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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Windows update reboots come up on HN every so often, and I still don't understand the problem. Windows is my daily driver, and updates force me to reboot my laptop 2 to 3 times a year. oh no!

Plus, usually I can just schedule the reboot to happen at night when I sleep. All I have to do is click an "restart tonight" button in a notification and then not shut it down that evening. TBH I don't understand why this is considered bad design, especially by the HN crowd.

I suspect that the people who complain about this on HN are mostly people on mac/linux who run windows in a VM 3 to 4 times a year and therefore think that it needs to update-reboot all the time. I felt the same about Firefox (which has relatively noisy updates) before I switched to it as my daily driver.

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I have two pet theories on why this subject comes up as much as it does on HN.

1. Windows Updates were a known quantity for years. Patch Tuesday and so on. Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours - it's almost as if some middle manager MBA who recently graduated said to themselves "how much technical jargon can we throw at 'em?" To what end? I'm not sure. The tin foil hat crowd (which I've been somewhat forced to join) would say that 1. dovetails into 2.

2. Increasing disrespect for the users, which many of we on HN see and hate (see rest of this paragraph), and the vast majority don't see. Privacy invasions which cannot be stopped (minus 'hacks') a la quartering of the kings solders, settings reverting themselves in willful violation of the user's express wishes, and the biggest insult of all, denial of user-control over updates, a feature that has been with Windows for decades. Update control being yanked away from the users, in addition to the telemetry and setting reverting themselves are viewed by many as Microsoft machinations aimed at turning the users into the used.

3. Many people here have company provided Windows PCs that have software on them that forces you to restart for updates far more regularly than Windows itself.

>Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours - it's almost as if some middle manager MBA who recently graduated said to themselves "how much technical jargon can we throw at 'em?"

Controls how often/whether you get feature updates. They're not applicable to home users as they only have access to CB.

>Active Hours

Controls when your computer will auto-reboot

what's so confusing about this again?

Jargon is jargon - to those who know it, it's easy to remember. To those who don't? It might as well be Konami Codes.

Hard for us, who are familiar with this jargon? Not a chance, to your point. To the dad who opens IE, types Google.com into the bing bar, clicks the google.com link, then types his internet search - those words might as well be Elian script.

>Controls when your computer will auto-reboot

>what's so hard about this?

It's not hard. It's that I am out of control of when my PC gets to reboot. It is a small inconvenience, but it should be something I don't have to put up with at all. I've had file updates cut short over "inactive" reboots. 10+ GB downloads that I was hoping to use the following day that never finished due to a restart.

Number 2 really hits the nail on the head. I don't get annoyed when Steam updates and wants to restart. I don't get annoyed when Firefox updates and wants to restart. I don't get annoyed when I have to (rarely) restart my linux machines. Why? Because I have a fairly large degree of certainty that the updates for these are either going to be beneifial for me, or at worst won't screw me over. For Windows, which has done nothing but show disdain towards it's own users, seeing an update causes me nothing but fustration and anxiety (the same goes for Nvidia drivers too).

Also, add the fact that nearly all of these install their updates in the background, and that their restart is actually just a standard restart that will take no longer than a usual cold boot helps a lot, when compared to Microsofts "applying updates screen" where you never know if you're going to be there 5 minutes or over an hour. It's just a terrible situation every time it occurs when others have shown that it really doesn't need to be.

> I don't get annoyed when Firefox updates and wants to restart.

This was true for me until recently on my work machine I went to open a new tab and Firefox forbade it until I restarted for updates. Can do whatever I want with the other tabs, but can't make a new tab. Multiprocess blah blah, it didn't used to be this way. Every tech organization successfully wages war on its own users from time to time and will disappoint you sooner or later.

But yeah, respect for users. Many kinds of malware treat your machine with more respect than Microsoft does.

> Windows Updates were a known quantity for years. Patch Tuesday and so on. Now there are various short-lived concepts like CB, CBB, LTSB, SAC, LTSC, Active Hours

Patch Tuesday is still Patch Tuesday. New patches come out on the same Tuesday every month that it has just about always been that Microsoft implores everyone to install ASAP. (It's always been posted as "ASAP". That's not a recent change in all this.)

