How to business folk deal with E36 M3 Windows updates that take all day?

Full disclosure: I'm a mac guy and web developer. I have here on my desk a win 7 laptop that I rebooted and now wants to do elevety million updates!. Okay, I lie, it's only 118.

I seems that this process is going to take hours. I also, got no choice about when it was going to happen. I rebooted, and now I have a machine that is not usable any time soon.

What happened the first time a guy couldn't give a presentation to Bill Gates because "Sorry Mr Gates Windows update for the next 3 hours, so no presentation."?

What's your answer to this problem? Here's mine:

We push updates out in the background using WSUS and hope that nobody shuts their computer down right before they have to do anything important. If they do we bring them a shared presentation computer to use temporarily. Any other questions?

With 7 you can still disable automatic updates...need a little bit of forethought.

Then like every 6th tuesday the IT guy reminds me I'm supposed to manually update. It's probably been a year since I did.

GameboyRMH wrote: .. and hope that nobody shuts their computer down right before they have to do anything important. />

That people put up with this baffles the E36 M3 out of me. "and hope"? What kind of technology strategy is this? What is this? 1986?

The problem is that shiny happy MS gives users no choice about when it happens.

they force tech staff to work odd hours and weekends to push updates at 3am.

LuxInterior wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: .. and hope that nobody shuts their computer down right before they have to do anything important. />

That people put up with this baffles the E36 M3 out of me. "We hope"? What kind of technology strategy is this? The problem is that shiny happy MS gives users no choice about when it happens. MS is in effect saying our computer software is more important than you are. YOU need to wait for US.

I was half-joking...If you update regularly you won't get any massive glut of updates that takes a long time to install - we push them out pretty much immediately so this should never happen. If something bad does happen (which could also come in the form of a hardware failure, coffee spill, or even malware) you'll get a backup computer and we can even pull the files off the stricken computer's hard drive in minutes if you really need them. It works.

GameboyRMH wrote:

LuxInterior wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: .. and hope that nobody shuts their computer down right before they have to do anything important. />

That people put up with this baffles the E36 M3 out of me. "We hope"? What kind of technology strategy is this? The problem is that shiny happy MS gives users no choice about when it happens. MS is in effect saying our computer software is more important than you are. YOU need to wait for US.

I was half-joking...If you update regularly you won't get any massive glut of updates that takes a long time to install - we push them out pretty much immediately so this should never happen. If something bad does happen (which could also come in the form of a hardware failure, coffee spill, or even malware) you'll get a backup computer and we can even pull the files off the stricken computer's hard drive in minutes if you really need them. It works.

I'm not joking though. I have a perfectly fine piece of hardware that is not usable because some shiny happy person at MS thought it was OK to create an update process that doesn't ask the user "Hey is it okay if I make your computer completely useless for the next several hours?" before it starts the update.

GameboyRMH wrote: If you update regularly you won't get any massive glut of updates that takes a long time to install

This.

A hacker friend points out that patch Tuesday is like Christmas. Every month he gets a list of all the exploits to take advantage of.

LuxInterior wrote: I'm not joking though. I have a perfectly fine piece of hardware that is not usable because some shiny happy person at MS thought it was OK to create an update process that doesn't ask the user "Hey is it okay if I make your computer completely useless for the next several hours?" before it starts the update.

In business environments, you have the option of doing just that:

I don't run the update server myself so I haven't seen how many updates came out today, but it would be very unusual for that many updates to one operating system to come out at once. So in practice it's usually not a problem, but in theory you are indeed gambling with how long your computer will take to restart every time you install updates.

Your computer might also be stuck in the update process. I'd say that if you don't see any significant hard drive activity for 3 solid minutes you should reset the PC, and if it fails a second time it's time to call IT so they can dig around in the registry and fix it.

Linux doesn't have any of these problems, you can even do live kernel updates with the right setup, I've been saying it's a better OS for a long time, why don't all businesses switch to Linux?

I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes or so for updates, but my machines get rebooted every day. Has it been a while since you used this one?

Here's my cause of bafflement:

1. Computer Users(at the ones that run the MS stuff) put up with this mighty inconvenient update process.

2. But if say... Ford created some system that "updated" and made Billy Ray's F150 unusable for 3 hours at some random time, the Internet would be full of video showing one Berklying Angry Billy Ray hacking his F150 to pieces with a sawzall.

3. Both car and Laptop are tools. So why is #1 acceptable and #2 isn't?

MCarp22 wrote:

LuxInterior wrote: I'm not joking though. I have a perfectly fine piece of hardware that is not usable because some shiny happy person at MS thought it was OK to create an update process that doesn't ask the user "Hey is it okay if I make your computer completely useless for the next several hours?" before it starts the update.

In business environments, you have the option of doing just that:

My gaming PC does the same, I didn't realize this post was about a forced automatic reboot, not an unexpectedly long manual reboot. Apparently if you have updates set to install automatically (directly on the PC) you can get a forced automatic reboot...a terrible "feature" indeed, as indefensible as Windows' swap space management.

Most I've ever had to wait was 15 minutes.

Now, we use Survey Monkey for things here, and I had to cancel a meeting because the site was so overloaded that I couldn't get what I needed. That was slightly annoying.

Here's how to disable forced automatic reboots when running local automatic updates BTW:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable-forced-restarts-windows-update/

LuxInterior wrote: Here's my cause of bafflement: 1. Computer Users(at the ones that run the MS stuff) put up with this *mighty inconvenient* update process. 2. But if say... Ford created some system that "updated" and made Billy Ray's F150 unusable for 3 hours at some random time, the Internet would be full of video showing one Berklying Angry Billy Ray hacking his F150 to pieces with a sawzall. 3. Both car and Laptop are tools. So why is #1 acceptable and #2 isn't?

I could understand your bafflement. If the updates actually took 3 hours.....

Imagine if your car went catatonic at random intervals as it updated some piece of firmware. Might be why MS does not make cars.

I have had the curse of MS when setting up for a PowerPoint presentation. Embarrassing, but really only a 10 minute delay and people take it in stride as they vent against MS.

So we use Shavlik at our work to push out monthly MS updates to machines. The average amount of updates that I push per month is 20. If you're in the hundreds then you've been waiting far too long to get them.