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Microsoft Operating Systems Windows Technology

Most Windows 10 Users Are Running the Update From Over a Year Ago (betanews.com) 170

Posted by msmash from the whatever-it-takes dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's original grand plan for Windows 10 was an operating system that was always up-to-date. Updates were intended to be mandatory, and while you could delay them a bit, you couldn't opt out of them entirely. And the software giant was committed to rolling out two major feature updates a year. Fast forward to now, and things are very different. You can delay, or avoid, most updates, including feature updates -- assuming you're even offered them in the first place.

AdDuplex monitors the state of adoption for the various Windows 10 versions, and its latest figures, for May, show the October 2018 Update (1809) is still only on 31.3 percent of systems (up from 29.3 percent in April), and the May 2019 Update (1903) is currently to be found on just 1.4 percent of devices.
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Most Windows 10 Users Are Running the Update From Over a Year Ago More

Most Windows 10 Users Are Running the Update From Over a Year Ago

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  • Not surprising... (Score:3, Informative)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @04:34PM (#58682140)
    Most Windows users are STILL running Windows 7 SP1

    • I have had the same issue. The last several updates keep failing to install because of lack of storage space I think.
      Windows keeps getting more bloated for no good reason.

      • I doubt that it's storage: I have 250GB from a laptop from 2015, and I doubt that the OS alone takes up all that space. It's more likely the fact that we are the beta testers, so that broken shit gets released downstream
        • I also have a 250 GB SSD and every time updates try to install I get the BSOD. If I reboot enough times I can get past it and it reverts back to the last update notifying me I have new updates. I just skip them until they try to install themselves again. Same issue. Same resolution. Repeat...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      And some still use Windows XP SP3! :O

    • Most Windows users are STILL running Windows 7 SP1

      No they aren't. Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 last year.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Windows 10 overtook 7 quite some time ago.

      http://gs.statcounter.com/os-v... [statcounter.com]

    • Or you're full of shit Win10 55.9% Win7 33.78% Win8.1 6.02%

    • No longer most, but many. I'm certainly not the only one who is frantically trying to figure out which Linux Distribution has the best gaming support before time runs out next year in January.

      Ain't it funny that there is a perfect solution for every other problem, but what tethers you to the sinking ship of Windows is gaming? It's apparently impossible in Linux to produce an easy to use interface that allows people to play their games.

      • Games need proper hardware support.
        Linux never really figured out a proper hardware abstraction of high enough level.
        Metal might change some of that.

        I played ARK!Survival Evolved for a while, which has both a Mac and a Linux port, using Unreal4. While the Mac version had some issues, the Linux version was a lot worse, not only because of the OS, but also it's users. A lot of them were complaints of things not working properly because of using open source drivers that just did not implement enough of OpenGL,

  • Microsoft was sick and tired of customers resisting their latest shiny upgrade, especially when they did so successfully, as with Vista and 8. Keeping the actual version a secret (i.e. "it's all Windows 10") was supposed to cause enough confusion to blunt dissent (and damn the negative side effects).

    Remember when Mozilla tried to remove FF's version number from the About Box [slashdot.org] as a prelude the wacky wapid release schedule? Same reason.

  • So long as you have to reboot to update Windows (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lanthanide ( 4982283 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @04:43PM (#58682218)

    This will always be true.

    If Microsoft want to ensure that people will update windows to the latest versions, they need to come up with a way of updating the system that doesn't require a full reboot.

    • Re: So long as you have to reboot to update Window (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tysonedwards ( 969693 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:10PM (#58682416)
      I am okay with a full reboot. What I am not okay with is the hour of waiting for âoeconfiguring updates, please do not turn off your computerâ. Having a Threadripper 2990wx, 64GB RAM, and an EVO 970 SSD shouldnâ(TM)t mean being able to start updates, leave for lunch, come back and it is still updating.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        The feature updates are, really, installing a complete new operating system. And hour for that is actually not bad.

        (That is does so automatically, given their record of breaking stuff with feature updates, should result in everyone involved being beaten with a flaming stick until they're not stupid any more.)

        • Really? It takes me less than 10 minutes to completely reinstall linux (KDE neon at the moment) on my four year old laptop.... when I do updates, the most frustrating thing is that after the updates run, completely in the background, I occasionally have to restart Firefox because some pages crash after a new version has been installed. An hour of not being able to use the machine? What are they smoking?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The feature updates are, really, installing a complete new operating system. And hour for that is actually not bad.

