Flaky USB driver? IDK about Windows but my Linux desktop gets confused by the wireless keyboard every so often and switching the kbd off and on again doesn't fix it, but removing/replacing the wireless dongle sorts it out.
But then when you switch it back on again it finishes updating, first by telling you it is 30% complete for 10 minutes then 100% complete where it reboots and starts updating another part of the OS displaying another random percentage complete figure for another 10 minutes. Even when you finally get into windows it can still be very slow for many minutes after the update.
It seems to be particularly bad on spinning rust systems that are memory constrained. It almost seems deliberate since the updater doesn't use all of the physical memory available to it but still renders the machine utterly unresponsive by saturating all available disk bandwidth.
I happened to visit my parents on Sunday and wanted to show them something on the internet. I turned on their (little used, as they have a desktop and tablets) laptop, running Windows 10 ... and it spent the next hour pretty well unusable, as it first downloaded and then installed a massive update, without asking, as their version of Windows is "no longer supported."
I bought my son's Windows 10 machine from him when he went over to Linux, but I found it impossible for the same reasons. [It isn't the only time I've had that experience either.] I spent ages removing a lot of useless crap from it and just about managed to get it running, but then it updated itself again and reinstalled all the crap. That settled it; it too is now a Linux machine. Meanwhile I am hanging on to my old Windows XP machine until that becomes completely unusable.
The only thing you can realistically do with 'Doze machine of the Win10/11 64bit flavour that hasn't been on for a long while (and hasn't been able to complete any updates) is leave it to get on with updating.
It doesn't help that the machine defaults after updating to Win10/11 are to sleep after 15 minutes of no keyboard mouse activity so even if the user leaves it on for hours the updates do not complete (this setting is configurable so I set it to 2 hours on the recently offending machine).
If you are brave you can do ctrl-alt-del and open the Task manager to watch in detail which MS updater components are hogging all the disk bandwidth but the machine is glacial for potentially a few hours and you just have to let it work through all the pending updates and reboots.
Once disk bandwidth falls away from 100% and flat lining it quickly becomes usable again but this may take a few or several hours.
It is notable that the Dozey updaters only get about 1/3 of the effective disk performance of any of the main backup programs.
I think dung beetles probably have a better life than intermittent Win10/11 users on minimal memory hardware configurations.
You turn it on, go out and make coffee, and usually by that time it is finished the slow stage.
The patching has a delay button (delay for 7 days and a menu), that allows delaying updates.
You can stop it from doing OS upgrades. If it was 21H2 and you wanted to stop the 22H2 OS Upgrade from coming in, you can enter "21H2" in this tool, and it sets the registry entry that maintains that release.
The random changing of settings, yes, that's a nuisance for sure. It's as bad as dealing with a Snap, when you'd rather have a .deb .
Paul
A well organised IT dept can arrange the machines to wake-up in the small hours, install updates and close down again ...
That isn't any good to me, because I work to tight hourly deadlines. I need it to work when I need it.
The worst resource hog was some kind of background data collection programme that used all the CPU time and network bandwidth in sending information back to Microsoft. I can't remember what it was called now, but it made a huge difference when I finally deinstalled it. Then it came back again with the next update, and sealed W10's fate for ever.
Yes, I did that, but it merely postpones the evil day.
Thanks. But really I'm done with it now.
Agreed. The one I use is gradually becoming less and less useful. Fortunately, the few websites that I need that it can't handle can still be viewed adequately with ->View->No Style, but I doubt that'll last much longer.
Like all creatures of habit, Microsoft "patch tuesday" is well known, so all you have to do is remember to turn it on every Wednesday, first thing in the morning and let it do its business. Setting the flag to only notify you that you "need to install some updates" helps too.
Just the Wednesday following the second Tuesday of each month. Although I'd wait a few days to see if there were reports of problems caused by the updates, before risking my own systems.
Manual control of updates, would require the user to select the "Delay for 35 days option", then the day after Patch Tuesday, you open the Windows Update panel and do them. Since I don't use this feature, I don't know if there is a count-down so you can determine when to push the Delay button again.
In a given month, there is a major and a minor update. Patch Tuesday is well known. But if you need your machine on short notice, the second one near the end of the month can also inconvenience you.
