Microsoft has finally re-released the October 2018 Update for Windows 10, after pulling it about a month ago because a serious bug deleted a small number of users’ files. Alongside the re-release, the company published a blog post detailing the testing process for Windows 10. This paragraph stood out to me:
Critical to any discussion of Windows quality is the sheer scale of the Windows ecosystem, where tens of thousands of hardware and software partners extend the value of Windows as they bring their innovation to hundreds of millions of customers. With Windows 10 alone we work to deliver quality to over 700 million monthly active Windows 10 devices, over 35 million application titles with greater than 175 million application versions, and 16 million unique hardware/driver combinations. In addition, the ecosystem delivers new drivers, firmware, application updates and/or non-security updates daily. Simply put, we have a very large and dynamic ecosystem that requires constant attention and care during every single update. That all this scale and complexity can “just work” is key to Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
With the virtually unlimited number of hardware and software permutations Windows runs on, it’s actually nothing short of a miracle that updates go out to most users every month. Sure there is the occasional problem – like what happened a month ago – but Windows’ update proces is an engineering marvel, and while blind Microsoft and Windows hate often blinds people to the things Microsoft does well, the fact remains that there is no other operating system in the world that even comes close to Windows when it comes to releasing updates for such a wide variety of possible hardware and software permutations.
I mean, Apple has had to pull a watchOS update only recently because it bricked Apple Watches – and how many Apple Watch models are there, total? Ten?
Windows has more than enough issues, but its update process is not one of them.
hello,
recently I reinstalled 3 machines to 1803. I’ve got a home version. I’m trying to delay upgrades with this registry change
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUp date]
“BranchReadinessLevel”=dword:00000016
“DeferQualityUpdates”=dword:00000001
“DeferQualityUpdatesPeriodInDays”=dword:00000035
“DeferFeatureUpdates”=dword:00000001
“DeferFeatureUpdatesPeriodInDays”=dword:00000365
so far only 407 update was installed. it should be delayed.
anyone tried to delay feature updates with such registry change on home edition? does it worked?
Edited 2018-11-13 22:52 UTC
Not sure if your method works, but setting your internet connection to “Metered” should prevent feature updates, too.
thanks for the hint!
While the updates themselves seem to be okay, imo, the update process has been one of the Great Weaknesses of windows since vista; there’s something seriously wrong with the process when the first reaction of many users is to delay it whenever possible.
Edited 2018-11-13 22:52 UTC
I remember trying to update Windows 7 – that was like a 3 hour project every time! That teaches users something pretty quickly.
Windows 10 has gotten better, and restart times on a nice SSD are actually insanely fast – unless the system has a bunch of PuPs and other uninstallable garbage bogging it down, which is common on Windows, since it seems designed to let that crap in, and everything has to run as root – most Windows machines even come with McAfee software pre-installed… in 2018… Garbage.
What we should really be comparing the Windows update process to is the blissful update process for Android or even iOS. On Android basically everything is just always up to date (with an occasional restart, maybe monthly, like on a Nexus). But actually most of the system is a bunch of apps, which are auto-updated by a central process, and doesn’t require a restart at all. This is a marvel – the Windows update system – garbage.
Edited 2018-11-15 06:04 UTC
Since the blog post isn’t clear, the feature update being released today isn’t identical to the version Microsoft pulled a month ago.
If you have 1809 from before Microsoft pulled it, there’s a cumulative roll-up released today that will update existing 1809 installs to the same as what is being released today.
That must be why my laptop rebooted itself last night… I found it unexpectedly at the VeraCrypt boot password prompt this morning.
Then I updated the Intel wireless drivers and now it’s stuck in some “Attempting Automatic Repair” startup mode that I can’t seem to escape. Sigh.
Sure like to know how the Intel driver installers could have botched the boot process so much.
I installed Ubuntu after 5 years thinking to give it another shot. To keep the story short, I decided to reinstall Windows 10 Pro on it again. With Ubuntu the CPU was always hot and fans were making a lot of noise. My ATI didn’t work very well. Windows 10 is smooth like butter and fan make occasional sound only when playing games, etc. It is so well said mate.
Windows does wrangle third-party proprietary drivers and hardware profiles well these days. They get props for that. Ubuntu doesn’t do a bad job of that either in my experience (except with ATI specifically)
Edited 2018-11-15 06:08 UTC
I looked long and hard at this recently.
I think I could live in Ubuntu (except, maybe, for games…) if there was a version of OneNote that worked there. I could probably use the web version, but ugh…
Seriously, just games and OneNote are keeping me on Windows these days.