          That's a straight up shit view. It is very possible to stage the upgrade so that it takes minutes, and that should be what we all expect from Microsoft; this isn't a free operating system, they're not doing us any favors, they earn enormous amounts of money in this business. These updates should be as painless as possible. Hell, I can upgrade the kernel of an Ubuntu machine without a reboot, and their revenue is a Microsoft rounding error.

          Instead we have glacially slow upgrades and crazy ass bugs that

        • Have you installed Windows on a clean build anytime recently? It takes a hell of a lot less time than an hour, so why do updates on that same machine take so much longer?

        • it's very bad for people that need to do some actual work on their computer, businesses should be able to bill Microsoft for the time wasted, it's immense.

      • Thanks to Slashdot and their unicode text bullshit, I know you were posting from a Mac.

      • They could go with the solution that is used by enterprise Unix-es: duplicate the system drive, patch the inactive copy, and the reboot boots into the (formerly) inactive copy and the (formerly) live copy becomes the inactive one. As an added benefit, if something breaks, they can add a boot entry to the F8 menu to go back to the older disk (or even just go back to it automatically if it fails to successfully boot). This will also eliminate the need to reboot *right now* after patching because none of the

        • Why not leverage virtualization? Run the OS as a virtual machine and make updates copy-on-write clones of the current VM. They could keep a couple of iterations of the previous build VMs around, merging the oldest into the second oldest after a successful update.

          • The only issue I could see with that is hardware performance for gaming and the like. Can graphics cards perform within a VM at near native levels yet? I haven't tried in a while. I suspect KVM under Linux would work best, though Microsoft would probably insist on hyper-v.

            • I don't work with Hyper-V enough to know what kind of hardware passthrough it's capable of, but I know you can do a lot of direct hardware mapping to VMs in VMware. Anyway, my thought is a "desktop" hypervisor like this could just map physical hardware resources like GPUs and PCI cards by default to whatever the desktop VM was.

        • Good point. Back in the day when hard drives were smaller, Microsoft's insistence on having Users on C:\ forced the secondary drive to be pretty useless, since everything wanted to go on C:\. But I don't know that it's an issue now, given that hard drives are 128GB or higher.

          Even if Program Files and Users were put on a separate partition, the issue would still remain whenever Microsoft wants to introduce a new bundled program into an update.

          • Good point regarding a bundled program, they would have to do them through the Windows Store (have the store check the OS build level, and if above a certain one, unlock the update to the bundled app). I guess what I was getting at is, updating is still way more troublesome than it needs to be, and it won't move mountains to fix it.

      • Why do you not apply the updates overnight like the system asks you to?

    • they need to come up with a way of updating the system that doesn't require a full reboot.

      Apple has had much better luck with people adopting updates fairly rapidly, both for IOS and OSX. Both systems require updates.

      I think it's because the updates are not very frequent, and generally are pretty safe (modulo enemy action from Google [macobserver.com]).

      They are not even generally that quick to install, so I'm not sure what other things could make the adoption of of them generally better.

      I know when I ran Windows is was most

      • Apple has had much better luck with people adopting updates fairly rapidly, both for IOS and OSX. Both systems require updates.

        I think it's because the updates are not very frequent, and generally are pretty safe (modulo enemy action from Google [macobserver.com]).

        They are not even generally that quick to install, so I'm not sure what other things could make the adoption of of them generally better.

        My Macs allow me to choose a time, and even to avoid an update entirely. In general, the computer works afterward,(I did have an update some years ago that left it sluggish, and they fixed that in a day or two. So I just do the update later in the evening when I get the notification window.

        Windows updates on the other hand, have a lot of post update surprises. I've had updates that rename all the sound drivers - and I've got 28 of them. But Windows decides to rename them all to the first driver it finds,

      • Yes.
        Apple's minor point releases are quick and painless.
        Apples bigger (yearly) releases do take some time and are more prone to cause issues, but there is usually no penalty for being 1-2 versions behind and wait until any problems are sorted out.

        Apple leaves the user in full control of when updates happen, which updates happen and even when you get nagged about it.

        I hate Windows Update popping up in the middle of a game. Apple knows not to do that when I'm running something full screen.

