Microsoft Says Windows May Need Up To 8 Hours of Online Time To Update

'According to a post on the Microsoft IT Pro Blog, Windows computers will need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest OS updates successfully. Tom's Hardware reports: Another revelation in the post is that Microsoft tracks how long PCs are connected to Windows Update, calling the statistics "Update Connectivity." The data is available to IT managers in the InTune app, a component of the Endpoint management suite. The post details Microsoft's attempts to figure out why some Windows devices aren't getting the latest quality and feature updates, and discovered that two hours of continuous connectivity was required to get updates. It then took six hours after the release of the patch for a machine to update itself reliably. Microsoft's figures show that 50 percent of Windows devices left behind by Windows Update and running a build of Windows 10 that's no longer serviced do not spend enough time connected to have the patches downloaded and installed in the background. This figure drops to 25 percent for customers using a serviced build of the operating system that lags behind in security updates by 60 days or more. The goods news, as noted by Tom's Hardware, is that "Windows 11 updates are smaller than their Windows 10 counterparts due to improved compression [and] new Microsoft Graph APIs," which should help speed up the update process.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/02/01/2056211 Bloatware? I can download/install full Linux distros in less time (and updates don't take that long either, not even a full version upgrade!). Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022 17:04:41 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'According to a post on the Microsoft IT Pro Blog, Windows computers will need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest OS updates successfully.'
You can do a whole OS install in less time than that. Even a Windows OS install.

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022 17:04:41 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
Bloatware? I can download/install full Linux distros in less time (and updates don't take that long either, not even a full version upgrade!).
Sorry, I didn’t notice this part before posting my reply. Note also by the time many of those Windows machines have downloaded a full update, it’s probably obsolete so they have to scrap it and start again.

On Wed, 2 Feb 2022 17:04:41 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'... two hours of continuous connectivity was required to get updates. It then took six hours after the release of the patch for a machine to update itself reliably.'
Bloatware? I can download/install full Linux distros in less time (and updates don't take that long either, not even a full version upgrade!).
My monthly upgrade of Debian Unstable can take an hour or more to download new versions of all the packages installed on my main machine. And it doesn’t need “continuous connectivity”: I can stop at any point, and when I start again, it will even resume a partial download of an individual package. And the “six hours” to “update reliably” might be due to the inability to replace files that are in use by running processes, because Windows insists on locking things. So the machine needs to become unusable during an update. Maybe they should hire some developers who understand how to do interruptible file transfers, just for a start ...
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann