8 hours to install Features update 1903

[wickham]

It took 8 hours to install the monthly cumulative update and the Features update 1903 yesterday on a W10 HP laptop with 4GB RAM.
I've commented on the length of time Microsoft updates take to install before, but 8 hours is unacceptable.
If I complain to Microsoft it would have no effect, so is there an important institution that can ask - demand - Microsoft to improve this time delay when a computer is completely unusable?

In simple terms, what is happening during an update? We see "getting ready", then downloading, then installing, then restarting.

The download period might be affected by the internet or ISP, but what causes such a long install period? Presumably the computer has to cache the new files, then swap them and check. Swapping files should take milliseconds, not several hours, so could Microsoft do something to shorten this period?

[bungeejumper]

At least you got there in one go. It took four attempts (or was it five?) over a week to install 1903 on my Acer laptop with 4gb. And three attempts on my Dell desktop (at another address) with 8gb. Each time, the download was completed and then the computer rebooted, only to say something along the lines of "sorry, the install failed". In between times, there were many occasions when the screen just went black - no cursor, nothing at all, for maybe half an hour at a time. On both machines!

Problems with 1903 are very common, it seems. Some have suggested that users' drivers may not be up to date, but mine had all been updated. I never did find out what was going wrong, but I tend to prefer the alternative explanation which was that Microsoft was feeding me damaged files.

What it did do on my desktop was fail to remember my personalised settings, so that reboots took longer and became more scary and unpredictable. (It has now stopped doing that.) And it re-enabled a wifi adapter which I'd purposely disabled (because it was crap and I had a better dongle).

Sometimes I pine for the old days when my antique Austin computer, with a mighty 20mb hard drive, would boot up in thirty seconds.

BJ

[Itsallaguess]

It won't even go on to my little Asus tablet pc (W10/W Edge). Not enough memory and I've uninstalled almost everything and ive tried using external memory.

I can't do a reset of any kind (Not enough memory) and it appears you can't upgrade the memory

We had a bit of trouble with one of our Windows 10 tablets, and needed to ensure that the disk 'Clean-up' process was removing system files and old update files, as well as previous windows installations -

Cleaning out your PC on a regular basis frees up drive space and helps it run better. One of the easiest ways to clean up files you no longer need is by using Disk Cleanup.

• Open Disk Cleanup by clicking the Start button . In the search box, type Disk Cleanup, and then, in the list of results, select Disk Cleanup.
  
• If prompted, select the drive that you want to clean up, and then select OK.
  
• In the Disk Cleanup dialog box in the Description section, select Clean up system files.
  
• If prompted, select the drive that you want to clean up, and then select OK.
  
• In the Disk Cleanup dialog box, on the Disk Cleanup tab, select the check boxes for the file types that you want to delete, and then select OK. To remove data from a previous installation of Windows, select the Previous Windows installation(s) check box.
  
• In the message that appears, select Delete files.
  
• Go back to Computer in File Explorer, select the drive you cleaned up, and then select Refresh. If you need to free more space (the drive is still marked red), go to the next tip.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/17421/windows-free-up-drive-space

Carrying out all of the above processes did free up enough space on the system drive to enable the recent Windows 10 update to progress fully.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Breelander]

It took 8 hours to install ... the Features update 1903 yesterday...

...In simple terms, what is happening during an update? We see "getting ready", then downloading, then installing, then restarting.

In simple terms, windows update doesn't download a complete set of new system files, it constructs the new system by re-using as much as possible from the old system and applying patches to create new up to date system files.

Allowing Windows Update to install the Feature Update to 1903 is, perhaps, the slowest way to to upgrade to 1903. The reason is that Windows Update uses the Unified Update Platform (UUP). This is optimised to reduce the download size of an update by only downloading the changes, not the full set of files as are used in the ISO. The down side is that there is a lot of work to construct the new system files from your old ones by applying patches.

...one of the biggest benefits UUP brings to our customers is a reduction in download size of build updates on PCs.... Differential download packages rely on re-using files on your current OS to reconstruct the newer OS. This could include copying files as-is that have not changed between builds, or it could involve applying “binary deltas” or “diffs” to old files to generate newer files. Differential download packages are smaller and can take a shorter amount of time to download.

For a full build, we refer to this as a canonical download package... Canonical download packages tend to be larger in size and may take longer to download.

..as we roll out UUP in our retail release, users can expect their download size to decrease by approximately 35% when going from one major update of Windows to another. For retail users, the first time they get the UUP client code is part of the Creators Update, therefore, they will see the benefit of differential download packages when they go from the Creators Update to the next feature update of Windows.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperi ... tform-uup/


The fastest way to upgrade to 1903 is to use the Media Creation Tool to download the ISO, mount it, then start an in-place upgrade by running the Setup.exe from the ISO. The ISO is what MS call the 'canonical download package' so it contains full copies of the system files. No patches to apply means much less CPU time is needed.

