Slashdot Mirror
New Study Shows Windows 10 Home Edition Users Are Baffled By Updates (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Since the initial release of Windows 10 nearly four years ago, Microsoft has been tweaking its approach to automatic updates, adding Active Hours settings to ensure that mandatory restarts are less likely to be intrusive. Recent feature updates have also made notifications of pending updates more obvious. Are those changes enough to ease the pain? A new study from a group of UK-based researchers suggests Microsoft has more work to do. The study, titled "In Control with No Control: Perceptions and Reality of Windows 10 Home Edition Update Features," was presented this week at the Workshop on Usable Security (USEC) 2019 in San Diego, California. Researchers Jason Morris, Ingolf Becker, and Simon Parkin of University College London, built a detailed model of Microsoft's update process as of Windows 10 version 1803 and then surveyed a group of 93 Windows 10 Home users.
The overall conclusions were a mixed bag. In general, the survey respondents think that the Windows 10 update approach is an improvement over that found in previous Windows versions. Among participants who had experience with earlier Windows versions 53 percent reported they felt updating Windows 10 is easier, versus only 8 percent who found the process more difficult. Similarly, a majority of respondents agreed that the Windows 10 update process causes fewer interruptions than in previous versions (43 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed). Where Microsoft has fallen down, the researchers argue, is in building an update system that is "dependent on a complex range of user and system properties." That system, illustrated by the flowchart shown here, is simply too complicated for the average home user to understand.
The overall conclusions were a mixed bag. In general, the survey respondents think that the Windows 10 update approach is an improvement over that found in previous Windows versions. Among participants who had experience with earlier Windows versions 53 percent reported they felt updating Windows 10 is easier, versus only 8 percent who found the process more difficult. Similarly, a majority of respondents agreed that the Windows 10 update process causes fewer interruptions than in previous versions (43 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed). Where Microsoft has fallen down, the researchers argue, is in building an update system that is "dependent on a complex range of user and system properties." That system, illustrated by the flowchart shown here, is simply too complicated for the average home user to understand.
A lot of the time, I have open files and it just nukes everything. I've never figured out how that's OK.
There's some dark magic you can do to disable the automatic reboot. I did it months ago when I built my new workstation -- there's a folder buried deep under System32 that contains the 'Reboot' script. If you remove that and replace it with a folder named 'Reboot', then it will always fail to run the reboot-after-update phase of the update cycle.
Try explaining to an elderly person who's used to 95/XP/7 how to get around Win10. Everything's hidden, icons that are confusing, and the modern desktop UI just baffles them to the point where they just give up..
In my opinion, the biggest issue with Windows Update is the cryptic error messages when the update fails, for whatever reason or another. I'm quite computer literate, and I struggle mightily trying to search out "Error Code 0x80072ee7" (or whatever) - Takes me down a rat hole of incomprehensibly useless knowledge base articles and general gibberish.
Fixing *that* should be a top priority for Microsoft.
Dear Microsoft: start calling Windows OS X.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Microsoft keeps rearranging settings and stuff. It's gotten to where about a quarter of the online tutorials and guides don't work anymore because Microsoft has rearranged things since the guide was written. The one that stands out in my mind is the setting to disable driver updates. There used to be a setting in the updates page of the control panel which allowed you to disable driver updates. Then it got removed from the control panel and moved to the Metro UI settings. Then it got split into a separate setting for each driver. Then they completely removed the setting for several months (which screwed over my gaming laptop since the video drivers Win 10 kept installing didn't work). And now they seem to have finalized on using the "Roll back driver" button in the driver's properties. If you click that, it rolls back the driver and disables automatic updates for that driver.
Either focus on consumers, and remove the enterprise stuff
Or focus on enterprise, and remove the consumer stuff.
This one size for all OS pisses everyone off.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
They figure anyone using Hyper-V is a masochist so they probably want it reboot randomly.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I chuckle a bit when people talk about letting the user choose what time to shutdown the entire machine for 30 minutes while Windows updates whatever - the color picker dialog and the wifi UI or whatever.
Twenty years ago, tou used to have to rebuild Linux if you updated the KERNEL. Only the kernel ever needed a reboot. Anything else, the update just saves the new version of the file to disk. If it's a running service you.want to update, restart that service. Updating the file sharing service means you restart file sharing, which takes three seconds. Why in the world do Microsoft programmers find it necessary to shut down the machine, and then extract the new version of the file? Do they really not know how to save a file on a system that is running?
Ten or fifteen years ago, Linux got live kernel updates. No need to reboot to activate the new kernel. Most people probably reboot into a new kernel out of habit and inertia, but that's the only time you'd reboot a Linux box related to an update. I had a machine up for eight years until I moved. It stayed updated.
Windows got multi-user security (DAC) 10-20 years after Unix and Linux. Windows got modern security, MAC (or at least a watered down simulation of it) about 10 years after Linux. Windows gets a lot of things 10-20 years after Linux does. Maybe it'll get the ability to update a file without shutting down the entire machine, in a few years.
I still remember back when Windows was an operating system. Now, the friendly popup informs me, Windows is a "service", graciously provided by Microsoft, at its discretion, and to susceptible be updated with whatever code they choose to push at me, with or without my approval. All for my greater comfort and convinience, of course.
Might makes right irrelevant.