If there’s one thing Windows users hate about Windows, it’s Windows updates interrupting your workflow or gaming session with a popup asking you to restart your PC finish installing the latest security update. It happens at least once a month, because that’s how often Microsoft rolls out security updates to Windows PCs.
This may soon be a thing of the past, as the company is now testing an update method called “hot patching” for Windows 11 PCs. Hot patching is already in use on some Windows Server editions, as well as Xbox, and now it appears the company is preparing to bring it to devices running Windows 11.
↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central
A welcome, good improvement every Windows user is going to benefit from. This is the kind of improvements Microsoft should really be focusing on, instead of adding more ads or useless “AI” features.
Anyone who minds reboots because of updates can easily avoid updates by marking the connection as a metered one.
It also offers the bonus of windows updates reverting user’s preferences back to defaults to enable collecting data and forcing ads.
I don’t update my computers anymore, since I realized Microsoft uses updates as an excuse to re-enable their ads.
For about 20 years Windows had a decent settings stack (registry) and settings app (control panel). Now it is impossible to know which setting is kept where.
I see only two solutions: The first is to move to Linux, which is the sensible thing to do, but which isn’t an option for me as the application in which I spend about 20 hours a week isn’t and won’t be available in Linux.
The second one is to freeze my Windows installation by disabling the updates at the cost of living without tabs in notepad. Well… I guess I can do that.
Hold up… You don’t apply Any updates? Do you use this machine for any kind of professional work? (I’m assuming yes from the 20 hour a week requirement).
While I understand updates can sometimes be frustrating, not doing them might also open you up to professional liability. In the UK that could take the form of ICO and/or GDPR.
It also poses a genuine risk for others sharing professional (often cloud based) services at the org.
No it does not (except in theory). This is a third world country. Neither the laws, nor the courts are developed enough to deal with such cases. Anyway, my line of work isn’t worth suing.
I do understand the benefits of not crossing the street in the red light. I do understand the benefits of vaccines. I do understand the benefits of not drinking expired milk. I don’t understand, however, what benefit windows updates bring to a poor freelancer working behind a router with firewall. Windows updates feel like an endless pit of scaremongering. And Microsoft is trying hard to kill any goodwill remaining towards updates, by using them to revert user settings to avoid ads.
Does your firewall block outbound connections except to known trusted sites? Does it filter web traffic including ssl interception?
The idea that a firewall blocking incoming traffic makes you immune to attack is a hangover from the days of XP which had a bunch of services exposed externally by default. Modern windows does not expose any services by default, so even if you put it on a fully unfiltered connection and leave it unattended it won’t be compromised (even with years of no updates).
Systems these days are compromised via applications which make outbound connections – exploits of your browser when you visit a hostile site, exploits of your office software when you open a malware laden document etc, phishing attacks where the user is tricked into opening something malicious etc.
End user desktops are not compromised via inbound connections to open ports and haven’t been since the days of xp/sp2.
You must be the only freelancer in a 3rd world running that is not running a torrented copy of Windows Pro (aka the one without ads).
It’s safer to have update without reboot than no update at all.
hotpatching is a widespread feature on Linux, but it’s usually on subscription.
The reason is that it’s a significant programming effort to facilitate this. You don’t just drop in new library, it has to hook into running code in specific ways. And on linux, if internal data structures change – things get complicated really quickly.
[email protected],
Yeah this is definitely non trivial. I know redhat offers hot patchable kernels but don’t know much about it personally. Only some types of changes can be patched in and IIRC some structures even reserve some space for future patches.
Am I right that redhat only does this sort of hot patching for the linux kernel and doesn’t do anything special with userspace applications? Most linux applications can be updated transparently in the background and get updated when new processes are launched. This is far easier to do on linux because it doesn’t have the same file locking semantics as windows.
Thom, you should talk to an AI about your AI anxiety. They can be quite insightful. 😉
drstorm,
As much as some want AI to fail, to me it seems likely to become increasingly important to our futures. So it makes sense that MS are investing in it. Personally I don’t feel AI is innately good or bad, but I admit it’s hard to trust that companies are going to use it only for things that are socially positive.
On the topic of AI & jobs…
“No more people taking your drive thru orders?”
https://www.tiktok.com/@brentapotamus/video/7314391007691328810
“Wendy’s, Google preview partnership with new AI-powered drive-thru”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkaGk-hLR4c
I’m not saying that I like this, but we need to open our eyes and see that this is going to continue happening. It’s only just starting, more and more jobs will keep being displaced by AI. Of course they’re tackling the lowest fruit first, but we can’t be naive about where things are headed. A significant number of jobs are in the cross hairs in the coming years and very few people are truly ready for it.
One of the easiest jobs in the world to automate would be the lawyer. Once AI starts encroaching on that field, laws will be put up against it. 85% of the current US congress is lawyers. (it used to be less than 30%). Representing the people? My A**!
I was thinking conveyencing (house purchase lawyering). It’s driven so heavily by convention and regulations that it’s fairly simple to automate and highlight any abnormal clauses.
NaGERST,
I agree that AI is coming for intellectual jobs too.
I’m not sure how many people on osnews follow US politics, but what’s going on is absolutely pathetic! Their productivity is so low they could stay home and do nothing and get the same job done. Too many of them see it as their job to sabotage the government and they’ve become expert stonewallers to make sure that those who take the job seriously can’t get anything done. Unfortunately this isn’t the byproduct of a broken process that could be fixed, for many of them this is their true goal 🙁
You could argue the roles like drive through orders are up for grabs because they no longer add value (to the buisness or customer).
Let’s be honest, they listen to your order, then input that same information into the computer that are Sat at. In my expirience have made a number of mistakes in doing so. If the voice recognition is better than Alexa, then it feels like a win win for everyone other than the worker.
Adurbe,
I saw one of the revamped wendys and other than a window to the kitchen where your food comes out, it was designed to be an entirely humanless experience. I actually had trouble placing the special order I wanted and I ended up getting something else instead, haha. There was nobody to go to to fix it. Anyway, I pretty sure this is the future regardless. Maybe some patrons don’t mind but we’re loosing the human touch.
What do you think of machines replacing cashiers in stores? This is becoming quite prevalent and IMHO the experience is getting worse. Just the other day another customer was talking about this very thing, many people feel the experience becomes worse, and meanwhile the wage savings get passed on to customers in the form of higher prices :-/
On that last point, all this automation should be making things cheaper, but companies are planning to exploit the power of automation to find ways to raise prices even higher. For example wendys is planning to roll out surge pricing in 2025…
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/wendys-plans-ai-powered-menu-to-change-food-prices-based-on-demand-weather/
If this is the future of AI and automation, then I’m afraid consumers aren’t the real benefactors of it.
It was probably some AI that showed MS a way forward to achieve it’s no reboot goal.
I don’t mind rebooting; It’s not the end of the world; A couple minutes of downtime isn’t too much to ask of a user in exchange for improved security and function. That is assuming the update doesn’t raw dog anything, which Microsoft doesn’t have a stellar reputation for avoiding. So will this “new” hot-patching Mircosoft is salivating over cause things to break immediately after you click install/apply/update/whatever, or will you still have to wait to reboot to get access to that feature?
This comes to mind whenever windows updates are mentioned in this site…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX5rjTramis