I have tested both methods using the same machine each time. The ISO upgrade took less than two hours, while windows update took over four and a half hours.

[Infrasonic]

The fastest way to upgrade to 1903 is to use the Media Creation Tool to download the ISO, mount it, then start an in-place upgrade by running the Setup.exe from the ISO. The ISO is what MS call the ' canonical download package' so it contains full copies of the system files.

I have tested both methods using the same machine each time. The ISO upgrade took less than two hours, while windows update took over four and a half hours.

I'd concur with this, having done the same A/B a couple of times on different spec desktop machines with a similar OS/apps/data storage footprint.

The higher the PC specs the faster it is too, so things like USB 3.1 G2, SSD OS boot drives, quad core CPU et al all make a noticable difference.

[wickham]

The fastest way to upgrade to 1903 is to use the Media Creation Tool to download the ISO, mount it, then start an in-place upgrade by running the Setup.exe from the ISO. The ISO is what MS call the 'canonical download package' so it contains full copies of the system files. No patches to apply means much less CPU time is needed.

I'll try to remember for the next Features Update.

I've just completed the 1903 Features update on my W10 desktop - 7.10 am to 12.48pm.
I said before that the computer is unusable, but it is usable most of the time, but not during the "configuring" and "working on updates" phases (about 45 mins) which can be embarrassing if you try to update a PC before a meeting but it takes longer than expected and the PC can't be used in a meeting, which happened to me once. I think I tried to stop it installing by closing down and rebooting, but I think it just restarted where it left off.

[Breelander]

...it is usable most of the time, but not during the "configuring" and "working on updates" phases (about 45 mins) which can be embarrassing if you try to update a PC before a meeting...

That last stage takes the same length of time regardless of how you got there, Windows Update or ISO. You just get there faster with an ISO.


When Windows update has completed the initial stages of a Feature Update, 'preparing...' 'downloading and 'installing', it should give you the option to restart and update now or to schedule a time for the restart. If you need the machine straight away then you can postpone the restart until such time as is convenient.

[ReformedCharacter]

Well I've just downloaded Linux Mint (Xfce version) to a USB stick via a download tool called Rufus on to my little ASUS tablet with a clip on keyboard thing. I'm running it from the USB stick at the moment. Ten minutes in...... and its like a new computer, honestly. The only thing I had to do was to rotate the screen to landscape instead of tablet/portrait and connect to my wi-fi. Some of the keyboard keys are in the wrong place, but the internet, trackpad, plug in mouse, keyboard etc all seems to be working fine. And the internet (via Firefox) is very quick.

Welcome back little ASUS.....you were almost gone.

Helpful guide

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.zdnet. ... 0-minutes/

You'll enjoy the updates too, I updated Debian on my PC yesterday and the update took c. 60 seconds including the reboot

RC

[Howard]

Should I be worried?

My 6+ year old Medion desktop I bought from Asda for £349 updated to W10 1903 earlier this week. Having read about the long update time on this thread, I was concerned, so nervously set it going, made a coffee and went back 15 minutes later to check no smoke was coming from the computer. To my surprise it had updated and was waiting for me to enter my password. A minute or two later and the update was complete.

The next day it did tell me that I needed to manually update a Medion app, which I did in a couple of minutes.

Since then it has been working fine.

Have I done something wrong

regards

Howard

[xeny]

Swapping files should take milliseconds, not several hours, so could Microsoft do something to shorten this period?

As I understand it the update takes far longer than one might expect (I have the joy of managing these updates on large numbers of machines in a work context) as the process is designed to be robust against outages or other problems during the process. MS accept a longer update duration to reduce the no of people left with an unbootable PC of something unexpected happens.

Looking at resolving the symptoms rather than cause, is it worth considering an SSD simply to get update times down to something more palatable?

[Watis]

Should I be worried?

My 6+ year old Medion desktop I bought from Asda for £349 updated to W10 1903 earlier this week. Having read about the long update time on this thread, I was concerned, so nervously set it going, made a coffee and went back 15 minutes later to check no smoke was coming from the computer. To my surprise it had updated and was waiting for me to enter my password. A minute or two later and the update was complete.

The next day it did tell me that I needed to manually update a Medion app, which I did in a couple of minutes.

Since then it has been working fine.

Have I done something wrong

regards

Howard

Probably not, since it's working.

To confirm which Windows version you are running:

- press the Windows button + R

- type 'winver' (without the asterisks) in the dialog box and press Return.

