The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on
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@dkf Just don't stumble over the pot of gold half-buried there or our resident leprechaun might steal your shoes.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@sloosecannon said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@heterodox said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@sloosecannon said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
Also your boot time doesn't really matter too much when it takes so long to get through BIOS. Since on my servers it takes like 5 minutes just to get to Windows anyways...
Wow, that's atrocious.
Is it better on newer servers? The ones I have access to are... A few years old... But they take absolutely forever to get through all the BIOS/UEFI stuff.
Brand new Supermicro board, takes 30 seconds or so to init the bmc, reboots, 40 seconds for... Something. 10 seconds for drive detection, 20 seconds for onboard network/storage card init,. 30 seconds to reinit, then finally it tries to uefi the bootloader from disk.
Yeah, that's about my experience. 5 minutes might be a little of an overestimate, but not by much.
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It's interesting to compare boot times for me on my computers. BIOS is painfully slow now all the other computers I use are all UEFI. So my parents brand new Pentium gets to the Windows desktop in 5s while my old i7 takes maybe 15s just to get past the BIOS.
And I really can't understand why updates on Windows (and macOS) are so slow. Updating on Linux, even including a reboot, goes very fast and the computer is usable during the update process. While even though both Windows and macOS applies updates during a reboot, the process takes several minutes to finish on average even though they have 100% control over the computer at the time.
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@Atazhaia said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
brand new Pentium
Did Intel swallow the Microsoft bug and try going back to the glory days?
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@Tsaukpaetra I dunno if I would call the current Pentiums the cutting edge. They fall between Celeron and i3, so I thought it would be a good fit for my parents who just browse the web and check e-mail with the occasional streamed video. Also, a good time to get a Pentium is now when they added hyper-threading to them (again).
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Here's a question for anyone saying "just reboot".
Would you prefer to install an update while you can still use the computer and then reboot, or would you prefer to stop working completely while the update is installed?
For some reason, Microsoft chose the latter, and that's what results in nonsense like "this incremental update will cause your computer to be inaccessible for about 90 minutes" in the Creator's update.
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@ben_lubar Usually all 90 of those minutes happen while you're asleep or elsewhere, though?
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@Atazhaia said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
I thought it would be a good fit for my parents who just browse the web and check e-mail with the occasional streamed video
An Android tablet would be a good fit then.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
Did Intel swallow the Microsoft bug and try going back to the glory days?
They've rebranded some of their CPUs (I think based on the i3?) as Pentiums again. So yes you can buy a brand new Pentium. It confused me too.
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@ben_lubar said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
Would you prefer to install an update while you can still use the computer and then reboot, or would you prefer to stop working completely while the update is installed?
I would prefer option 3, which is to never hear Ben L bitch about Windows updates again in my life. I've already gotten a lifetime's worth.
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@ben_lubar I prefer Option
34 which is wake up, log in to my computer, and find out it's updated. That's how it works for 99% of users.
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@TimeBandit They do want a proper desktop computer, and an Android tablet is not a proper desktop computer.
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@Magus said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@ben_lubar Usually all 90 of those minutes happen while you're asleep or elsewhere, though?
Only if your computer is always on. One of four Windows machines in my house is like that.
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@boomzilla said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
Only if your computer is always on. One of four Windows machines in my house is like that.
I'm under the impression that if your machine is in sleep/hibernation/maybe even shutdown it'll wake up and apply updates then go back to sleep/hibernation/shutdown. But I'm not 100% sure of that; I just leave my only workstation on.
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@heterodox said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@boomzilla said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
Only if your computer is always on. One of four Windows machines in my house is like that.
I'm under the impression that if your machine is in sleep/hibernation/maybe even shutdown it'll wake up and apply updates then go back to sleep/hibernation/shutdown. But I'm not 100% sure of that; I just leave my only workstation on.
These are laptops that closed and possibly unplugged and in a drawer. One is likely shut down (so maybe really hibernating if that buggy "fastboot" shit is enabled) and two of them are probably hibernating. But I'm not surprised that regular Windows users have adapted their habits to avoid encounters with Windows Updates.
Though one of the hibernating thingies is Win 7 and only updates when it can connect to its WSUS server when the moon is in the right phase and several other unlikely things. It actually stopped updating entirely for a couple of years and started back up this month.
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@boomzilla said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
But I'm not surprised that regular Windows users have adapted their habits to avoid encounters with Windows Updates.
Can't speak for regular Windows users. My machine being always-on is unrelated.
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Yeah, it seems like most people have this odd compulsion to turn their PC off as often as possible, which is why boot time matters to most people a lot.
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@Magus I have this odd problem on this regard--my system (a home-built desktop) won't gracefully restart. It'll boot up from shutdown, it will resume from sleep, but some kind of motherboard/UEFI/power supply issue makes it hang on a restart. The OS shuts down properly, but the restart just never happens. This makes un-monitored updates an issue. I end up just shutting it off every night and doing the updates when that happens. Hasn't bothered me yet (the updates that is).
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@TimeBandit Ok, that looks pretty cool. I could see myself using one of those actually. As a bonus I also found this little error in the article:
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@masonwheeler said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
The part I don't get is, why do kernel updates require you to close all your programs and shut everything down?
- Programs are using kernel objects.
- The kernel knows which objects each program is using. It keeps track of them. We know this because it's documented that all handles are closed upon program termination, no matter how it gets terminated, which means the kernel has to have this information in order to close them.
- If the kernel has a list of which objects each program is using, it can perform a procedure like the following:
- Suspend all programs
- For each program, serialize the list of kernel objects
- Replace the kernel module
- Initialize the kernel module
- For each program, deserialize the list of kernel objects, restoring their original state (or the equivalent, if internals have changed) and hooking them up to the same handle values as before
- Resume all suspended programs
- This would be significantly faster and less disruptive than requiring you to shut down all programs and reboot the system.
- So why doesn't it do that?
If Windows had been designed that way from the beginning, then yes, that would be perfectly reasonable. Sadly, out there in the real world, it's not that simple. 25+ years of hacks and kludges to maintain backward compatibility and accommodate all manner of shitty, badly written software, has made Windows internals too messy and full of a gazillion different gotchas.
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@Benjamin-Hall I had that on my old, partially fried mobo.
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@Magus Funny thing is the rest of the system works fine.Graphics card is getting a little long in the tooth, but does everything I need. What with trying to buy a house there's no way I can afford anything new right now, so...
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@heterodox so you waste energy with your computer turned on all night?
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@wharrgarbl said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@heterodox so you waste energy with your computer turned on all night?
I waste energy watching TV for half an hour that puts keeping the computer itself on to shame.
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@heterodox said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@ben_lubar I prefer Option
34 which is wake up, log in to my computer, and find out it's updated. That's how it works for 99% of users.Yes, but wouldn't it be better if you could install a software update (not necessarily an automated OS update) before you restarted the software?
Web browsers have figured it out, mostly.
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@ben_lubar Web browsers are also a lot simpler than OSes
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@RaceProUK windows 7 at work mostly just install updates when I turn it off
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@RaceProUK said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
@ben_lubar Web browsers are also a lot simpler than OSes
You apparently haven't looked at the Firefox source code
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@ben_lubar said in The episode where Microsoft won't tell me what's REALLY going on:
Yes, but wouldn't it be better if you could install a software update (not necessarily an automated OS update) before you restarted the software?
I don't know what you mean. I expend no effort to either install updates or restart.
If we're talking application updates now vs. OS updates, meh. I really don't care.