Microsoft punishes you for updating infrequently
OPINION It's not the first time this has happened to me and it won't be the last. I pulled a laptop that I hadn't used for six months out of a drawer, then waited through three hours and four rounds of reboots for it to update Windows 11 completely.
It probably didn't help that the laptop in question, a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, was running an Insider build of Windows. And if I were a different type of user, I might have continued to work on the laptop while it downloaded all these updates rather than waiting impatiently and clicking the "Check for Updates" button in Settings over and over again. However, I wanted to run tests on this computer, so I needed it to be completely up-to-date. And it went through two or three different builds while I waited.
This feels like a punishment for not going with the program and updating on a regular basis. Frankly, I'd rather that someone from Redmond came to my office and skewered me with searing hot (yet friendly) paperclips. I'd even accept being sentenced to get all my news from MSN over this.
Let's face it. Microsoft has built Windows with the assumption that you're using your PC on a daily basis and perhaps even leaving it on when you go to sleep at night so that it can reboot while you catch some ZZZs. If you have a PC in a drawer that you only pull out on occasion or after weeks of inactivity, Redmond intends to punish you with long wait times and annoying alerts demanding that you reboot to install an update.
What I want to know is why Microsoft can't just detect exactly what files you need updated, download them all in one go, and then perform a single reboot. And why can't it have more updates that happen in the background and don't require a reboot in the first place?
"Windows updates are cumulative but not infinitely so," Chongwei Chen, President and CEO of data recovery software company DataNumen, explained to The Register. "Microsoft periodically releases 'baseline' rollups, meaning a PC that's been off for months can't simply jump to the latest patch — it must first install prerequisite updates that bring the system to a state where the newest patches can be applied. Each of those intermediate updates may modify system files that require a reboot to replace while Windows is not running."
Perhaps most people don't have computers sitting in a drawer for several months. But I bet lots of people have an "occasional use" computer that they pull out just for one purpose.
For example, we have a Lenovo IdeaPad at my temple that we use exclusively for video conferencing. When there's a meeting or a lecture in the boardroom, someone pulls the laptop out of a credenza, plugs it into a webcam, and dials into Zoom so that people at home can participate.
In between meetings, nobody uses the Zoom laptop at all. So every time I use it, it harasses me about rebooting to install updates. Fortunately, it has never forced a reboot in the middle of a Zoom session, but it uses increasingly aggressive language and alerts to demand we restart it.
But who in the temple is going to sit there for 10 minutes or more while this downloads new updates and reboots? We pull the laptop out about five minutes before a meeting starts and we shut its lid immediately after leaving the meeting. No one is going to sit there in an empty boardroom after everyone else has left just so that Windows can run an update.
The problem isn't limited to Windows 11 either. A couple of years ago, I was working at a different job where they gave me the world's slowest and crappiest Windows 10 laptop. I kept that laptop in a locker for several years without turning it on, until a day during the COVID lockdown when the company wanted me to turn it on for some reason. It took all day – and I mean an entire business day – for it to update after having been unused for three years.
My colleague, Richard Speed, told me that he once had a Windows 7 laptop that took more than three days to get through its series of updates.
And may the gods help you if you buy a brand new PC that's been sitting on a shelf for months or years. You might have hours of updates after you first take it out of the box. If you're not updating a managed PC, your best move might be to reinstall Windows and all your software from scratch; that's faster than waiting for some updates.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, software updates are a necessary evil. So I would never recommend that you disable the Windows update service. And if we're keeping it real, we know that every software-driven device has updates, even those that use Linux, macOS, Android, or iOS.
However, Windows updates seem to be the longest and most punitive of any I've experienced. Phone updates tend to take a minute or two and come very infrequently. Even when I update Linux on a Raspberry Pi I've kept in a drawer, it takes minutes, not hours. Friends with Macs say that, apart from the annual macOS refresh, the updates are rather unobtrusive, and the barrier to entry has never been lower.
But Microsoft has many new features it wants to push, tons of PC drivers to support, and countless security holes to patch in the world's most widely used desktop operating system. Such is life for the occasional PC user.
If Microsoft wanted to make a real improvement in its OS, rather than festooning it with unwanted Copilot iterations, it would work on making Windows update slimmer, faster, and less frequent. It would also find more ways to roll up updates from previous eras into new packages so that users who've missed an update or four don't have to sit through hours of reboots.
What should you do if you have a PC that you don't need to use all the time? I consulted several experts for advice, but if you're like me, you won't love it. They advised taking seldom-used computers out of the drawer every month and letting them run for an hour or more to catch up with updates. That would mean that someone at my temple would have to "own" maintenance on the Zoom laptop, an awkward conversation I can't imagine having with the rabbi. Perhaps I’ll recommend a Chromebook the next time it’s due for a refresh.
"Microsoft developed Windows Update with daily use in mind, which makes it hell for seldom-used computers," Dario Ferrari, co-founder of OpenClawVPS, told The Register. Indeed! ®