How can I stop Windows 10 updates? Whether it’s preventing Windows 10 from kicking off a critical update during a presentation, or deferring Microsoft’s Windows 10 feature update because of worries about data loss, it’s a question we’ve all asked. You shouldn’t block all Windows 10 updates. But you can manage them.
Unpopular opinion incoming that will trigger a lot of people: if a Windows Update reboot ruins your live presentation or prevents you from studying, it’s your own damn fault. Windows doesn’t just update out of the blue – it downloads and installs whatever it can in the background, and it takes a long, long time before it just goes into rebooting your device to complete the installation process. Windows gives warnings and plenty of time for you to manually reboot your device, and if it’s a device that’s running all the time – like desktops often do – it will just reboot automatically overnight.
Computers require maintenance, and modern computers actually require very little of it, with updating their software being one of the very few things users still have to do. Nobody bats an eye at cleaning their kitchen and its appliances or sticking to their car’s maintenance schedule, but suddenly, when it comes to computers, nobody seems to be willing to accept the same responsibility.
If you have an important presentation tomorrow, just check Windows Update to make sure everything’s up to date. Not doing so and having your presentation ruined by a reboot? Shouldn’t have ignored the warnings for weeks.
the masses are stupid and ignorant when it comes to desktop computer use. Hell, most of them can barely figure out how to organize their own files, or even format a cell in Excel. When many millions of people use computers and the vast majority are too ignorant to know how to properly use them, you get things like this.
No, it wouldn’t be right to require a competency certificate before being allowed to use a computer (personal computers are a hugely democratizing force after all) so good on those who got burned. Maybe, just maybe they’ll go learn another useful tidbit or two.
Edited 2018-10-30 00:12 UTC
> If you have an important presentation tomorrow, just check Windows Update to make sure everything’s up to date. Not doing so and having your presentation ruined by a reboot? Shouldn’t have ignored the warnings for weeks.
This is a disturbingly authoritarian opinion.
Shouldn’t computers obey their users and not a corporation? Thom, what you say here is completely at odds with previous strong opinions you’ve stated objecting to corporate influence in computing. And it’s also at odds with strong opinions you’ve stated regarding a digital freedoms.
Is there a value system underlying your snarky editorials, or are they just contrarian for the sake of being contrarian?
Edited 2018-10-30 01:53 UTC
Yes, and they do — as long as you spend all of five minutes to configure Active Hours.
RT.
Which is of absolutely no use whatsoever.
Maybe we’re living in two different realities, then?
Since day one (okay, I started with 1511) it never ever pulled the proverbial rug from under my feet. Not once.
If I had to, I’d rather complain about its “all or nothing” approach to patches, but that’s a different story.
RT.
Have you seen the interface for Active Hours by any chance? The incomprehensible one that tells you what the Active Hours actually are.
I’d say the balance of evidence is against you– then again, you might be like my friend who goes into a new system, and disables all the services he thinks shouldn’t be running.
And then wonders why his computer constantly acts peculiar.
The balance of evidence is not against me. Why? We have this article, and Windows Updates still present a problem for people because a person’s Active Hours never fit what the OS wants.
If Windows had a proper package management system this wouldn’t be necessary. Telling the user is wrong because of Windows’s technical deficiencies is not an answer.
Edited 2018-11-01 15:12 UTC
Neither. It should do whats best for the user, weather or not the user understands what this is. And that’s mostly what happens here. There are edge cases that suck. This is true. But most of the time it just works(TM).
On the whole, security updates are good for computers. They desperately need them in a timely fashion.
If you think “what is best for the user” is rebooting in the middle of a business presentation you are severely out of touch with the user.
The operating system is a tool for the user, the user should not need to worry that it’s going to act against their best interest.
