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Microsoft to Alleviate the Pain of Windows Update Reboots

It's very frustrating to be in the middle of working on your PC, or just having walked away for a few minutes, only to return to see your computer rebooting. Microsoft realizes how annoying that is, and is trying to solve the problem in the latest Windows 10 Insider Build.

July 27, 2018
Windows 10 S

Love them or hate them, Windows Updates are very important. They ensure your PC has the latest security updates applied and that everything keeps working so that you can too. But the way in which they are installed needs some work, and Microsoft is attempting to solve the most annoying problem—untimely reboots—in the latest Windows 10 build.

Microsoft doesn't want to force you to stop what you are doing so a reboot can occur. Windows 10 allows you to choose a more preferable time window in which to apply updates, but the Insider Preview Build 17723 goes a step further with some updated reboot logic.

The Windows development team trained a predictive model that allows Windows 10 to "accurately predict when the right time to restart the device is." The decision is based on the answer to two questions: Are you currently using the device, and did you stop working only for a short period of time?

The first of those two questions is pretty easy to answer, but the second one requires Windows to learn from your behavior. For example, if you typically go and grab a coffee around 10 a.m. every morning, that's not going to be a great time to trigger a reboot. However, if you are regularly gone for an hour at lunch, Windows will know and use that time to reboot.

Internal testing by Microsoft shows "promising results." Let's hope it performs as well outside the lab so I can see fewer tweets from people complaining about Windows 10 suddenly rebooting and ruining their day.

Microsoft has already improved the Windows Update process this year by cutting feature update disruptions to 30 minutes. Combining that with intelligently timed reboots means we could soon reach a point where you don't even notice an update has occurred (wishful thinking, I know).

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About Matthew Humphries

Senior Editor

I started working at PCMag in November 2016, covering all areas of technology and video game news. Before that I spent nearly 15 years working at Geek.com as a writer and editor. I also spent the first six years after leaving university as a professional game designer working with Disney, Games Workshop, 20th Century Fox, and Vivendi.

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