It’s almost 1,5 years overdue, but Windows 10 will soon ask its users whether they’re done with their work before restarting the system to perform updates. Updates may still be disruptive, but users will have more warnings and have more opportunities to delay updates.
I’ve been somewhat critical of Windows Update in Windows 10 over the last few months, calling it both disrespectful and rude for closing everything I’m doing to restart and install updates.
Windows 10 made most of the decisions for you regarding when updates would be installed and didn’t provide ways to tailor the timing to your specific needs. What we heard back most explicitly was that you want more control over when Windows 10 installs updates. We also heard that unexpected reboots are disruptive if they happen at the wrong time.
John Cable, Microsoft
Users will be prompted whether they want to restart immediately, snooze the update for up to three days, or pick a specific time and date to perform the update. The changes will arrive in the Windows 10 ‘Creator’s Update’ (or ‘Service Pack 2’, as it would be called using 2000’s Microsoft product naming conventions.)
I’m happy to see that users will be put back in control of how their devices operate. It will be a definite improvement to be able to leave my PC for a bathroom break and not come back to a PC that have lost all my work and is busy installing updates. This is without a doubt the single most impactful improvement in the upcoming Creator’s Update.
Windows 10’s update scheme was incredibly ambitions for an operating system that doesn’t preserve the state of running programs after a reboot. There’s no way to implement anything like automatic reboots and updated without being disruptive when they would be so disruptive to running programs and actual work being done on the device.