Agreed. And the user should take care to maintain that tool, but sadly most do not so the tool must take care of itself. It is often difficult to balance what is best for the user in the long run vs short run. You’ll only ever hear the complains when it gets it wrong. Never, when it saved the users ass silently in the background.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Once I had an update happen right when I was about to go on a trip. I had to leave quickly and couldn’t abort it, I was so pissed off about it and I couldn’t let it kill my battery, so I did a forceful shutdown. Luckily it was fine and I was able to complete the updates successfully later, but I absolutely despise having been put in that scenario against my will. Forced updates a are shitty thing to do to someone. Also, MS updates take way too long for no damned reason! Get off my lawn microsoft!
Does your car force you into oil changes? Does your furnace force you into replacing the air filter? It’s complete bullshit that software should ever force actions because its’ creator thinks its job is to babysit the user. You can increasingly warn/nag the user but to simply force changes, that have repeatedly proven to be very problematic (if not disastrous) be it breaking drivers, leaving the computer in an unusable state, deleting data it had no business touching in the first place, etc, … is unacceptable. The user owns the hardware, not the other way around, and the user has every right to take any risk they want with their own property while an OS has no right to impede.
Yes, there are other options – Windows is not the only OS out there.. But that’s not the point! No OS should be policing the user – at least not in regards to personal/privately owned computers.
Microsoft trained Windows users to never shut their systems down (and instead leave their systems go to suspend or hibernate). Windows being clumsy at booting also was a factor (hint: your Windows system hasn’t booted unless the little white flag appears at the task bar, before that the act of booting still steals resources). Now that reboots are required for patching they have to un-train their users. Or just reboot the user’s system without permission and tell users to go stick their head in a pig. Both ways work for Microsoft…
Edited 2018-10-30 15:41 UTC
Actually, it’s common sense. You don’t (well, shouldn’t) walk into an important presentation without making sure your clothes are clean and neat, and that your presentation is spell-checked. Intelligent people have a backup copy of their presentation on a USB stick in case of emergency.
If it’s so important that it must go off without a hitch, then yes, you should apply any pending updates the night before, and make sure the battery is fully charged.
It’s called “being prepared”.
No. What’s “common sense” is that a computer should not be taking it upon itself to do things the user hasn’t requested or approved. But, playing along with your theory, let’s say Mr. Presenter does update his system prior to his big show. And that update completely hoses his system, as is common with Windows updates. Or may it installs a stable driver with a newer but less or unstable driver which Mr. Presenter only finds out about when the computer freezes in the middle of his showing.
“Being prepared” is one thing, being a victim is something else. And you’re trying to blame the victim.
That’s actually bitten me in the ass on a few occasions. Unless it’s a major update, it doesn’t tell you it’s going to reboot.
I’ve seen windows updates ruin a day at a user conference… show up at conference, turn on “demo computer”, walk away to get some coffee, come back to an hour long reboot of the machine after it downloads updates and reboots unexpectedly.
It’s a fucking disaster when it happens, and the user has almost no idea that it’s about to ruin their day.
It’s inexcusable really, somehow my android phone gets regular updates without forcing me to install and reboot them without my consent. Yet Windows forces it upon me when I least expect it. I arrive at my computer the next morning and find that it has installed updates and reboot… Several things I had running the day before are now stopped, various applications are telling me I can recovery files that didn’t get saved properly, etc.
It is the one thing that has pushed me to the brink of ditching Windows altogether.
Upgrade to Linux. Or work for a company that has an IT department that actually manages their systems.
> If you have an important presentation tomorrow, just check Windows Update to make sure everything’s up to date.
This is an incredibly stupid comment to make. Adding things one needs to check (probably right along with that silly vga dongle) needlessly takes away attention, increasing the chances that something will go wrong.
Windows should get the f#** out of the way and let people do their work and has been doing a poor job of doing that since vista. This, imo, broken update process is just another symptom of this problem.
Edited 2018-10-30 04:00 UTC
Funny you should mention that– Vista was the first version of Windows that took security seriously.
You know it’s people like you that are responsible for Microsoft’s draconian attitude towards patching? Because given your comments, you’re one of those people who delays critical updates for weeks or months, and then complains when your system gets hacked.
This. Although still not secure for my taste, since UAC tends to be all or nothing…
Surprise, Thom prefers dictatorial power 😉
No, it is not OK to reboot without my consent, destroying my work environment (10-20 open apps and files) overnight or not.