The big change is that Microsoft doesn't want to any longer accept "We'll get to it when we get to it" as an answer to "ASAP", and most of the alphabet soup is just variations on what and when "ASAP" is allowed to mean. (But again, the change here isn't that Patch Tuesday means "install these things ASAP", that's always been the messaging on Patch Tuesday. A lot of people just felt entitled to ignore that for as much as years in some cases.)

> But again, the change here isn't that Patch Tuesday means "install these things ASAP", that's always been the messaging on Patch Tuesday. A lot of people just felt entitled to ignore that for as much as years in some cases.

Yeah, those damned users and their feeling of entitlement towards being able to control a thing they bought. Idiots.

Don't you just hate it when your OS vendor cares about herd immunity and user/application security? Such a terrible thing for them to worry about. It's a good thing our devices are so rarely if ever networked together in 2019.~

Yes, I hate it when companies treat me like cattle. You like being treated like cattle?

I think it's not that you don't understand the problem, just that you haven't experienced it.

My Windows 10 machine installs updates that require reboots more than 2 or 3 times a year, but it is configured (and I believed this is the default) to install them and reboot at night, when no-one is using the computer.

So when all goes well, I hardly ever see the computer install an update or reboot because of it: normally this happens when I'm not using it. But last year it got stuck in a cycle of trying to install an update, failing, uninstalling and trying again later. Each attempt took about 15 minutes and required, if I remember correctly, two reboots: one after the attempted installation and one after uninstalling the update. It tried so many times! It seemed to want to try more when I actually needed the computer for something work-related. :)

After trying a bunch of things I found in forums (it seems like it is a very common problem), none of which solved the problem, I reinstalled Windows 10. It's back to normal, updating at night, but I know at any moment Microsoft can screw up another update.

> it got stuck in a cycle of trying to install an update, failing, uninstalling and trying again later

To me, this is one of the biggest issues with Windows Update: it's unreliability. When an update doesn't install, there's no reliable way to get it to work without shutting down services and deleting the updates folder; all technical tasks that most users don't know how to do.

I'm on insider updates and this happens occasionally on builds, but most of the time the updates apply just fine.

> the biggest issues with Windows Update: it's unreliability

I have the same experience, and i always took this for granted... but after i bought a Macbook i learned there are actually operating systems where updating is flawless.

Windows updates are such a huge mess.

Windows has 1+ billion users. If it happens to 1 user in 1 million, there's still going to be 1000 angry users...

I'll give you a few personal examples.

I was visiting my home town and was doing some genealogy work with my mom. When my niece and nephew came over I closed my laptop, not thinking about saving my work. The next day, when I opened up my laptop I found that it had decided to install an update overnight while asleep not connected to power. I lost 2 hours of work due to said update, because the update forced close the app I was using. I hadn't agreed to any update at that time, and back on other versions of windows I have it set inform me of updates before it does it.

For a long while, windows 10 updates would fail on another windows only computer. Any update that needed a reboot would cause a loop where windows would fail to start after update, windows would reboot, uninstall the failed update, and try to reinstall the update the next day. Even a full wipe of the system did fix the issue.

The problem is everything about it is user hostile and all the settings are opaque.

Updates went from a snooze button you could put off indefinitely for 15 min or 4 hours at a time (windows 7) to a one time 15 minute delay after which your computer automatically restarts (windows 10 on release). When you're in an hour-long skype business meeting or raiding a boss with 20+ other people, suddenly being shucked offline is terrible design. And it's not even just the restart, even the download (p2p in W10) can randomly render the pc unusable. And of course the restart is delayed for the installation which takes between zero and infinity minutes because the update wasn't tested properly before it was forcefed to a quarter billion machines. Then there's the actual content where windows update trumps the users decision to delete or limit microsoft apps and installs a bunch of telemetry bullshit you don't want.

