Windows Updates have sometimes been a pain point for users. The update pop-ups can interrupt a movie or a video game, and the automatic restarts can result in lost data or confused users.
Microsoft President of the Windows and Windows Live Division Steven Sinofsky explains in a blog post that Microsoft had three goals with Windows 8 when it designed the new automatic update system. 1) It had to minimize restarts and be more predictable, 2) automatic updates needed to be less intrusive, and 3) updates to the PC ecosystem still had to be delivered in a secure and timely manner.
“The challenge we faced was to find the balance between updating with speed and giving notice to the user for upcoming restarts,” Sinofsky states. “Clearly, updating and securing the PC before vulnerabilities can be exploited is just as important as it ever was. However, we also want to deliver a better experience around handling restarts and avoiding data loss without compromising our goal of timely updating.”
The result is a revamped Windows Update for the next version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system. The new updating system now consolidates restarts into monthly cycles, timed for Microsoft’s monthly security release on the second Tuesday of every month. The sole exception is for “critical” security updates like Blaster worms.
“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,” Sinofsky notes in the blog post.
Windows 8 has also changed the update notification system. Notifications appear on the login screen and persist for three days — a timeframe chosen because the majority of WIndows updates occur in that time. The notification, which appears in the bottom-right part of the screen, gives users several days to prepare for the restart or initiate it on their own with the “Update and shutdown” option.
Automatic restarts don’t occur on a hard timeframe, though. If there is a chance of losing user data, Windows Update will hold back until work has been saved. The familiar update pop-ups don’t appear if you are doing something that takes up the entire screen, such as playing a video game or watching a movie. IT administrators also have the ability to prevent auto-restarts, just as they currently do with Windows 7.
Overall, it’s a wave of nice changes that improve the user experience. I’ve had those annoying pop-ups ruin a perfectly good movie night, and it’s nice to know that the next generation of Windows is going to be a little more polite about needing an update.
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