HTH,

Watis

[Howard]

Should I be worried?

My 6+ year old Medion desktop I bought from Asda for £349 updated to W10 1903 earlier this week. Having read about the long update time on this thread, I was concerned, so nervously set it going, made a coffee and went back 15 minutes later to check no smoke was coming from the computer. To my surprise it had updated and was waiting for me to enter my password. A minute or two later and the update was complete.

The next day it did tell me that I needed to manually update a Medion app, which I did in a couple of minutes.

Since then it has been working fine.

Have I done something wrong

regards

Howard

Probably not, since it's working.

To confirm which Windows version you are running:

- press the Windows button + R

- type 'winver' (without the asterisks) in the dialog box and press Return.

HTH,

Watis

Sorry I should have indicated more clearly that I had "flippant" mode on

Windows 10 has always seemed to work fine for me. My desktop is quicker than my wife's Ipad at virtually every task and almost as fast as a Chromebook. Hopefully that's true for most Windows users.

regards

Howard

[Breelander]

As I understand it the update takes far longer than one might expect (I have the joy of managing these updates on large numbers of machines in a work context) as the process is designed to be robust against outages or other problems during the process...

As I said earlier, the the Unified Update Platform (UUP) used by Windows Update is optimised to minimise the download size at the expense of longer processing times. This is especially important in a work context where you don't want the update to hog all the network bandwidth.

[xeny]

[This is especially important in a work context where you don't want the update to hog all the network bandwidth.

Surely in most work environments you've got WSUS so download size is relatively speaking a non issue? I'd far rather pay for a faster connection to site than pay people to watch "please don't switch off your computer" any longer than necessary ?

[ReformedCharacter]

Well the keyboard appears to have fixed itself.

The 2 issues I have to work on are:

1. No speakers

2. To find a away to turn down the brightness on the screen. It's like staring at the sun.

The sound issue shouldn't be too difficult, see if this helps:

https://itsfoss.com/fix-sound-ubuntu-1304-quick-tip/

I've never had to adjust screen brightness, but this may help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn9JH8YH0Co

RC

[Infrasonic]

Not so good (not 'bad', but not so good).....

Despite RC's assistance, I have no sound (speakers or headphones). This is not uncommon and I'm sure I will work this out in time. Or perhaps I can try another Linux version.
My screen is permanently bright. I'm getting used to it now though.
my 'FN' buttons don't work.
It's a bit more involved than Windows.
Snorvey

You'll be pleased to know that even the big boys like Dell (who offer their XPS 'Developer' range with Ubuntu natively installed) have had similar issues with new models, even managing to send out review models with non functioning bits... It is one of the delights of Linux, waiting for the moment after install when hopefully all the hardware works as normal. Newer hardware can be more problematic than old as the FOSS community catches up.

You can run W10 'live' from USB as well, if you ever wanted to try it out (plenty of tutorials out there). Probably not great over USB 2 but 3.1 and up should be OK.

[Breelander]

...the computers +- volume buttons still dont work. I can adjust the volume in the app (BBC, youtube etc), which is fine for the time being.

Depending on the make/model of the PC, adjusting the volume from the keyboard may require specific OEM drivers. You should however be able to adjust the volume from Speaker icon in the taskbar. Just click on it to bring up a slider control.

[Infrasonic]

I installed 1903 via the MCT route yesterday evening, all went without a hitch. Took about an hour and a half in total including the latest 1903 MCT download and doing an in place with all settings/apps/files preserved upgrade. (I've done clean installs previously that were a bit quicker than that though).

It's actually speeded the machine up noticeably, I think there may have been a few corruption issues that have got fixed (1903 was being flagged as not currently compatible for a while via Windows Update).
A couple of 3rd party apps like Speccy have been broken (no longer displaying CPU/motherboard temps, so I uninstalled/reinstalled it, still no joy).

Overall I like it, especially dark themes ( I never got 1809...) and the anti-ransomware protected folders manual override update in WD. (No more searching through event viewer for file paths...).

[ReformedCharacter]

There's a useful but rather techy thread here:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=281776

I'd suggest running these lines one at a time in a terminal:

sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install alsa-base pulseaudio
sudo alsa force-reload

and then a reboot

RC

[tsr2]

One of the easiest ways to clean up files you no longer need is by using Disk Cleanup

It may be one of the easiest, but it's not the most effective. I had a 200GB Windows 7 partition that was running out of space. MS Disk Cleanup, including removing system files didn't clear enough space to make it usable, even though I had very little in the way of user files. CCleaner, on the other hand, removed well over 100GB of temporary files, probably closer to 150GB, mainly from \Windows\Temp, IIRC.