Windows Update is fundamentally broken

For many this is a non-issue. You live in a country that has super speed broadband and a 3gb download is couple of minutes of inconvenience. For you this post will make no sense.

For people like me living in a country where 4mbps ADSL is considered broadband speed, Windows Update is a mess. The cumulative updates makes things worst, they are huge in size and while they download the internet is basically useless.

For our business it is even worst. There we have 12 Windows 10 computers and the past week have been a collective nightmare. Most of these machines are downloading Anniversary update and it is a mess.

We have turn on the ability to get updates from other machines on the network. However, that does not appear to work. Despite similar machines and successful installation on several of these machines, we have gigabytes coming down, while our email and other business essential apps are slow.

Now, I understand for first world countries this is not a problem, however, for us it is crippling. We had to implement network shaping on our Fortigate to throttle Windows updates. I beg Microsoft to please give us some control over the timing of downloads. Not just the installation and reboot.

Conversation 2 comments

  • 5615

    18 October, 2016 - 3:30 pm

    <p>This is a problem for many of us even in "first world" countries. There are many problems with how Windows Update now "works" in Windows 10, but one thing I’ve really noticed more recently is how it doesn’t respect the user. What I mean by that is in the past the OS used to hold off on doing "housekeeping-type" activities while the PC was being used, so as not to bog down the PC while you were trying to get stuff done. It would wait until the PC was idle before it would do "housekeeping" (Windows Update clearly falls in that category). If it was doing stuff, it would stop immediately when you started using the PC, again.</p>
    <p>&nbsp;</p>
    <p>Now, not only does it seem to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, it pretty much starts to do this the instant you log on. And it now includes automatic bandwidth-hogging downloads "in the background." It’s *extremely* annoying. That’s one of the reasons we used to disable as much of the default automatic stuff as possible and set things up to happen on *our* schedule. With Windows 10 Home, that’s no longer possible. It’s even becoming harder to do with Windows 10 Pro. More and more, Microsoft&nbsp;calls the shots and does what they want when they want. In my mind, this shows a distinct lack of&nbsp;respect for the&nbsp;user.</p>

  • 5411

    18 October, 2016 - 9:58 pm

    <p>There are many places in "first world" countries where high speed with large data allowances are just not available. I live in Canada and for the last 7 or 8 years had to rely on cell data for my internet ($100 a month for only 15gb of data) because I was just &frac12; Km from the high speed cut off line. Finally last year they updated my area to high speed ($65 for 50gb download 10gb upload unlimited usage) If I was still on cell data today I would not be running windows 10, updating 3 PCs 1 laptops and a Dell tablet would easily of used up a large portion of my monthly cell data allowance.</p>
    <p>If Microsoft wants to reach 1 billion win 10 users they need to rethink this crazy update strategy as 10s 100s ? of millions of potential users &nbsp;just won&rsquo;t be able to get past the bandwidth needed. Microsoft itself may be responsible for pushing consumers to other platforms.</p>

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