Thom Holwerda,
Thom, I’m not try to sound anti-microsoft or be a linux fanboy here, but I don’t quite understand how you can say that when linux supports more platforms and supports hardware longer than windows. I’ve had to throw away hardware because windows no longer supported it to my dismay (printers/raid cards/capture cards/etc).
Before anyone jumps in pointing out that linux doesn’t always work, I know that’s true, but given how microsoft periodically drops support for older hardware whereas linux typically does not, I think the statement “there is no other operating system in the world that even comes close to Windows when it comes to releasing updates for such a wide variety of possible hardware and software permutations.” is at least questionable, if not false.
Linux also drops hardware support, be it explicitly (32 bits CPUs) or implicitly (developers loosing interest or just “vanishing”). You cannot always depends on bad tempered teenagers to provide support for your company, hence Microsoft still have a future.
Both support and services are available for linux PPC, x686 as well as for x386 by big blue (ibm) as well as by via, amd and SiS for the embedded market and the HUGE pc104 market. Though most fixes are not for general usage scenarios, IBM even provides custom kernels for their 32 bit PPC hardware.
Kochise,
While it’s true some distros like ubuntu distro stopped compiling/distributing software for 32bit, linux itself still supports 32bit just fine and there are many distros like debian that do provide official x86 builds. Linux still supports much of the ancient 16bit ISA hardware from the 80s if you like. For example, windows dropped NE2K after XP, but linux still has it if you want, I’ve tested it recently and it works.
They only dropped support for 386 CPUs in 2011. 486 is still supported, although there’s a caveat: GCC/libc projects are no longer building for pre-686 CPUs without patches…
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/1811/which-linux-…
So you can argue linux only goes back to P2, but that’s still more than windows. People have tried, modern windows versions crash on P2 & P3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3sQ1IwoT4I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_2whFuuPQ4
Again to be clear, most people couldn’t care any less about this, but for the purposes of our discussion, linux seems to be at least as diverse as windows in terms of legacy support and hardware permutations. I don’t say it to diminish microsoft’s efforts, but just to point out that microsoft’s challenge isn’t quite as unique as Thom implied.
It’s interesting to note that the very first ubuntu release was released in 64bit. In other words, 32bit was already legacy when it came into existence!
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2004-October/00000…
Edited 2018-11-14 10:46 UTC
Um, Linux runs just fine on 32-bit CPU’s. Many distributions don’t support 32-bit x86 specifically any more, and 80386 support got removed from the kernel a while back, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t support 32-bit CPU’s (in fact, it supports a wider variety of 32-bit CPU’s than 64-bit).
Even still, there are legitimate technical reasons for both of those facts, and Windows is the weird one here for actually supporting 32-bit x86 still (which is largely due to MS deciding to put a 32-bit CPU in the original Hololens).
Since in Haiku the update process is perfectly controllable by the user, and it is possible to roll back to any previous system state (provided you didn’t remove the package files of the previous states), — Haiku update process is much better than Windows’ one.
Just think of it. There is a system repository which provides updates. User chooses what to update and when, by running either GUI updater for the whole system and installed programs or running a CLI utility that allows updating packages on one-per-one basis. Every update is a separate transaction, therefore it can’t be partially done, it’s all or nothing. All that’s left is a reboot to load the OS and packages that are in use from the freshly downloaded files. And there is always a possibility to roll back to any previous state, both for the OS itself and for the package-system controlled applications.
There is nothing in Windows update process that even comes close to the breeze of updating Haiku.
Or compare it to Ubuntu. I had my mother in law on Ubuntu for half a decade (until she replaced the computer I gave her with one that had Windows on it). It updated itself reliable for the entire time, and I never had to clean out viruses, or fix things.
The Windows machine she replaced the Ubuntu machine with didn’t run for more than a month or two without getting bogged down with viruses, and other crapware which can’t be uninstalled, because on Windows everything has to run as root. It’s just garbage, and I don’t know why more folks don’t see it.
My grandmother has now been on macOS on an old macMini – similar story.
Edited 2018-11-15 06:02 UTC
Case in point about everything needed elevated privileges – I wanted to debug iPad on my Windows machine. In order to do that, I have to install scoop – and what do you know, I have to reduce global security policies in order to get it to run. Garbage. It’s garbage.
Edited 2018-11-16 16:20 UTC
Support for ~legacy ways of doing things is what people want, regardless of the consequences. But requiring root for most things to work is not inherent to Windows – Winphone did it “properly”, and hence had no security issues.
