For that matter, why are we seeing so many updates? It seems 1/4 of my CPU cycles are used to keep the system up to date.

ChromeOS updates the system once every 6 weeks and still has a far more secure system.

ChromeOS also does a lot less.

MacOS handles this perfectly. It clearly notifies you when an update will be installed if you restart.

It also gives you the option of re-trying the update "tonight" which takes up WAY too much of my cognitive load. "Tonight" doesn't appear to be configurable, or even well-defined, although an obscure knowledge-base article tells me it's between "2:00 and 5:00 a.m", which is nothing like my expectation of what "tonight" means. Does that run if my laptop is sleeping? What about if it needs to reboot? I really should know the answers to these questions ...

Windows does sometimes wake up a laptop to apply updates and put it back to sleep afterwards.

This can be rather dangerous if your laptop is stuck in a backpack with no airflow on a hot day.

It's not only updates that do that. All the HP laptops I've used wake up from sleep in my bag while I'm moving.

The laptop would be hot enough to toast bread when I pull it out.

Pretty sure that "tonight" just dismisses the prompt until "tonight" at which point you'll see it again, it doesn't irrevocably schedule the update for "tonight."

I think you're probably right which, given that "tonight" means between 02:00 and 05:00, explains why I never get around to applying those updates.

Yeah, the important one it offers is "Not Now". If you tell it "Not Now", it will not install that update, period. Windows 10, by default, will install those updates automatically and pick a random time or immediately reboot.

If I'm out of town for 2 weeks, I cannot have my Windows 10 machine reboot, it runs the software for my security cameras and that can't start until I log back in. Thankfully, I set up Windows Update to not install updates automatically(Win10 Pro) way back when it came out and it has continued to stick. Major updates are a constant worry that they will finally break this forever when it shouldn't even be a concern in the first place.

Windows also tells you it will perform an update on restart. It says "Update and restart" rather than just restart.

But it doesn't have a "restart and defer update" option. If you need to restart for some other reason, you're forced to take the update.

Holding shift while opening the power menu and clicking Restart used to do this, but admittedly, I haven't tried it in a while.

I don't know about Win 10 but I get around that on Win 7 by doing "shutdown /r /t 0" for reboot and "shutdown /s /t 0" for a shutdown.

This is why I like Linux - you don't need to learn the commandline just for basic OS functionality. Windows really needs to get a decent GUI already.

^_^

In cmd or PowerShell:

shutdown /r /t 0

AFAIK, this has always avoided updates.

I haven't used Windows since 7, but then it just did whatever it could (perhaps only download) until shutdown/restart. It might've asked if I wanted to, but I just said no, and then it did it's thing whenever I was shutting down anyway.

Is it not still like that? MacOS seems worse to me, since restarting when an update exists isn't sufficient: you have to remember to go back to the update and click 'update & restart'...

Linux handles this best though, by a long shot.

> Is it not still like that? MacOS seems worse to me, since restarting when an update exists isn't sufficient: you have to remember to go back to the update and click 'update & restart'...

IME OSX is way better, the shutdown update process is much shorter than on Windows (where it is frustratingly long) and not all updates require rebooting.

I only got around to updating my personal MBP to Sierra today. A major OS version upgrade took less time and messed with my stuff less than some Win10 updates have. :-/

Promised when XP came out, iirc.