Want to get in front of these problems? Good luck because there's no way to easily disable windows update. You can stop the service but it will randomly restart whenever it wants. You can use registry hacks to make it not restart and it will still randomly restart (did so a couple days ago). You can tell windows you have a metered connection but it will randomly ignore this.

Great startup idea: a utility that constantly turns windows update off, allows me to enable it for a few hours and redisables it afterwards. I would pay $20 for that right now.

Are you on Pro or Home?

On my Home edition machines, it's easily more than 3 times a year.

Windows is my daily driver too, and while I generally like Windows, the two things I hate the most are the updates and how bad the search is for launching apps (I know some people are going to chime in and say search is fine, but if you have a lot of apps installed, it can be laughably bad).

I have a laptop on Home that I use a few times aweek. It supports scheduled-at-night updates as well, doesn't it? Maybe I remember wrong.

Indeed my main laptop is on Pro.

Btw I agree that the start menu search is unimaginably bad. Insane how so many gigahertzes can be wasted so much.

Pro is way better for updates.

I'd upgrade my Home edition PC's to Pro, but for the features that I would benefit from (better update behaviour, remote desktop), it's not worth the expense to me. To upgrade an existing license from Home to Pro costs almost the same as buying a new Pro license.

> how bad the search is for launching apps (I know some people are going to chime in and say search is fine, but if you have a lot of apps installed, it can be laughably bad)

I think the variation in experiences is the variation of people with Cortana on. With Cortana on, I've never had a bad experience with app search in Windows 10. Using machines (such as work laptop) with Cortana off there are some very weird moments where search just stalls out that it shouldn't.

I think there are two trends that should help:

1) In Insider builds for the upcoming 19H1 release (round about March) they split app/local-machine search from Cortana UX again, and it's getting a lot more standalone testing because of that. (Pushing Cortana back more to the core voice search / assistant focus.)

2) Microsoft is in the early stages of the process of a big Bing "Enterprise" / "Cortana for Business" push. That may also help reduce some of the search differences between consumer uses of Windows and enterprise uses of Windows.

> I think the variation in experiences is the variation of people with Cortana on. With Cortana on, I've never had a bad experience with app search in Windows 10. Using machines (such as work laptop) with Cortana off there are some very weird moments where search just stalls out that it shouldn't.

My problems have been less with stalling out, than horribly bad guesses at what I'm looking for.

Sometimes it correctly figures out a misspelling, but most of the time it doesn't. Sometimes it won't find a multiword application name unless you type in the first few characters of the first word of the application name. Sometimes you can type in the correct name, and it just pretends the app doesn't exist at all.

Considering that MS makes a search engine and Apple does not, it's suprising how much better Spotlight is at launching apps (I used to get 95+% accurate guess rate) than the Windows Start Search thingamabob is.

The sad thing is that search has been broken since Win7 and they can't make it work despite the vaunted indexing service.

I have Home edition on my home desktop, and I see updates way more than 3 times per year as well. It doesn't really bug me unless the update takes more than a few minutes.

The search is absolutely terrible. And it's inconsistent. Sometimes I can type "no" and it'll come up with Notepad++ immediately. Other times I have to get all the way to the first + before it finds it. And still other times, it can't find it at all. That goes for all programs too, not just Notepad++.

I've somewhat tried using tools like Everything [0] but never given them more than a few tries before uninstalling. Maybe I should do it again.

[0] https://www.voidtools.com/

It's super old, but I've been using launchy[0].

I started using it in the WinXP days, stopped during Win7, (never used win8), and Win10 regressed in this department so badly I've returned to using this ancient software...

[0] https://www.launchy.net/

I've been using a tool called KeyPirinha for launching programs. Configured it to launch when Alt+Space is entered.

http://keypirinha.com/

> I've somewhat tried using tools like Everything [0] but never given them more than a few tries before uninstalling. Maybe I should do it again.