If you have a look at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4464619 you will see that it actually mentions two upgrades on 2018, November 13:
* First KB4464455 (17763.107) that mentions that you should install the latest servicing stack…which they list as KB4465477 but should actually be KB4465664
* Soon after KB4467708 (17763.134) was released that contains more fixes and this time it mentions the correct latest servicing stack KB4465664
…and both updates have a know issue that “After installing this update, some users cannot set Win32 program defaults for certain app and file type combinations using the Open with… command or Settings > Apps > Default apps.
In some cases, Microsoft Notepad or other Win32 programs cannot be set as the default.” with the workaround being “trying again sometimes works, otherwise we will patch this patch a few weeks from now”
So after a month of silence we get a re-release with 2 immediate monthly patches that “require” different updates for the updater and have a known issue that didn’t get patched in something as simple as “use program X to open filetype Y”
…So I just installed it and all works fine still. Does this make me a Microsoft Sheep?
Uh, I would call the random deletion of users’ files (and it was no small number despite what Microsoft are claiming) a major issue. Not with the update process maybe, but with the testing process for updates. This whole paragraph you quoted reads like a justification for why they insist on using us, the users, as unpaid beta testers and I’m tired of it and those who blindly accept it. They need to hire their QA people back, pure and simple, and stop pushing crap on the rest of us. It’s why I’m Windows-free at home: I deal with this crap every day at work and I don’t want to have to do more beta testing at home for no pay!
> Windows has more than enough issues, but its update process is not one of them.
What do you mean? It’s a huge issue!
Last time I upgraded my Ubuntu to a _new_release_ I actually coded at the same time! Windows update is a joke. Windows cannot properly handle even most basic security updates without 10 reboots and “doing something” screens.
Screwing up hardware or software support in an update is an oopsie related supported permutations.
Deleting any of user’s files is plain incompetence. Rendering OS unusable because update gets stuck using 100% cpu is incompetence. Filling up hard drive with obsolete system files is either incompetence or method for forced obsolense.
Meanwhile, over 15 or so distribution upgrades (twice a year), Kubuntu has screwed something up maybe three times. Never took much time to fix, let alone require a reinstall. I don’t thing they’ve ever screwed up smaller updates. If there are any obsolete system files, they don’t take noticeable amount of drive space.
There’s a couple of different things going on here. Yes, the breadth of hardware support is amazing, and the *update* process is a marvel (but still has major flaws in design and usage).
However the main reason for pulling the .55 build of 1809, *and* one of the other major bugs in that build, were entirely due to shoddy programming and a lack of quality control. Deleting bypassed folders *without bothering to check for contents*. Deleting files from a zip *without bothering to verify the success of copying them elsewhere*.
What links these two factors is the testing and QC process. Even if it’s “ok” for this code to have hit the Fast ring (and I’d suggest it’s *not* ok), it should never have made it past there. But when you *rely* on a huge number of random beta testers (presumably because internal QC has been gutted), it makes it hard to notice critically important feedback in amongst the noise.
Microsoft earned the negative emotions folks throw at them. Even today, we can’t run Windows without really intrusive anti-virus software scanning each file access in serial, slowing down the whole system, due to it’s horrendous legacy security models, which often requires running software as root, and their stubborn allegiance to the gospel of backward compatibility which keeps them from modernizing. Then there’s their history of embrace, extend, extinguish, and all the crooked and underhanded deals they made in the quest for supremacy. They earned the hate. There is nothing blind about it.
A problem for me with the Windows Update process is updates are forced.
This was a previous story:
http://www.osnews.com/story/30855/Some_Windows_10_Pro_licenses_are_…
I went from Windows 7 Home x64 to 7 Pro x64, then to 10 Pro. The process to install Windows 10, ( only a few weeks before the cutoff for the upgrade ), the “Update” took place over 4 days, with multiple restarts, BSODs etc. This is a gaming laptop, and thank god not my main machine. Three months ago, I turned on Windows update ( I forcefully shut it off ), and went through the process ( again 4 days ) of two system updates. Now its at 1804, and the “Pro” part has disappeared, it reverted to “Home” and Hyper-V no longer works.
To call this destruction of time, and the coagulated mass of spaghetti code quality escapes me. I now have the disks for Windows 7 Pro in hand, and my license key, and when I get a free weekend, I will abandon Windows 10 for Windows 7 Pro, and try to get my hands on Windows 10 LTSB, and the soreness of my bottom.
Window 10 is a temporary fix to wean people off of windows 7, ( I work in IT, and work with Windows 7, 10, and there are 8 Windows CE devices. ) until Microsoft can figure out a way to monetize OS as a chargeable service that will expire.
I was happy with Windows XP.
Still using Windows 7 Pro, XP SP3 and 2000 SP4. No problem in sight (beside Microsoft’s end of support). As long as the hardware last, all goes well.
…and most 3rd party apps also dropping support for the last two.