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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

Twice I've been bit by the unexpected updates during shutdown during a power failure. At home my UPS is only good for 5 minutes, so I want to shut down as soon as the power goes down. I do that, and Windows starts on "Installing 17 updates", with absolutely no way for me to intervene. And powering down in the middle of OS updates has to be about the worst possible time for it.

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It will simply roll back the half-finished updates and retry the next shutdown. Those things are done transactional. Powering down won't hurt it.

You mean pulling the plug instead of shutting down normally? I suppose that'd work but usually you only realize that Windows wants to update _after_ you hit the shutdown button. And powering the machine down in this state will likely result in an unbootable machine.

And good luck fixing that, especially if your hard-drive is encrypted.

Windows updates fall into various categories in how they are deployed (this also causes variations in whether you need a restart or not). The overwhelming vast majority of updates nowadays are deployed in a rather safe mode where nothing on the system is changed during install until at the very end effectively a switch is made to the newly-deployed components. Those updates tend to not care very much, or at all, about sudden power loss. The next start notices there's an unfinished update and either finishes it, or rolls back and you can try again.

True, but that doesn't really help you, does it. There is no indication on the screen which kind of update is currently being deployed. So shutting down your machine is still a gamble, something you definitely don't want on a production machine.

To use a car analogy: modern car's safety measures would probably protect me in case of an accident, but there is no way of being sure. So I'd rather avoid crashing into things at great cost.

What version of Windows do you use? My desktop uses the latest version of 10 (AFAIK) and the shut down button reads something like "Shut Down and Install Updates" when Windows wants to install an update. I also remember 7 having a little orange icon next to the shut down button when it was going to install an update.

Granted, I don't think there's a way to properly shut down without the update in an I-have-five-minutes scenario. But it does, at least, warn you.

IIRC there is. You can log out, and then have the option to not apply the updates (you'll have Shut down or update and shut down in the poweroff menu).

You can shutdown without applying updates if you use 'Alt + F4' to initiate shutdown

Running shutdown -s -t 0 works.

Add a -f to that too, I have never seen a windows with pending updates install them with "shutdown -s -t 0 -f"

For what it's worth, I regularly "pull the virtual plug" on my Win10 VM during updates because fuck you it's time to go home, and I've never had it fail to boot the day after. It's obviously an unacceptable solution to the problem, but it's at least not disastrously fatal in most cases.

As a Windows system admin, I can confirm this is incredibly rare. Windows is pretty darn good at recovering from broken update states.

Eh, honestly compared to other operating systems it's really not. Windows 10 is starting to get there.

So the message 'do not turn off your computer' is just a suggestion?

"It's now safe to turn off your computer."

Why it couldn't be an "install updates now?" prompt with default set by the admin is beyond me.

> Powering down won't hurt it.

Usually. I see enough students who mess up their machines due to hard poweroffs during updates to say that sometimes it does not work out.

Anecdotally I'm 1-for-1 on forced shutdown breaking Windows 10. It messed up the users user account; recovery was done by rolling back in System Restore.

So I'll go with powering down shouldn't hurt it.

It wasn't however update related. The user went to shutdown, the computer said "no" (apps are open, blah blah) and the user held the power button down.

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