14 DAY TRIAL // Long-time Windows 10 users certainly know that updating a device running Microsoft’s latest operating system has so far produced mixed results.
While some, including myself, experienced little to no issues with Windows updates, others had to struggle with all kinds of problems, including failed installs, broken Windows features, and update downloads that took hours to complete.
As far as the Windows Update service itself is concerned, the biggest complaint is often the time required to complete the download phase.
Microsoft has tried to make the update process less intrusive, so more offline stages are now taking place online. This means the device spends less time after the reboot, as more tasks are performed while your computer is still online and you can thus continue using it, while everything is performed in background.
Recently, however, I came across a suggestion that makes the whole updating process even smoother.
The option that users require, and which I also think would be a helpful addition to Windows 10, could be called “shut down the computer when the update is complete” and is supposed to do exactly what its name suggest: turn off the device after an update is installed.
If you’re wondering who needs this, the best example is night updating. Some users prefer to allow their devices to download and install updates in the evening when they’re done working on the device. However, because the update takes so long to download and install, they have no other option than to wait for the process to complete or leave the device on all night long.
A feature suggestion in this regard has already received several tens of upvotes in the Feedback Hub, and I’m pretty sure more would be given soon as more people discover the benefit of such an addition.
“For long download and slow internet it would be great to have an option "Shutdown PC when download is done", so we can go to sleep with download in progress without worry about shutdown the PC or leaving it up all the night,” the original poster says.
Others go even further and envision more options to control the device after the update is complete. For example, some think that an option to shut down the device after the update is downloaded and before the installation starts would also be helpful. This control would come in particularly handy for users who are concerned that updates could fail to install and push their devices into an infinite reboot loop, which in turn would prevent the device from shutting down automatically in the first place.
Similar controls could improve the updating experience for users in the Windows Insider program as well. Because these users are provided with larger downloads that include new Windows 10 build images, the download process (and the installation that takes place afterwards) obviously takes longer, so such an option would allow them to do the whole thing at night while they sleep.
Of course, there are many ways this experience can be further polished and improved, but more control over the updates that are served though Windows Update is without a doubt welcome, no doubt about it. Whether or not Microsoft will make this happen is something that depends on users, as the more upvotes are submitted in the Feedback Hub, the bigger the changes for the company to start working on such a feature.
As a matter of fact, the next feature update, which is called 20H1 and will land as version 2004, is almost complete already, so there’s no chance to get this improvement earlier than the fall of 2020.