Feature updates are the bigger updates to Windows 10, released twice a year, that are probably more akin to the service packs of yore than regular updates or full releases. Microsoft is improving the process of installing these larger updates.
The Windows Fundamentals team focuses on the underlying technologies that are used to install feature updates as well as a host of other things. We’ve heard your feedback about the lengthy amount of time your PC is unusable during a feature update installation, and we’ve been working on ways to decrease this time. Today, I am excited to share more details about the improvements we’ve made to the feature update experience.
For as much as Windows has problems, I really like that Microsoft is working on improving things like this. It would be very easy for them to set low-level work like this aside in favour of flashy stuff that’s easy to show off in an ad blurb, so I appreciate the effort put in addressing less sexy problems like this.
A faster, less invasive update process is always welcome.
It would be more like a slower, less invasive update process actually.
They didn’t actually change much. They are doing a bigger part of the PRE and POST setup while the system is online (which causes system slowdown and sometimes some issues) so they have to do less during the OFFLINE setup where people cannot use their system at all and are just waiting for setup to do its thing.
I’ve been a Mac person for 15 years, but watching Microsoft aggressively iterate on their desktop OS as Mac languishes and Linux remains perpetually incomplete, makes me eye it for my daily driver with ever more interest.
I don’t like some of the underpinnings, but they listen to and respond to feedback from users really well. Might actually be a usable OS in a couple more years.
Windows has been a usable OS for decades now, just like Linux and OSX. Basically every piece of software that you want to run on it will run on it, all the hardware is supported, crashes are extremely rare, security is good, operating it is easy….and that basically applies to all three major OS’s. We are living in boring, but good times.
Now if anyone could tell me how to perform a feature update (like the upcoming 1709 to 1803) completely offline that would be greatly appreciated
that’s what I get for medium-sarcastic commentary without appropriate flagging. I definitely agree that it’s a usable OS by the criteria that you mentioned (and have run many many virtual and baremetal installations over the years). I just don’t like the philosophical underpinnings (like the horrible fcking mess that is the registry) or the UI paradigms very much (specifics of which escape me at the moment); I’m pretty darn Mac & Unix acclimated.
Good luck with the install…
(I’m not sure whether or not that “offline” was a typo.) I think the closest to completely offline is to download the iso, mount it, and run setup.exe – offline, but still not unattended.
Offline means “while the OS isn’t running”.
So “dism /image:c:\” instead of “dism /online”.
It is very easy to:
* Install an OS “clean” while offline
* Install a customized/sysprepped OS while offline
* Upgrade an existing OS while online
but I have never succesfully managed to upgrade an OS while it was offline
(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/offline-mig…)
“Very easy” might be a bit of an overstatement but Windows has come a long way with regards to managing upgrades and machine migrations. I wish I had time to fully grok the migration xml files so I could capture more of what I wanted automatically but that project always gets pushed to the back burner. I’ll take 90% and do the rest manually.
I’m mostly just looking to grab firefox profiles and a few config files that get littered in appdata, but compared to mindlessly grabbing files and folders out of c:\users, it’s a big improvement. When you’re in an environment with thousands of desktops and 20% yearly hardware refreshes, you’ll take any port in a storm.
One last thing on Windows 10: as much as I hate how fickle certain things have become (customizing the start menu and task bar spring to mind), they have (theoretically) become easier to set programatically which (again, theoretically) means you’ll only need to figure it out once. Just wish it didn’t feel like I had to figure everything out on the fly. I figure once I have everything humming perfectly, Windows.NEXT will get released and just be a browser session linked to a desktop session hosted on Azure. Can’t hardly wait.
Will they stop needlessly uninstalling my RSAT, and leave my damn search and privacy settings alone for a change?
Funny what 8 years of iPad and 10 years of Macbook Air did to the computer industry. Today’s Microsoft talks about better UI “smoothness”, less system requirements, better boot times and better update speeds.
The Microsoft of 8 years ago talked about the ever increasing download size of their .NET framework, WinFS, more background services and higher system requirements, system requirements that were increasing at a rate faster than Moore’s law. Which is why PC laptops just before the 1st gen iPad was released and at the same time the Air was released were actually getting bigger, with dedicated GPUs becoming a must and cooling fans becoming beefier and faster (and noisier) to cool the larger CPUs and GPUs. There were non-Apple ultraportables sure, but couldn’t really handle the Windows OS without crawling.
