Windows 8 Smarter Updates

Features, Operating System, Start Screen - By admin on Friday, November 18, 2011 - 08:54

It's happened to all of us at one time or another; you're halfway through some work when Windows Update informs you that it's about to restart your computer to install an update. Sure, you can delay it for fifteen minutes, but at the back of your mind you know you're going to have to stop what you're doing, close down your programs and restart. It's a pain.

But now Microsoft has made it easier to update without interrupting your work. In Windows 8 Windows Update or WU will happen once a month. As Farzana Rahman, the group program manager Windows Update group explains:

"WU will consolidate all the restarts in a month, synchronizing with the monthly security release. This means that your PC will only restart when security updates are installed and require a restart. With this improvement, it does not matter when updates that require restarts are released in a month, since these restarts will wait till the security release. Since security updates are released in a single batch on the second Tuesday of every month, you are then getting essentially one restart a month. This simplification helps in three ways: it keeps the system secure in a timely manner, reduces restarts, and makes restarts more predictable."
Windows will then download the updates automatically and if a restart is needed to install them, you will be informed on the Start Screen as shown below:

Farzana continues, "A message about the upcoming restart is shown in the login screen for three days or until the PC is restarted (whichever is sooner). This means you now have three days to restart the PC at your convenience."

If you haven't restarted your machine within these three days, your computer will give you a standard 15 minute warning that it is about to restart:

When it comes to restarting, you will notice that you now have new options: 'Update and restart' is shown 'immediately after the update occurs.

Whereas 'Update and shutdown' appears on days two and three if you haven't yet restarted.

Occasionally, however, there will be a need for additional updates outside of this monthly one, as Farzana clarified: "There is one exception to the rule to wait for the monthly security release, and that is in the case of critical security update to fix a worm-like vulnerability (for example, a Blaster worm). In that case, WU will not wait, but will go ahead and download, install, and restart automatically. But this will happen only when the security threat is dire enough."

I'm sure we can all cope with that.

Have you tried Windows 8 yet? Let us know what you think by leaving comments.