    • Re:So long as you have to reboot to update Windows (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:43PM (#58682622)

      This will always be true.

      If Microsoft want to ensure that people will update windows to the latest versions, they need to come up with a way of updating the system that doesn't require a full reboot.

      They need to come up with a way of updating the system that leaves a working system when it does reboot.

    • Or better yet, quit removing features in new updates to Windows 10 and breaking things that used to work. I have a couple of my machines specifically locked to the TH2 version of Windows 10 -- which is the last version that WMC will run on with CableCard support. My other production machines are generally running 1803, but I have automatic updates totally disabled and only install stuff at scheduled intervals when I need to for security reasons. I also generally only reboot the machines maybe once every 6

    • This will always be true.

      If Microsoft want to ensure that people will update windows to the latest versions, they need to come up with a way of updating the system that doesn't require a full reboot.

      Causality error. People here aren't worried about not rebooting a computer for a full year.

      Now back in reality: The rollouts of the two most recent builds haven't been green lit for every system, still has a list of incompatibilities which prevents them from installing, many of the smaller devices lacked the 8GB of disk space available to start the update of the previous updates, and thanks to Microsofts disk reservation policy even more devices lack the disk space for the 1903 update.

      That's before you take

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Windows 10 just forces you to reboot, you have no choice in the matter.

      • Yes, I do [oo-software.com].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I've tried it, it does help but it can't completely stop the forced reboots.

          Windows 10 also tries to trick you into agreeing to a reboot too. There are lots of misleading messages or things that look innocent but include a mandatory reboot.

          • This. A lot of the Windows messaging is misleading, and there usually are a lot of unmentioned consequences.

            One of the things I like about MacOS, is that it tells you up front if it will require a reboot. Not just the OS, but other applications (employer mandated firewall, virus scanner, ...) do as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      All too easy. At shut down, if there is an update available, let people know and advise them clearly ie "System is Shutting Down, an update is available, would you like the update to proceed and the system to shut down once the update has successfully completed". Let people know when they boot but for fuck sake do the update on shut down as an option.

  • About 10% of my machines are stuck (Score:3)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:01PM (#58682334)

    I update using Ansible and SCCM and about 10% are stuck at some version of 7 or 10 and if you run update from command line you get an "unknown error" 0x8... code. Some can be manually fixed by cleaning out the old update logs but most of them will need a wipe and reinstall.

    Unlike Linux installations the Windows update system doesn't just update files. Too many operations require system services, dll registrations and registry updates and if your machine isn't "just so" it fails spectacularly without rollbacks and gets stuck.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      The best source of Windows Update failure I've personally seen: Windows Update can fail if the WU notification icon isn't visible on the task bar. How bizarre. Totally unrelated to MS deciding they no longer needed QA a few years back, I'm sure.

    • Try unplugging every USB device. A mouse and keyboard will likely be useful, so if those are USB, keep those plugged in. Everything else that is USB should be completely disconnected.

      A USB hard drive being connected is enough to cause the update to fail. In my case, it was a VR headset. Poor programming and USB are at the root of the issue.

      Just disconnect everything USB that you can and try to runt he updates then.

  • Fucking braindead version scheme (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:03PM (#58682360) Homepage Journal

    I'm sure the completely opaque and uninformative version scheme has nothing to do with it.

    Am I running it? I have no fucking clue. What is 8704? Is that before or after the Summer Fun in the Sun Update? Which fucking year's summer is it? Is this even the current release? System Update seems to say so, but then again maybe my computer isn't in this traunch?

    • Exactly, turning windows into a rolling release cycle thing is a disaster. At the office you can have different teams pinned to different releases by mistake and because WSL features are tied to releases you could have one team able to use docker for example and another team pinned by their department to an earlier release of windows 10 with a version of WSL that doesn't support use of docker or has some other vital but missing feature. However because of how WSL is integrated with the NT core it has to be

    • Yep. I have two laptops running 10 and couldn't tell you which version even though I know the two devices are on different updates. Don't care either as long as I can open Steam since that's the only thing windows is good for these days.

    • I'm sure the completely opaque and uninformative version scheme has nothing to do with it.

      The year followed by month?

      What is 8704?

      The version of Windows 10 your grandchildren will install in April 2087

      Is that before or after the Summer Fun in the Sun Update?

