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.
A lot of people don't think in terms of concepts like shortcuts. They click Start and click Programs and click the thing they want. If Programs becomes "Applications" but everything else remains the same, they get lost. They don't understand, they memorise steps.
These people need to re-learn workflows when you move the contents of "Programs" onto the base Start menu and make it a different color. Many people don't have decent computer skills. Unfortunately it's not just the elderly, either.
That's something that I hate: "Updates failed; error 0x00062007" message.
Googling that error number provides mostly generic answers like "this error can be produced when the moon is in the seventh house, try the update troubleshooter"
Or the totally useless "experts" on answers.microsoft.com who tell you to reboot and then run the update troubleshooter.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
And another thing - that cryptic error message is presented in a graphical dialog box, and you can't cut and paste it to look it up. You have to write it down, and then type it into browser search. What a useless aggravation!