So, thank you Apple for that. Also thank you for integrating an antivirus with the OS so OS vendors can’t blame the AV vendors for the slowness of their OS.
I may not like Apple as a company, but they led the way to ultraportables, gotta give them that.
Edited 2018-03-26 19:06 UTC
Yeah, but THE REBOOTS, stop with the reboots FFS.
Reinstalling a system (lucky me that the new system came with 1709 last week) yields a bunch of updates, while the whole online-offline thing works, it still needs an unreal number of reboots. Comparing that to any Linux update where after the first reboot you’re up to date and you’re just done… wow…
That literally can’t happen without a fundamental rewrite of file handling mechanics in Windows. Every file open is an exclusive lock, which is why you can’t just rewrite system files while they’re in use like on *nix, which in turn requires a special update mode that leaves the system itself unusable and thrashes disk for hours on end.
Edited 2018-03-26 21:30 UTC
I prefer an extra reboot than update process changing files while the process that relies on that file runs, causing weird crashes.
Updating needs 2 reboots on Windows 10.
The 1st one to really start the installation after “Preparing to install / Downloading / Installing / Restart now”
The 2nd one at 30%
A clean install also takes 2 reboots.
The 1st after applying the install.wim to the C:\
The 2nd after searching for devices.
(or more technically speaking, before and after the specialize configuration pass)
Edited 2018-03-26 22:33 UTC
This would be nice. The other day it was like this:
“Preparing to update” 1 hour
“Downloading update” 1 hour
“Installing update” 1 hour
“Finalizing update” after reboot 30 minutes
This process has gotten ridiculous and need streamlining bigtime!
Windows 10 Insider Preview 17128.1 (rs4_release)
23:33 Preparing to install
23:38 Downloading
23:41 Installing
23:53 (Restart now)
00:14 All programs loaded again
So 20 minutes while online and 21 minutes while offline
^^The above was on a Windows 10 Enterprise
On Windows 10 Home it was quite different but took basically the same amount of time in total
00:09 Preparing to install
00:12 Downloading
00:18 Installing
00:38 (Restart now)
00:49 All programs loaded again
So 29 minutes while online and only 11 minutes while offline
The Home system was a much cleaner installation with less software, less old stuff, less drivers, no domain, no VPN, etc. It also had less powerful hardware
Lucky you. I started the process, took my shower and got ready to go to work, checking the computer before I left the house and it was at 5% “Preparing to Update”. I came home during lunch and it was still performing the update. I am on the Windows Insider program, the computer was doing the latest update available last week. This process does indeed need a bit of work for some people.
I realize this website isn’t meant for support issues, but either you have a very full/slow HDD or something is blocking the upgrade process. When something like this happens I always rely on the following trick:
1) Check your system (chkdsk, sfc)
2) Reboot your system
3) Throw away the c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution folder (you might need to stop some services)
4) Try again
I hate all the Windows Installation caches that are left everywhere and are only needed in situations where you will most likely have other issues that have corrupted these caches. However, I don’t recommend using 3rd party cleaners like CCleaner, just use the tooling built into Windows like cleanmgr and dism
There still is an interesting bug with this over metered connection, where Windows tries to download and install the same feature update over and over again (until you decide to clear the SoftwareDistribution cache).
Also happened during clean install..
That sounds like a major bug. When using “metered connection” there simply shouldn’t be any download of feature updates (or even regular updates) unless you turned the “Automatically download updates, even over metered data connections (charges may apply)” setting on. Of course that setting is disabled by default and I don’t think it is synched through your Microsoft Account settings so it should never happen on a clean install.
But again, this is not a support forum so this is as far as I will reply to this. File a bug so it gets fixed
P.S. Currently running the “17133/final/RTM” version of 1803 on my work machine and haven’t found any blocking issues for our company yet. If an Enterprise ISO was available I would start a rollout for new machines (we are used to always running the latest version of everything)
P.S.2 Currently running the 17627 RS5 build on my home machine. No idea how I can test out Sets, multiple desktops also doesn’t seem to be improved, but no issues either