform what they can now on Windows.
Maybe just install some SSD next time instead of complaining about Windows.
Idk, it still takes Windows 10 much longer than I’d expect on my system. I wish it only took 5 minutes
First World problems
“This more complex OS takes 3 more minutes to update completely, oh the horror!”
It really is a first world problem, can’t deny that. Still though, it shouldn’t take that long to install.
Look at pacman on Arch, that thing installs packages so fast, the only meaningful factor for how long an update takes is your download speed
You misspelled a word. Let me correct that for you:
“This bad OS takes 3 more minutes to update completely, oh the horror”
Thank me later.
Just kidding. One thing that is unarguably better with Linux is, is the fact that you can update whenever you want and you can do it in the background while using your computer.