      I'm confused. Why are you quoting silly newsspeak names when talking about versions. Windows 10 has two identifying factors: The version number in the format YYMM, and the Edition e.g. "Windows 10 Pro for Home".

      Anything beyond that is you confusing yourself and straying from the official identifiers:
      https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com]

  • Just use LTSC from usual torrent sites (Score:4, Interesting)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:05PM (#58682382)

    After paying for regular edition legally of course. Operating system needs to be stable, familar and lightweight. I will likely run same apps in a year as I am running now. The last thing I need is for UI to subtly change and for API changes to break a bunch of games every 3 months. I especially don't need constant popups for free trial of Office 365 or whatever. Just wish Oculus supported Linux so that I didn't have to bother with such hacks.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Um... Getting your OS from a torrent specifically to avoid patches and updates is by far the surest way to be pwned by malware I can think of.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iamacat ( 583406 )

        LTSC has security patches, but not breaking/spammy/gratuitous changes stuff. I do wish it was available for end user purchase, say for a price of Pro.

        • It also has the worst update mechanism that takes hours and is 4 years behind. Meaning no WSL for Linux or OneNote support

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by iamacat ( 583406 )

            LTSC 2019 has WSL. As for other things - I am not missing them now, why would I suddenly miss them next year? Or sit and wait for updates to install?

  • Before or after MS bricks PCs with their updates? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by atrex ( 4811433 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @05:26PM (#58682518)
    Subject says it all, Microsoft's "latest and greatest" Win 10 updates screw things up when they're first released more often than not. MS's zeal to force out updates has overrun their QA cycles. It's no wonder users attempt to block the updates however they can.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Microsoft fired all the QA people. Their idea of QA is to do a slow roll-out of updates. If they don't start getting an unusual number of crash reports back they ramp up the deployment speed. If they notice a lot of telemetry saying the update started to install and the machine was never heard from again, the might think about pausing before other victims' PCs are trashed.

    • I let you in on a secret: You are their QA department. If it doesn't brick your system, they release the update to their real customers, i.e. companies.

      They should rename "Home edition" with "Guinea pig edition". It's much more fitting.

  • I think it was supposed to read: "Most windows 10 users are running FROM the update from over a year ago."

    See, most of us really are scared of the bugs and the privacy issues introduced!

  • Lesser of two evils (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @06:00PM (#58682716)

    The problems are the frequency of updates, the intrusive, borderline destructive nature of the updates, the low added value of the vast majority of updates, and Microsoft's arrogance in wilfully ignoring the impacts of all of the above. The benfit to the computer user is simply not worth the cost in its various forms, and by a huge margin.

    I'm sure there are critical security patches that are absolutely essential, and I'm sufficiently computer literate to understand the dangers of not having them. I would still rather disable updates entirely and permanently than suffer through the 99.9% of updates that are unwanted, disruptive, or outright harmful.

    • The problems are the frequency of updates

      It's an annual minor feature update - I'm confused, how often are minor feature updates supposed to be released, semi-annually? Bi-annually? Quarterly?

      The issue is that 1903 was released ONE WEEK before the adoption measure was recorded - by now the 1903 release likely has more total number of users than either Linux desktop or OS X... I think Win 10 1903 is doing just fine.

    • I think rather that Microsoft burned their goodwill regarding software updates long ago, with Windows Genuine Advantage - an update whose benefit was entirely Microsoft's, not the user's.

      Much the same as Sony burned their update credit when they disabled Linux boot on the Playstations.

    • I would still rather disable updates entirely

      Sure. But like all anti-vaxxers I would recommend we build a separate internet for you which you and your kind can use to infect each other while leaving the rest of the world alone.

      • We should build a separate internet for all the people with inferior bodies (i.e. OSs) where you only have the choice of dying from not getting the vaccine or dying from the vaccine.

    • When 0day exploits and being 24/7 connected to the internet with a machine that has those 0day exploits is a LESSER security risk than running the updates, you know just how shitty the OS is...

  • In the case of the latter update, its tiny share can be attributed to it only having been released to the general public a week ago

    Less than 1.5% adoption after ONE WEEK is fine. By the end of the third week the latest feature update will have greater market share than ALL desktop installations of either Linux or OS X...

