I feel like Windows Update didn't used to be such a shitshow. Was I just not paying close enough attention a decade ago?
1. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever.
Try using the Start Menu.
Nothing will work.
The search upon typing will not show all items.
If you click on a search result, it won't launch.
Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something.
Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists.
Etc...
It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.
There are many similar examples with this same pattern.
This leads to absurd situations where the index show different programs for each letter.
For example on my machine:
Up > Windows Update first
Upd > Lenovo System Update first
Upda > Windows Update first
Update > Lenovo System Update is the only result
When I search for Visual Studio, only a few programs are found. I made a shortcut for the Visual Studio Command prompt because Windows search regularly threw it out of the results. One day it's there, the next it's gone. Horrible UX.
What planet are you from that it takes a server nearly 170 hours of processing time to index... what... a few dozen kilobytes?
And why, for the love of god why, does it have to index the Start Menu!? Why isn't it indexed synchronously on install!?
Why does it even need indexing in the first place!? Do you have any idea how few milliseconds it takes to just brute-force search through a few dozen KB of text?
I implemented real-time character-by-character completion and search for an index over a 100M records in a web application in 2007. Are you telling me that Microsoft, one of the world's biggest corporations struggles to solve the same problem in a week for an amount of text that a child could index using play cards in a matter of minutes?
This is one of those places where Microsoft has let the OEMs that install Windows on 5400rpm hard drives or slower to this day ruin the experience for others. Hence we get this weird performance detection system that tries to guess how slow your system is when it comes to search and seemingly fails miserably at all cases.
It's the fucking OS, that even with its problems (Spotlight has gone downhill on macOS too) is still a generally more pleasant experience than the other 2 options.
I would guess it's something like non-deterministic order of patch installation. Which seems easy to end up doing even if you think it's deterministic. For example, some patches don't finish install until boot time, so unexpected reboots could bork things. Or things like "can't install this patch while X software is running", etc.
flaky hardware?
Admittedly I have a test rig running windows posready 2009, aka w7 with esu cooked in from the beginning for contractual reasons. It is a bit like running windows xp embedded b on a normal desktop but seems good enough that I could use it as a daily driver if I wanted to.
Did you cross over from a parallel universe, because Windows Update always was, to use the term of endearment, a shitshow:
https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+update+deleted+docum...
Now you're forced into it, like it or not.
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
EDIT here's one thread talking about installing some, but not all, patches and updates: https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.backoffice.smal...