I've tried a bunch of stuff too, and even bought one (Listary), but from a muscle memory perspective, nothing beats hitting the Windows key with my pinky. I guess I could remap the Windows key, but I think that would have too many negative side effects.

I was on Mac as my daily driver for about a decade (but have no desire to go back), and Spotlight worked great as a launcher.

Classic shell fixes the start menu and its search

The problem of course is that your laptop is asleep at night so the update happens 10 minutes after you wake it up in the morning, just as you're getting into your work. They tend to not have a lot of warning either, so people get surprised when their laptop suddenly reboots in the middle of their presentation and their slides are replaced by a "don't power off your machine" screen.

the problem is not the update per se. it is the content. Which completely surprises you after the reboot!

Windows always peak at some new version and then goes downhill when changes are introduced for no good reason. 95/98, then 98+IE6 all over the place (even the desktop wallpaper!). XP, then vista. 8.1, then 10...

Now, after windows 10, the downgrades are incremental!

For example, surface tablet without a keyboard. When you wake the device the touchpad keyboard was always there. After some update, you have to touch the PIN input box to get a keyboard. And sometimes it doesn't show up. You have to lock and unlock the screen and then touch the pin input again. And that is just a very minimal example. Another example is that the first updates completely removed the windows 8.1 window theme, which was perfect for touch based systems. Another one i recall, an update removed the landscape/portrait toggle button and replaced it with a "lock screen rotation" one, that doesn't work in all orientations!

For me the updates always seem to reset and further reduce privacy settings. I don't want cortana or ads, and now I need to hack the registry to get rid of this stuff? What a joke.

If you don't like it, don't use it. I don't like Cortana or ads either, so I don't use Windows, and I don't have any of these problems with forced updates that everyone here is complaining about.

Honestly, I've been watching Windows users complain about Windows for many years now (decades?), and it's somehow both tiring and amusing. I guess humans just never learn.

Yeah, the multitudes of people experiencing problems with Windows over the years must be lying or just stupid, because you personally have nevere encountered those issues.

That's got to be it!

When did I say the people experiencing problems with Windows must be lying or stupid? I don't have these problems because I don't run Windows, plain and simple. Did you miss the line that said "so I don't use Windows"?

Apologies, I was meant to reply to somebody else.

Yeah, I wish I could delete comments here indefinitely after submitting them. There've been several I regretted and wished I could remove after a few days.

Yeah, unless you dual boot when I get stuck for 20mins+, before Windows decides to restart and then goes to "Restoring a previous installation" (or whatever the wording is..) and then I've wasted enough time and just carry on. Que next time I need to boot into Windows and I get to do the same shit again.. Until one time it just actually completes the update.

Oh, and I've been gaming numerous times (when the toast notification is hidden so I don't see it and click it) and then bam, my PC decides to reboot itself.

> Windows update reboots come up on HN every so often, and I still don't understand the problem. Windows is my daily driver, and updates force me to reboot my laptop 2 to 3 times a year. oh no!

Erm, if Windows 10 has only made you your machine reboot 3 times in a year, you're probably running an old and insecure patch version.

Windows is my main dev environment ever since they came out with the Ubuntu vm and shell. I'm surprised your updates are so infrequent. I have some reboot event mess with me every couple weeks. Granted I tend to roam away from my computer when I'm thinking, but it's much more common for me.

My guess is HN users are more likely to have company issued machines with fairly aggressive update policies, making this pain point all the more obvious to them.

Why is your computer on while you're not using it? Most people don't do that.

I don't. Windows tells you that there's an update ready. Keep it on that night only.

> Most people don't do that.

Almost everyone I know does do that.

Don't assume your experience is truth. In my experience, no one I know ever turns their PC off. They'll put them to sleep but never fully off.

Do updates run in sleep mode? That's my point. Scheduling updates for a time your computer can't do it is pointless and it will just eventually get in your way.

Even if they do update, if you're putting your machine in sleep mode, I assume you'd have some state you didn't want to lose. Why would want a surprise in the morning?

Most people defininitely do that.

Gotta keep that globe warm.

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