Seriously. This is only a Microsoft Windows problem for a reason. The entire premise of modern versions of Windows is that you do not own your operating system – they do.
Intrusive ads, intrusive updates, etc.
My Mac/Linux systems don’t have this problem.
Actually– I don’t have these problems on my Windows 10 installation, either.
I have never been beaten up by the police, so I’m suggesting that probably people who have been are making it up or didn’t treat the policemen well enough.
/s
So… you’re saying Windows 10 is racist and/or abusive?
I wasn’t suggesting anything, merely making an observation.
Most of the time ( Not all, I get it), you do get a bazillion warnings that you need to install updates. So, again, most of the time if this happens its your fault for not taking a break and saving your work.
Really. Set your wifi connection to “managed”, disable the windows update and the b.i.t.s. services, and you should be fine. Manually re-enable every once in a while when you want it, let all the updates roll in, then disable all of it again. Not saying it’s something average users would do, but it can be done. I’ve long accepted that there will probably never be a usable windows update process, ever, so if you want to use windows, you’ll have to live with the constant workarounds.
1. Doesn’t help on a wired connection.
2. Windows STILL downloads updates over a connection set to managed.
Edited 2018-10-30 10:45 UTC
What’s worse with Windows updates is their install time. It just takes too long to install the updates, on Linux you just download the packages, update them (while still using the system) and then just reboot the system. This takes at most 10 minutes including the time spent downloading, when I get a huge bunch of updates on my Manjaro system. On Windows it easily take 30 mins without counting the time spent downloading the updates, and I saw reports on Reddit about updates which took as long as 4 hours to finish.
I’m using Windows just to play games now and then and I completely disabled Windows Updates because I don’t want to waste half an hour looking to a progress screen and to a computer rebooting two or three times just to install some updates. Windows Update is simply a mess and I’m not the only ones who is pissed off because of this.
Edited 2018-10-30 07:22 UTC
Same here, staying on Win7 SP1 until (modern) linux gaming becomes ubiquitous.
[double post – removed]
Edited 2018-10-31 13:56 UTC
I agree that it is their own fault but for different reasons. Windows gives higher priority to doing what Microsoft wants than it gives to doing what the user wants. So if the user wants to do things with his computer that are not Microsoft-approved then he should have replaced his OS for something that gives the highest priority to the user.
When you use Windows you must accept that your PC is under Microsoft’s control and that you only get to borrow control over it to the extend that Microsoft thinks is good for Microsoft.
It wouldn’t be such a sore point if Windows could update gracefully, but the process is excruciating. It downloads the updates at speeds that makes you think you are on a 56K modem. Then it needs to reboot several times to apply the updates and it makes you think that shiny new Ryzen processor has been replaced by an AMD K6. After wasting at least 20 minutes of your time with that lovely spinning set of dots, it boots to the desktop again and in that time it only managed to update the base OS. You still need to do all the installed applications seperately.
Contrast that with a typical Linux distro update run. Quickly download the packages, swiftly install them in the background and only if there is a kernel update, a reboot is recommended. As a bonus, the base OS and all the updates for the applications are done.
I mean, why is it necessary for mac and windows to reboot?
As mentioned linux updates on a daily basis and never needs to reboot, even if you install another kernel.
Install? Sure. Run the new kernel? You wish!
And keep in mind that if a shared library is updated, whatever application was using it, will keep using the same outdated, possibly vulnerable version until you restart it.
RT.
No, you do need to reboot to actually use the new kernel (t least, if you’re being a sane person and not using live patching). You also need to reboot in many cases to use other types of updates (libc updates essentially require a reboot, systemd updates technically do, etc).
Really this is the case on Windows too, it’s just that effectively every update looks like a libc update, because it’s updating code that applications are using, so if you don’t restart all the applications you’re running unpatched code. Windows made the policy choice to force a reboot; Linux lets users decide. See http://www.osnews.com/thread?664231 .
