this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
403 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
59672 readers
2692 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wasn't just talking about the reboot phase...
Downloading gigabytes worth of updates, waiting for them to install, rebooting, see more updates, reboot again takes WAY more than 5 minutes.
But why are you paying attention to a process that a) doesn’t need supervision and b) is done automatically in the background? It’s such a weird thing to complain about.
Not to mention, the vast majority of windows updates are tiny. The only large updates are the yearly major updates. If you’ve got multi gig downloads happening even weekly, you might want to look into what’s wrong with your system.
I am guessing you run your computer all the time instead of putting it to sleep, because it's never a process that completes transparently in the background for me. It will always build up and then I have to go in and manually trigger it. Or I have to restart because I installed a new application that requires it and then it decides to do them all at once and takes forever.
How old is your machine? If it's new enough to run windows 11 then it probably also supports modern standby (aka S0 standby). When plugged in during "sleep" it's actually on, and should be doing the updates for you.
That said my work laptop only gets used during work hours and it almost always gets it's updates done while I'm doing stuff throughout the day, and it just needs a quick reboot to finish.
I turn off modern standby. I don't want my computer turning on when I am not around or when I am asleep. For laptops, modern standby is famous for turning it on while its in your laptop bag, causing overheating and battery drainage.
I think if an update process is annoying enough to require something like Modern Standby in order to be "seamless", it needs to be improved.
How long is it on for? Unless you’re turning it on for minutes at a time, I just can’t see how it would never have time to download things in the background.
The only way I can see this really happening is if you’ve a) got obscenely slow internet or b) have all networks listed as metered, which would indeed prevent automatic updates (unless you specify otherwise.)
Might be a good idea to dig into your settings, because the age of needing to babysit windows updates has been gone for years now.
Settings and internet are fine. I dunno what to tell you. Very frequently Windows update shows its head, like I'll randomly want to restart my computer because I installed a piece of software that required it, and then it kicks off a long round updates when I just want to use my computer.
I still think having to leave it on and let it run in the background is still just addressing the symptoms. An update process should be way faster than that so that such a thing isn't needed.