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Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing is exactly why I have automatic updates disabled on my Windows partition. I've been burned so many times by bad Windows updates breaking stuff. My favourite is when stuff breaks during the "configuring updates" stage after a reboot, leaving Windows in a boot loop with no error codes or anything to help you figure it out. And of course the documentation from MS is utter garbage. Most of the time the only solution I found was to reinstall Windows.

Now I always google around a bit before applying any fresh Windows updates to see of there's any breakage reported.

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My Windows install is stuck in a boot loop like this - it spends 10 minutes trying to update and then fails, except maybe 1/3 times it then boots normally. I don't even try to do anything about it, I just marvel at it.

I have a Thinkpad that did something like this, it would try to install updates, fail and eventually boot into some kind of recovery wizard that demanded the bitlocker key. That wizard wasn't able to actually fix anything either but after failing a few times the system finally would uninstall the update. The whole process took over an hour with zero feedback.

I had to switch to Linux just to get a machine I could rely on.

Last time I saw a computer do that it was due to bad memory sticks.

Yeah, it turns out applying updates during boot is bad design. I'm sure plenty of people at MS realise it is, but I guess they don't care enough to fix it.

Windows can’t replace running executables, so needs to reboot. Fundamental design not easily changed.

Do you dual boot? That's what mine did when the efi partition was too small for grub and windows' bootloader

Yeah, I dual boot. I think my efi partition is around 100mb. I forget if Arch puts just one backup kernel in there, but I feel like I saw a lot of garbage in there once that I had to clear out. Maybe that's the problem, will investigate, thanks.

Yeah, 100mb has been insufficient for some windows updates for me in the past. New windows installs create a 500mb EFI, but Windows 7/8 created a 100mb EFI and kept it if updated to Windows 10. Unfortunately resizing it is a pain, as the EFI partition is normally before your Windows partition.

The last time I had to manages windows I used Unattended to wipe and re-install to a base level. I found that diagnosing and troubleshooting was not worth the effort.

https://tgup.net/

How does tgup compare to ninite? The latter seems more polished and older/stable, with more software available.

https://ninite.com/

if you're at a point you need either of them, just hire someone too work on the oem scripts.

for personal use, not really worth it imo

if you're installing the right version of windows (Enterprise ltsc) it's already one click install. and your applications will change every week anyway.

no idea. This was the early 2000s. I'm sure it's based on the same thing. I set-up a netbsd box as the server and could hook up as many laptop as I had network ports. I would then just hit the enter key or perform a few manually steps when things couldn't be automated.

I'm sure it's all based on silent install or the /s switch for install.bat. If my memory is working.

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