The reason it doesn’t stage updates while running then reboot (which Linux updaters typically do) is the risk of exposing “torn state” where an application can observe a new version of one binary and an old version of another, which may not be compatible. This is something Linux updaters don’t seem to care about, but they have the same risk.
I disagree that it’s something Linux updates don’t care about. There’s been a pretty big push recently to get transnational updates working (SuSE is the only platform that has them though if you don’t count stuff like NixOS which has had them since it originated).
The reality is though that other than cases like libc, libstdc++, and a couple of other odd libraries, torn state rarely even matters on Linux because of how most things work.
> Windows gives warnings and plenty of time for you to manually reboot your device
This is simply not true. And that’s the problem.
It is true– but not if you’re running Windows 10 Home. Even for Windows Home, you can tell the system not to update between 8am and 5pm (for example).
And of course, you’d know that if you read the article.
Windows ignores Active Hours if Microsoft thinks that an update is of particular importance.
Yeah, you should stay up to date.
The problem is that updates actively interfere with regular usage of the system for many people.
Take for example the reason I hate them. I have a laptop that I dual boot. Windows seems to think that booting into Windows is a cue that I want it to check for updates, which it then promptly downloads. Except, 95% of the time when I boot into Windows, it’s to game, and the system suddenly using all the network bandwidth is a pretty serious issue for me. As a result of this, I’ve had to configure old ‘ask before downloading’ behavior through a local GPO (yes, you actually can get the old behavior, but you need 10 Pro to actually do it) and hope that Microsoft decides to keep supporting it on 10 Pro. This in turn means I get nagged every damn day because I can’t configure Windows Defender definitions updates to just run automatically (they never cause any issues, it’s the actual Windows updates that do).
Now, keep in mind, this is coming from someone who religiously builds local updates for their Linux systems daily. The fact that I would rather take the performance hit from building GCC or LLVM in the background for an hour or more than have to deal with updates on Windows should be pretty indicative that there’s an issue with the way Microsoft handles updates.
I think that is the first time I’ve genuinely been pissed off at a comment on osnews.com. Windows update is a horrible experience. PERIOD. I don’t even have to fight for my onion because the internet and Microsoft’s user testing forums are all ready full of people who have made this case.
“just check Windows Update to make sure everything’s up to date” is also a terrible idea.
https://www.howtogeek.com/369656/dont-click-check-for-updates-unless…
TLDR here is that, yes, you get all available updates, and the downside is that you get them in some cases well before they would-have or should-have been offered to you.
Several Windows 10 updates on my maching worked fine, but since 1803 was released they’ve failed. Only security updates install. Features version is stuck at 1709.
Background – it’s perhaps a non-standard install – with a primary SSD plus a secondary spinning HD on a Lenovo T540p laptop – I have Win 10 Pro on SSD and a second Win 10 Pro install plus a linux install on separate partitions of the spinning HD.
Every few weeks (even after I disabled updates via a registry hack; Windows eventually overwrote and re-enable win updates) “my” computer tries…and then fails to install a new feature set to my OS – and I can’t turn it off, just postpone for a while. Eventually I have no more choice, windows will reboot, update – partially, fail, sloooooowly roll-back to 1709 and I’m back where I started.
Only MS can fix this issue. I can’t, open source hackers can’t. But they, MS, don’t….
And it NOT my fault.
Thanks
Offtopic, but disable power saving for wifi card. Helped my relative with her Lenovo laptop, may help you too
Bullsh*t. Right now, with 1809 I’ve gone through this mess again. My windows install is virtualized and I only bring it up once every 3-4 days for some specialized engineering applications that have no Linux or Mac equivalent. But I do bring it up every few days!
Let me give you my experience from a few days ago:
Windows did not warn me that it planned to install 1809 it was just the shutdown button that became Update+Shutdown. I pressed it, unwilling to fight it. Since most updates are minor, this seemed harmless.
It was only the second day, in the middle of a major incident with more than 15000 affected customers that I couldn’t access my Windows install because it wanted to continue the update to 1809. Oh shit, it wasn’t a minor update.