There are several programs for "managing" Windows Update, but Microsoft generally breaks these when they are discovered. It does not treat them as malware or "hackerware" like the status of Produkey, but Microsoft makes sure that whatever interface the program is using, gets some "subtle" changes.
Paul
Used to be you could simply use firewall rules to block the relevant URLs, I wonder if that still works.
A well organised one might well be able to, but there are plenty of cowboys lurking in large corporate IT operations. I recall one lot that were (possibly still are) stuck on IE6 long after it never use by date because their corporate intranet would not work on anything newer.
The Peter principle applies to high level IT decision making.
Unless you enjoy unwinding bricked computers for an intermittently used one it is probably worth *never* switching it on on the Wednesday after MS patch Tuesday. They have form for bricking Win10/11 PC's and ordinary users are seldom in any position to unwind the damage done.
Wait and see if "Microsoft bricks laptops" is news of the day eg.
The PC will probably hang if it cant phone home
The capability exists, because Intel put the Management Engine in the Southbridge.
While you might think your computer has one (multicore) CPU, there can be two of them. The second one is inside the Southbridge, and runs a copy of MINUX. On the machines set up for this, the NIC chip (Intel-branded) has two interfaces, one feeds the Management Engine, one feeds a regular NIC MAC. If you have a RealTek NIC, that's one part of the recipe that is missing, the special NIC.
When the machine is in soft-off state, or if the machine crashed while running, you can "ping" the CPU in the Southbridge and use it to trigger updates or tip the machine upright. The Management Engine can do a hardware RESET on the machine, to start a reboot from crashed state.
On my Optiplex refurb, this takes the form of the Q45 chip, and the letter Q is an indicator you could have a Management Engine on your machine.
The original Wake On LAN idea, only works if the main CPU is still running and the machine has not crashed. The Management Engine on the other hand, is available as long as the machine has +5VSB running on it. And the Management Engine can assert PS_ON#.
There is no jumper to disable the Management Engine. That's because it is potentially being used to trace stolen computers.
Some security-minded individuals consider such schemes to be "attack surfaces".
When you buy refurbished (business) computers, the person reconditioning the computer is supposed to flash the BIOS with a (partially) neutered MINUX. There is some Intel utility you can run, to determine if the ME is armed or not.
And this capability, is why a business user should not come in to work at 8AM and find a machine in the middle of an update. At least some small attempt can be made, to avoid that.
This is also why businesses buy or lease "business" machines, because they have things like a Q45 and not an X48. They have the hardware for remote control. Then when the three year lease cycle is up, the "business" machine is reconditioned by a refurbisher.
Paul
The rumor is, that the firewall is not an absolute firewall, but has "holes" in it for the convenience of Microsoft. It can be bypassed, as part of the arch.
Microsoft can use raw IP addresses with no DNS entry for example, if they don't want you to see the word ".vortex" in an Internet name.
If you run a newer version of ProcMon, it has network trace capability now (the events were in ETW, but now a parser was added to ProcMon so they could be recorded). Microsoft hides a lot of what it is doing, using "akamai" addresses, so your ProcMon trace is a-chatter with "akamai this and that", and there's no way for you to see if any of that is headed for Vortex. Sp if you saw mysterious network activity, and you used ProcMon to try and get closer to the who and what, you will not be rewarded with valuable info. The idea was, you would have the PID or process name, and that it was sending a packet to "akamaitechnologies".
(A passing, if somewhat comical reference to the vortex...)
The idea behind Vortex is, any search string a user might enter, including File Explorer searches, can be logged somewhere. Think of the tuning of search engines you could do with the info.
It's very hard for end-users, to figure out exactly when the Hoover Upright is being used on them. If you use the application that "dumps telemetry" on a Windows machine, it is of course filled with gibberish so you cannot determine exactly what they're doing.
It leads to a lot of conspiracy theories that are hard to verify.
Obfuscating everything you do, has a bad look to it. That's why when a .vortex network address appears at the bottom of a browser window, it's so funny. "We're watching you. Wink Wink and I say again, Wink".
Paul
I wasn't thinking of anything that relied on Microsoft to work properly.
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