david55

My computer updated W10 this morning. The update took so long and with so many % screens I had not seen before, I thought for awhile I was re-installing 10. When it finished, all was well ( after a little tweaking of my desktop icons and fonts) but there were a bunch of new apps installed.

nkedel

The semi-annual major updates (e.g. 1511, which has been rolling out over about the past month) ARE basically a full upgrade/reinstall in place. It's an annoying amount of time, but because they basically do an upgrade, they should help keep the installation cleaned up over time if the process works out well.

pseudoswede

How do I prevent W10 from rebooting my computer in the middle of the night to install updates? I want to be able to choose when to reboot my computer.

nkedel

Settings -> Update and Security -> Windows Update
Click "Advanced Options"
Select "Notify to Schedule Restart" under Choose how updates are installed

This seems to reset itself after major updates; I'd had it set to notify, and the 1511 update seems to have reset itself to automatic.

piper28

The updates in windows 10 are really starting to annoy me. I'm not really a fan of how it's doing basically installs in place when they release whatever current refresh they decide to do are. But it takes way too long when it decides to do these updates, and I've had a number of people already complain to me about it in our department, and we don't have that many windows 10 machines so far.

nkedel

Those are scheduled, and are only supposed to be tied to a twice-a-year calendar. The last one -- and the only one so far* -- was 1511 (November 2015) and the next one is 1605 (coming in May, in theory.)

If you're on a Microsoft enterprise agreement, you can get the "Long Term Servicing Branch" and avoid those, but at the same time, Windows 10 is a bit of a moving target and I wouldn't personally want to be stuck on an old build of it right now.

(* unless people signed up for the preview releases, in which case they oughtn't complain, or they were on a pre-release version which is basically signing up for the preview releases.)

PTravel

My machines are also set to notify me re: reset, and they've been doing that, even for the 1511 roll-up.

I may have faster machines, but I've found that the updates are quite fast. YMMV.

piper28

Timed a machine that we being setup a couple days ago when it hit that 1511 rollup. New machine, hadn't been used by a user yet, dell 9020 with 16G ram (although either a standard or hybrid hard drive, not ssd). From the time I told it to restart till the time it got back to the login (so not including the download time), 1 hour 10 minutes. (Plus about another 5 minutes after I logged in again where it was telling me it had updated, and that it would eventually take me to the desktop - although I've had one machine where I logged on, well after it did that upgrade, where I got that message and after 20 minutes I gave up on it.) (I will say, on my surface when it did this update, with the ssd drive, it did take significantly less time.)

I need to start buying ssd's on desktop machines, I just get annoyed at the premium dell charges for them compared to what they really cost.

Between that and the critical start menu error that comes up that may or may not be caused by dropbox (or a couple other applications), I've gotten less happy with win 10 than I was.

nkedel

Yes, probably starting about 2-3 years ago, at that.

That said, why buy the overpriced Dell ones (which also gives you no control over what SSD manufacturer/controller you get) when you can buy the machine with the cheapest drive -- or no drive -- and just either swap for (if it's a small form factor desktop) or better still, just add, the SSD.

Some of the new machines [not sure if this applies specifically to Dell desktops] which take an mSATA or m.2 SSD card on the desktop motherboard are particular easy to add a drive to as there's no fussing with cables.

piper28

I've certainly done that in a few instances, especially on laptops. Unfortunately, the purchasing process around here doesn't make that method particular convenient, so in the long run it'll be easier to just pay the extra that dell charges. And of course, any warranty issues with the drive would only be covered with Dell if purchased from them, and I can get them to replace a drive a lot faster than I can get the drive manufacturers to do it.

nkedel

For personal use, the purchasing process is generally "go buy it." If it's other people's money at work, just buying the machine with the preinstalled drive is the way to go these days.

As for warranty issues, prior to being able to get sorta-halfway-decent/sorta-afforable drive from the system manufacturers, the answer to replacing drives in a corporate environment is to buy cold spares and keep them in inventory. The drive replaced under warranty goes back in inventory when it comes back.

piper28

Yeah, when I've been able to, I've generally had spare drives around for when they fail. But it's academia, and it tends to be one of those things that comes about when there's spare money, and some of the lines of funding we've used to do that in the past have dried up somewhat. A significant amount of our purchasing is done from grants, and they're starting to get exceedingly picky on what you can order (a number of funders have basically banned purchasing computers, on the theory that they can be used for more than just the project that the funding is for). I'd call the funding system broken, but that might be overly kind.

Eh, what can I say, there's advantages and disadvantages to working at a university.

CPRich

Public Service Announcement...

For those who have been procrastinating - The free Windows 10 offer ends on Friday. I did my daughters' laptops last weekend (and promptly installed Start10 on top of them).

pseudoswede

I upgraded my work laptop (ThinkPad T450s). However, I was getting so many blue screens that I had to roll back to Windows 7 Pro. I don't have any special programs installed.

The tech support company my company outsources to says that since I've already upgraded to Windows 10 once, I don't have to upgrade again by the end of this week. I can now wait as long as I want. Is that true?

nkedel

To the best of my knowledge, that's correct; once your Windows 7 (or 8, or 8.1) key is activated for that hardware on Windows 10, it's a valid Windows 10 key for that hardware.

I have a few friends who made that assumption -- didn't want to run Windows 10 now, but wanted to make sure they could; backing up the machine with Windows 7, upgrading, and then restoring the Windows 7 backup in theory should do it.

Nobody will know for certain until after the 30th. I'm still half expecting at least for 8/8.1 that free upgrades will get extended.