[wongarsu]

Windows has gotten pretty good at staying out of your way with updates if you have typical usage patterns. That is: either you turn it on at the beginning of the business day, it downloads updates in the background and installs them when you shut the machine down at the end of the day; Or you leave the machine on 24/7, get a couple prompts over multiple days about a scheduled restart with the option to schedule it, and if you don't react it just restarts in the dead of night (or rather, a reasonable prediction of when you won't be using the computer).

The rub is that this doesn't work as well in atypical setups like a lab. The machines are probably only on while students are using it, preventing the "install at night" strategy, and if your normal workflow includes restarts Windows will take that as a cue to finally install the update.

Of course all of this is avoidable by configuration, or by the user (restarting explicitly without updates). But the Home version hasn't always given you as much agency in this as the more expensive Windows versions.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Updates on shutdown make sense in some of my machines but are awful in the laptop I use to teach classes. When I finish a class, what I want is to leave to do something else elsewhere (often another class in a different room).

I know I could probably suspend or something, but I never do that because it used to be a lottery on Windows whether your machine would actually unsuspend or you would need to fight it pressing the power button until it rebooted (did they ever fix that?)

[cesarb]

> Updates on shutdown make sense in some of my machines but are awful in the laptop I use to teach classes.

It's also a bad idea when the power has gone out and the UPS battery will last for only a few more minutes. Or when you have no UPS, a storm is coming which you know will cause the power to fail, and you want to orderly power everything off as quickly as possible (not to mention that losing power during a software update is not ideal).

Which is why I love the way recent Gnome does it: when powering off, the confirmation dialog has an unobtrusive checkbox (checked by default) which selects whether you want to run software updates before powering off. If you're not in a hurry, you can keep it checked and wait for the software updates to finish; if you're in a hurry, just uncheck it before confirming and it'll turn off immediately.

[pmontra]

Is that a Windows installed by the manufacturer or a Windows installed by somebody else with possibly not all the right drivers for that machine?

[thfuran]

That sounds like a problem from twenty years ago.

[jacknews]

It sure does. And it's still a problem today.