Truly annoying W10 update.

[Tim Locke]

A friend of mine bought a Refurb Thinkpad ( I5, 4GB, 320GB) on Thursday, machine is required for a new job on Monday. She has very slow internet, it is over-the-air, peaks at around 15Mbps but in cool wet foggy weather like yesterday it is much slower and it has throttling...such that when she took the free upgrade to W10 this last spring it took over 24 hours to download.

We took this machine to her house and it happily installed W10 1511 with the latest build edition of 104 which would make it Feb 2016. No downloading apart from 10 minutes worth of 'critical updates'. Took a couple of hours to download Office.

Today we took the machine to my place where I have 100+ Mbps internet, the idea being to get it up to 1607. I decided, wrongly I think to let the machine just follow Windows Update. We started at 2pm and immediately we found all the updates for 1511 upto August 2016. Took nearly two hours to download these and install them and then finally the download of 1607 started.

At 4:33 we are 35% into the main 'Working on updates' at 35%. So perhaps another 45 minutes to go. I am assuming that a download of 1607 via Windows update will be uptodate as of the last Patch Tuesday

I suppose I should have just loaded 1607 from an ISO, I had downloaded and prepared a USB stick for this. but I assumed that Windows update would not go through all the cumulative updates in order, not to mention the Malware tool a couple of times which is always slow. I was worried that just loading 1607 would mess up something that was already loaded...but probably it would have been faster to do that and redownload Office.

Either way, if my friend had got into this with her slow internet it would be Sunday night before it was done I suspect. I know that there are many people with slower internet than here and with download limits ( which she has but they are very large).


Finally finished at 5pm

 

[Norton]

Makes me wonder why they would make users have to sequentially download all of the cumulative updates. Absolutely makes no sense.

 

[Tim Locke]

My point exactly...why not sort them and only do the last...which of course would be a big update.
Even after 1607 it still found another update!


Or they could use that old fashioned Service Pack thing every 6 months or so!

 

[Tim Locke]

I wasn't clear about this. Once it started downloading clicking Details showed every update upto and including 1607. At no point in the first hour did it stop and ask for a restart. If it had one could have just done these updates a few at a time and known where the machine was at. Also would it be too difficult to put a dialog on screen giving which update it is downloading and the progress of that particular one with perhaps a time to completion. OLther software makers manage this...why not MS.
I'll probably put all this stuff into Feedback Hub shortly.

 

[Saltgrass]

At no point in the first hour did it stop and ask for a restart.

If it did not restart, do you feel it did actually install all updates? You might look at the Microsoft catalog and see if the cumulative updates supersede prior ones..

I just did a clean install on a new machine using the 1607 install media. Since I could not see what it was doing I don't know if it installed them all but it did seem to finish faster than I would have expected.

Did the download speeds fall in line with what you had seen with your systems? I like to keep the Task Manager open to watch the downloads, so I have a good idea of how fast those downloads are and when something other than downloading is going on.

 

[Tim Locke]

I did watch the downloading via task manager. Bursts of high speed activity** from a second or two upto a couple of minutes mixed in with times when the cpu and disk were at 100% utilization. When the Update dispaly finally started showing that 1607 was downloading it looked as if ethernet was at a consistent rate with spikes of cpu/disk...I wondered if it was still applying updates.

My 100Mbps internet is theoretically 12MBps but more likely to be a max of 80% of that so about 8MBps which is what I was seeing...6-9MBps overall.


Anyway the update from early 1511 to upto the minute 1607 succeeded with none of the problems that others have shown on this forum. Plain Jane T430 running Defender as its AV and Office 2016 installed. Not even Malwarebytes.