| As a Windows developer and somebody who actually likes using Windows, I'm still shocked by how pathetic Windows Update is. I'm often reinstalling because as a developer I want to try out the newer platforms. I gave Windows 8.1 a try recently. Fresh install and Windows Update says there's nothing to update. Knowing that's BS, I force it to refresh -- after a significant wait suddenly there's 1GB of updates. Really? Why did I just download a 3.5GB ISO that is 1GB out of date? I press on and force the downloads to start because a safe system is a priority to me. The downloads take forever to start. When they eventually do start, they randomly stop (no ethernet activity) for random periods of time. All this time I'm twiddling my thumbs wondering if there's some kind of "intelligent" downloader that is slowing down because I'm trying to do something else on the system. Eventually they finish downloading and installing and the system reboots. After the reboot... I have more hundreds of MBs more of updates waiting for me. WTF? I go through this process 2 or 3 more times, and now I'm just left with "optional" updates. Curious, I click on the 'more information' link to hit the Microsoft website (because for some reason the Windows Update UI just shows the most completely useless generic text for each update). Apparently the 'optional' updates are "rollups"... surely that's important?! Who knows, because Windows Update packages are opaque blobs. So I go ahead and install the optional updates. Reboot. Now everything is good, right? Nope, go take a look at the Windows Update History - it turns out a bunch of updates actually failed to install at some point? It looks like they might have successfully installed later... or did they? At this point I don't even care. Compare with the Linux (Ubuntu, but I'm sure others qualify too) experience: apt-get update; apt-get upgrade. If there's an issue I get informed immediately and because the updates are per-package it's clear whether or not I should care -- no opaque blobs here. When it's done, I know it's done and there won't be any more magical updates mysteriously appearing. I know I can run the update/upgrade in the background while I use the machine for other things. I just don't understand why Microsoft can't get the update experience right! |
Heh. My workstation in my cubicle at the office is getting a hard drive replacement right now because some update left it stuck at startup, saying "Windows is configuring things. Please do not turn off your computer." (Or something to that effect.) I get it; if it takes longer than 15 minutes to fix, core IT is going to re-image the drive, but now I have to reinstall Visual Studio and SQL Server, and patch, and patch, and patch. And always be afraid that it will just happen again some day.