anyweb Posted November 19, 2011 Report post Posted November 19, 2011 Before the Internet, updates such as service packs and "patches" were impossibly hard to come by. You ordered upgrade "media" or maybe bought a magazine with a CD in it. Of course, the Internet changed all that. In fact, when ftp.microsoft.com was first set up, among the first services was the ability to get updates for MS-DOS and Windows. With the introduction of Windows Update, we invested heavily in building not just a software delivery service, but a commitment to delivering high quality updates in a timely manner. It took some time to get to the point where customers trust these automatic updates, and we're proud of how far we've come. Today Windows Update is one of the largest services on the Internet by several measures, and of course we're using Windows 8 development as a chance to improve the experience of product updates too. This post was authored by Farzana Rahman, the group program manager of our Windows Update group. –Steven When it comes to Windows Update, one of the most discussed topics is the disruptiveness of restarts in the course of automatic updating. And for good reason—restarts can interrupt you right in the middle of something important. The obvious question to ask first is why does the installation of updates even require a restart at all? Ideally, we would like all update installations to happen seamlessly in the background without a restart. But, in reality, there are situations where the installer is not able to update files because they are in use. In these cases, we need to restart your machine to complete the installation. The automatic updating experience thus needs to be able to handle cases where restarts are required. We know this architectural challenge is one that frustrates administrators and end-users alike, but it does represent the state of the art for Windows. It is important to understand that for many updates, even if you could continue running the existing code that is already in memory, it is that very code that is a security vulnerability (for example), so the risk to the security (or reliability) of the machine would remain until you restart your machine. We'll keep working on this one. In the meantime, applications that support the Windows Restart Manager (introduced in Windows Vista) can return you to precisely where you left off after a restart. In this blog, I want to talk about some of the improvements we are making to the automatic updating experience in Windows 8, which will make restarts a little less annoying. First, some facts about Windows Update Windows Update (or WU, as we like to say within the team) currently updates over 350 million PCs running Windows 7 and over 800 million PCs across all the supported Windows platforms. There are actually many more PCs updated by WU indirectly if you account for our Windows Software Update Server, and for those machines (or customers) that do all updates manually for any number of reasons. Since its genesis over a decade ago, the Windows Update experience has evolved quite a bit to adapt to a changing ecosystem, especially the changing requirements around security. And Windows Update has been quite successful in updating PCs in time to stay ahead of large-scale exploits against Windows. Since the introduction of automatic updating, we have constantly worked to tighten the time it takes to distribute new updates to everyone who uses WU. The chart below (figure 1) shows us how fast downloads and installations occur on Windows 7, from the time of release of an update. The speed of each download is primarily determined by the internet connectivity of the PC, something that WU has no control over, so it is interesting to see below that the majority of update activity occurs in the first three days after release. This three-day number is a key one that I will come back to when we talk about improvements in Windows 8. In one week, 90% of users worldwide who need the update have successfully completed installation, including the restart, with the number of installations pretty much flattening out after that. Figure 1 – Completed download and installation of updates from time of release of update The balance of how broadly and how quickly we can update has proven beneficial to our users to the point where updating is mainly viewed as a background maintenance task (and justly so!) with nearly 90% of users choosing to update automatically on Windows 7. That’s 90% of the total user base telling us to automatically install updates without showing any notifications, or asking for confirmation. Windows 7 Automatically install updates 89.30% Notify me before install 2.38% Notify me before download 3.44% Never check for updates 4.88% Figure 2 – Usage of various modes of automatic updating Automatic updating and restarts on Windows 7 The next logical question to ask is what is the install experience for people who have chosen to automatically install updates? Below, data collected anonymously from WU gives an insight into the various modes of installation for those who have chosen to install automatically. As you see above, there are 3 main categories of automatic update installations. Here is what we learned from analyzing each category. Install-at-shutdown – The majority of automatic update users (39%) are updating when they shut down their systems. For these users, there is no automatic restart because the system can complete all steps of the installation during shutdown. This is the least disruptive experience for users, and so we do want to “hitch a ride” whenever we can on user-initiated shutdowns instead of inconveniencing users with a separate restart. Install-at-scheduled-time - For the 30% who are scheduling automatic updates, their installations start at a scheduled time (the default is 3 AM in the time-zone where the PC is located) or the next time the user logs in (if we miss the 3 AM window). WU automatically completes any restarts necessary to finish the installation. To ensure that you get the chance to save any important files and data before the restart, we show you a 15-minute countdown timer before the restart. A fifteen-minute countdown timer warns you of the restart Allowing restarts to occur without user interaction has helped us to rapidly update a major portion of the Windows ecosystem with critical updates. On average, within a week of releasing a critical update, 90% of PCs have installed the update (see Figure1). On the other hand, this behavior of automatic restarts has some unintended consequences for the user. Restarts can occur without notice, and might occur monthly or even more often if there is an out-of-band update. This unpredictability can potentially result in loss of user data. Most of our automatic installs and the subsequent restarts happen at 3 AM, when users are not around to save any important work. We have heard a lot of painful stories of users coming back to their PCs in the morning to find that a restart occurred, and that some important data was lost. In other cases, the user doesn’t lose data, but needs to restart a job that they were in the middle of (for example, a long copy job). Interactive install - We were surprised to see 31% of users interactively installing updates; of these 31%, approximately 20% have selected to automatically install, but they manually intervene anyway. WU provides a pop-up notification telling you when updates are available if you have selected to automatically install. The notifications are clearly capturing people’s attention, so they click on the notification and interactively install the updates. But this is actually reinforcing an unintended behavior. If you signed up to get automatic updates, you really shouldn’t need to bother interactively installing an update every time one is available. Most installs should occur silently in the background, and WU should notify you only for critical actions (for example, a pending restart). This also matches feedback from customers, who tell us they find the constant notifications to be distracting. Their expectation when they choose automatic updating is that updating will occur automatically. This seems to be a case where making sure people are in control of their PC experience actually resulted in too much information, and ultimately the price of being in control was a feeling of a loss of control. With these lessons learned, we set about defining a better automatic updating and restart experience for Windows 8. Solving the challenge around updating and restarts The question for us on the WU team is always “What is the best way to quickly update the PC while not being intrusive to the user?” Turns out, this is a hard question to answer, and there is no one simple answer. The challenge we faced was to find the balance between updating with speed and giving notice to the user for upcoming restarts. Clearly, updating and securing the PC before vulnerabilities can be exploited is just as important as it ever was. However, we also want to deliver a better experience around handling restarts and avoiding data loss without compromising our goal of timely updating. To this end, the guiding principles we used to design the experience were The automatic updating experience is not intrusive to users but keeps them aware of critical actions Minimize restarts and make them more predictable Continue to keep the PC and the ecosystem up-to-date and secure in a timely manner Windows Update and handling restarts on Windows 8 Based on these principles, we made the following improvements to the Windows 8 updating experience. more > http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/11/14/minimizing-restarts-after-automatic-updating-in-windows-update.aspx Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
