This past weekend, my PC received a push from Microsoft. Now, my PC does not know how to boot up. This is ridiculous! Microsoft allegedly staffs some of the brightest in the business, and they don’t know a push SHOULD NOT break a PC? WTF? So, I ask you:
If is push is supposed to be good stuff, like security patches and upgrades, why does it prevent a PC from booting up?
Don’t the Microsoft people think of the risks ahead of time? Can’t they control their code(s) from breaking PCs? I mean, if they were a bakery, how many of us would have food poisoning!?!
Countless millions of people have gotten OS updates from Microsoft with no ill effects, but if you interrupt the update, we are strongly warned, that could lead to disaster. Any change the update wasn’t able to complete? Did you wait until it said it was done?. My father recently updated his PC and it took 90 minutes to complete. He was tempted to reboot it before it was done but I told him to wait. It finally finished and all is well.
My computer had issues with an update last week. The update started at 3am or so but hadn’t completed by about 7am or so, with just the spinning dots shown. So I power-cycled it. It tried to recover the update, again showing the spinning dots for a long time. So I power-cycled it a second time. This time, Windows 10 automatically reverted to the last known good configuration, which was the one before this update. Right after that, I make a couple of current backups, because the ones I had were almost a month old.
Nope. No interruptions during updates, pushes, installs, reboots, etc. No reason this should have occurred. I think MS just enjoys this. Oh! And, their tech support? An embarrassment to this Fortune 500 company. One brain to share across the whole Helpless Desk. Makes Comcast look like geniuses!
The openness of the PC world usually causes this. There are so many varieties of machines with different hardware configurations and different drivers/software loaded, that Microsoft just can’t possibly test for all possible cases.
Even if there were a quite limited number of cases like in Mac-world, programs don’t always execute exactly the same way all the time. Things happen in parallel and if a certain rare combination of instructions happen in a certain order, then surprising things can happen.
OTOH, Microsoft, esp. of late, has become increasingly careless about its update policy. Add in them making it harder to delay or ignore updates makes these problems even more likely. E.g., you’d normally want to delay general (non-security) updates so that other people can be the post-Beta testers.
Some standard recovery info here. Scroll down and start trying boot up options. At worse, you’ll need to make an install image on DVD or USB stick. There’s a link in that article that points you to how to do that.
Sometimes an update process merely seems to be stuck, but sometimes it really IS stuck, and restarting is the only solution.
And sometimes, even if the update is working properly, we need to abort it because the computer is needed for some very important thing.
And sometimes, through no fault of anyone’s, the power goes out.
My conclusion is that Micro$oft (and other software designers) should be making their updates more capable of recovering from interruptions. And allowing us to abort when we need to.
Does the machine actually finish POSTing (Power On Self Test) when you turn it on? That’s the memory and hardware checks and such before windows tries to boot.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. They do this for the express purpose of their own amusement. You should ask for the thread to be closed, because you have used your insight and analytical sophistication to answer your own question. Well done!
Completely agree with this. I really like Windows 10, but the insistence on pushing updates immediately, with basically no options for delaying, is annoying. When i had Windows 7, my update settings were “Inform me of updates, but let me choose which updates to install, and when” (or however it was worded). You can’t really do that anymore. All you can do now, really, is delay the restart if you’re in the middle of something.
The other day, i got the latest update which, for me, included the Windows 10 Anniversary update, with new features like Sticky Notes. This was a pretty major update. When i turned my computer off for the night, i could see the update process start. I don’t know how long it took, because i went to bed and just left it.
The next morning, when i got up, i turned on the computer to do some work. The problem was that, once the computer was switched on, the update had to finish, and this took at least 15 more minutes. And i have a pretty quick computer (latest i5-6600K 3.5GHz processor, 16Gb RAM). Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but i had work that i wanted to do before leaving for the university, and the update left me twiddling my thumbs for a quarter-hour or more when i could have been working.
When i had Windows 7, i would keep an eye out for bigger, more complicated updates, and would delay them until a weekend, or some time when i had no immediate need to use the computer. It’s annoying that you can’t really do that anymore.
I got that big Win10 update sometime last week. Mine doesn’t update just in the middle of whatever, though, it gives the option to update before shutting down, which is fine because I’m usually leaving work or going to bed (depending on which PC). At home, I set a reminder to turn the PC on when I get up, so updates can finish installing before I want to use the dang thing. At work, I don’t care. Gives me an excuse to drink coffee and “check email on my phone” while the updates finish.
Yeah, i should have been clearer. Mine does that too.
It downloads the update in the background, but doesn’t actually begin the process while i’m in the middle of working. And when i powered down, it did give me the option of updating or not, and i chose yes, forgetting that it would delay my startup in the morning.
But still, i’d like the old Win7 option, where you can actually look through individual updates, and choose what (and when) to install.
Pretty much this. Most of the time there is a problem after an update you can blame some kind of incompatibility. That’s why in an enterprise environment you rarely have workstations downloading updates directly from Microsoft. Typically they are downloaded by someone in IT/IS who tests them before pushing them out through a system like WSUS or SCCM. You can’t trust that they won’t break things especially when you’re running proprietary software like many large organizations do.
I remember in 2012 when a new Windows 7 update caused a Blue Screen of Death on all the machines that received it because it was incompatible with the Kaspersky
Antivirus software my then-organization was using. It was a major hassle to deal with and pushed us to finally implement the WSUS server we had been considering.