It took 15 minutes (on a 1TB PCI-E SSD) for it to decide it wanted to rollback. Windows is the only OS where in half of major updates it wants to roll the fuck back. YUM+RPM works. PKG on macOS works. APT+DEB works, but Windows is just fucking slower by orders of magnitude and painfully buggy. They have a gazillion application distribution and patching mechanisms (APPX, WindowsUpdate, MSI+MSP, etc.), one more useless than the other.
I finally log on to my Windows instance and due to a small software issue with the drivers I have to reboot again. But it wanted to install the same shit AGAIN. That is the moment when I call my Windows team and tell them to use GPO or whatever else to fuck the windows update mechanism before my laptop flies through a window.
First of all it uses incredible amounts of resources. If you don’t mine crypto or play games, TrustedInstaller is the biggest CPU and memory hog in Windows. Bigger than the applications that we run. Actually, I suspect that 60% of the used resources on our Windows machines are actually .NET recompiles and TrustedInstallers. Due to the incredibly bad performance of the installer, Windows tries to do as much of the install in the background before the critical and agonizing 15 fucking minutes in the reboot. This is insane and the worst experience of ANY OS out there including the likes of Solaris, AIX and alike.
On a macOS you won’t find minor version updates that require two steps (one before the reboot and one after), at most they just have a wizard after the reboot to get your iCloud password again and to accept any changes in the license, but after the reboot you are productive within 30 seconds as long as you know the password. In Windows, after the reboot you find out that it takes another 15 minutes.
If they can’t fix it another way, they should use a KExec-like mechanism at shutdown to move into another ramdisk-based setup mode of Windows.
I’m not Windows NT agnostic, I am intricately familiar with the NT Family starting from NT 3.5 and still have the Windows NT/2000/XP Resource Kit books on my shelf. I’ve developed a bootloader for it for some special x86 hardware, changes to HALs, IO Filters, etc. This is not my job anymore, and my experience with Windows 10 from an update perspective is so excruciatingly bad that I can’t get myself to ever use a Windows laptop just for fun. When 1803 appeared, I’ve attempted to understand where it fails, but the logs are so bad that my 30 minute budget wasn’t enough. It is now easier figure out problems with CRS+RAC+OracleDB problems faster than client Windows. So a warm fuck you to all the architects that can’t get the platform update mechanism right on Windows.
For major updates, on modern SSDs it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes and 60 cpu seconds to do it with a single reboot and 99% of the actions BEFORE the actual CPU reset.
For minor updates, we shouldn’t even feel them.
For all updates, successful updates should be about 5σ (250 failures out of 1 million attempts or a failure rate of 0.023%). In our experience of 200 windows stations it’s more like 2.5σ (15% failure rate). This means that the idiots that designed this shouldn’t be trusted with writing a robots.txt on a web server.
The OS isn’t bad. However, the installation mechanisms are catastrophic. If they can’t think of anything else they should at least use a union filesystem to overlay changes on top of a read-only and replaceable image of Windows. That would make major OS upgrades painless and fast.
When the user is moving the mouse and pressing on the keys, don’t restart.
The humble screensaver had figured out the correct behaviour on this decades ago.
It’s not that simple?
I’m so happy I can use Ubuntu at home and at work. The OS does what _I_ want.
I’ve been running Windows 10 Pro since before Windows 10 was released. It has never forced an update on me. It follows my set Active Hours and it informs me ahead of time if there’s an update pending. It offers to schedule an installation time for me. It’s never been a hassle.
I wonder just how many of these problems are from the Home version? If it can possibly be that bad?
I don’t think so. I believe most users with problems are too conditioned to click off alert boxes without reading them, and don’t realize there’s an update waiting. Pay attention.
Yes, there are circumstances that can cause problems – shared computers need to be managed properly.
But if you are in control of your own machine, you’ve got some pretty simple things you can do:
a) Manually check for updates ahead of a critical situation to minimise the chances of there even being an update available
b) Set active hours to limit when the machine will consider itself ready to reboot
c) Use the “pause updates” in advanced options to stop the device being updated for up to a month.