    How many Ubuntu users upgraded to 19.04 in the first week of availability? The latest Windows 10 is a minor feature update, what's the pressing motivation to upgrade for the average desktop user? was not found on this server.

  • When I shut down my laptop to put it in my backpack to head to the airport. And it says not to shut it off.

  • ... says Microsoft, then force terminates your processes, dumps the machine into reboot, and then makes you stare at the software equivalent of a fidget spinner for a lengthy period of time at always at the worst possible moment.

    Shockingly, people actually want control over their machines. They don't particularly care for MS telling them what's important when they are the ones with a job to do. They disable the windows update service like a sensible person should and update manually. MS, being as oblivious

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Livius ( 318358 )

      They don't particularly care for MS telling them what's important

      Especially when Microsoft is incredibly unreliable at making that judgment. Plus thinking in terms of what's important to Microsoft and not the actual owner of the hardward and licensee of the software.

    • That comic [commitstrip.com] sums it up nicely.

  • So are the vendors (Score:3)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Thursday May 30, 2019 @07:45PM (#58683136)
    I just bought a Ryzen 5 2nd gen-based Lenovo Ideapad 330 with a 256GB SSD and it shipped with 1803. I know it takes a long time to test and make an image for an OS but it doesn't take THAT long.

    • Why would you as Lenovo put the effort in if the problem will sort itself when the user starts up the computer?

      • Agreed, except the assumption is incorrect.

        A few years ago, I sold an old laptop of mine. Since I'd been running Linux and all kinds on it, I did a factory reset and got it back to the as-shipped Windows OS. I didn't log it on though, I just switched it off and handed it to the buyer. He was using it for a few weeks and asked if I knew how to make the sound work - for it to work, you needed to run Windows Update, which clearly he hadn't run (I seem to remember the screen resolution improved after an update

  • Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that recent updates tend to wreak havoc and break a lot of shit making for a very frustrating experience for the end user ? I mean, I love the fact that ( after the last ' update ' ) my $3k tablet won't charge its damn battery ( sitting at 20% ) even when it's plugged in.

    In fact, the only way I'll bother with future updates is with the misguided hope that one of them might actually " fix " what they broke with a previous one. :|

  • I recently learned windows added a rudimentary clipboard manager (Win+v) to this spring's update, but when I tried to enable this I discovered didn't have access to it because I was still on the 18xx version despite the native update tool saying I was up to date. I had to install the Windows Update Assistant to get up to 19xx.

  • I'm not sure I believe this article. I went through a tremendous amount of effort to stop my computer from auto updating as I want to update on MY schedule not some you have to do this in 18 hours or else garbage. I really doubt most users go through the trouble its not as simple as turning windows update off as it will turn itself back on. Perhaps if they didn't have Windows 10 Home like i do they could stop it easier.

    In the end I couldn't stop it I was only able to stop it from rebooting automatically

  • Too many updates break too many other things, including in my constituency mission critical applications. Is it any wonder people go out of their way to avoid updates?

    That's before we consider the implications of an operating system that chooses to phone home over expensive data links (not just data capped cellular but satellite).

  • 12 mentions of Microsoft and and 14 mentions of Windows. Is this what /. has been reduced to, an advertising platform for the company that made email dangerous.

  • My laptop had several failed attempts at installing the Fall update. It would cause a BSOD and then rollback. Security patches continued to trickle in but my laptop stopped attempting to pull the Fall update for most of early 2019 (I suspect MS blocked me, like many others).

    Then another BSOD corrupted Windows 10 and required my machine to be fully reformatted from the factory image.

    Now I have all big updates - successfully. I did have a higher frequency of BSOD after the re-install which were (mostly)

  • People stopped at 1803 because 1809 was broken when they released it in October and it took until April of 2019 for them to finally say it was OK to go ahead and install it. Funny because they just released 1903. This is a slightly loaded article since the stigma is still there over 1809 being a shit show. Of course it has low adoption, people were told not to install it up until a month ago.

  • The majority of offices have chosen to only deploy the spring updates and skip the fall ones so they only have to deal with one major change per year instead of two. Sites that are running Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise can do that easily. And the problems with the Fall 2018 update in particular caused even more sites to avoid it. Windows 10 Home users have to jump through hoops to avoid an update, so fewer of them do. Some offices are only doing one update every two years.

    All in all, not really big news, and

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