A new vision for Windows Update
By now, you’ve probably read Terry Myerson’s blog entry on Windows 10, where he talks about the concept of “Windows as a Service.” When thinking about Windows Update in this new world of Windows as a Service, this quote is worth focusing on:
“And just like any Internet service, the idea of asking ‘What version are you on?’ will cease to make sense–which is great news for our Windows developers. With universal Windows apps that work across the entire device family, developers can build one app that targets the broadest range of devices–including the PC, tablet, phone, Xbox, the Internet of Things, and more.”
As part of this process (and the process of advancing Windows from its PC heritage to something that spans the broadest range of devices, from big screens to small screens to no screens at all), the Windows Update experience is changing. In this post, we want to share more information on our vision for Windows Update, and how that relates to the update experience you see today on the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview build (9926).
First: what’s missing today that’s coming soon
As with all aspects of the Technical Preview, the update experience is a work-in-progress. We’re by no means done, but we wanted our Windows Insider audience to get an early look at what we have so far in order to get feedback to shape the final product. So before talking about the vision for Windows Update, here are a few things that are still being worked on but didn’t make it into build 9926:
•Optional driver updates will no longer be automatically installed. We are evaluating fixing this prior to the next Technical Preview release.
•If your machine is managed by WSUS, the option to scan against either the WSUS server or the Windows Update/Microsoft Update environment.
•Notifications when updates are available (including support for Action Center), including scenarios where multiple users are logged in.
•The first scan when setting up a new device will get all available updates and only require one restart (instead of multiple restart cycles over several hours or days).
•Technical Preview updates integrated completely with the new update experience.
You can look forward to these in future Technical Preview releases as soon as they’re ready.
Windows Update and “Windows as a Service”
Beyond the work we’ll still doing though, the Windows Update experience you’re seeing in the latest Technical Preview build represents the first steps toward the vision laid out in that quote we talked about earlier from Terry’s blog post. Windows as a Service means the broadest number of PCs, phones, tablets and other devices are all running the same software, where “the idea of asking ‘What version are you on?’ will cease to make sense.” Many customers view updates as a necessary (and frustrating!) part of their device experience that they just want to be as easy as possible. To make this a reality, we’re streamlining the update process to keep devices up-to-date with minimal complexity. In particular, we’re focusing on reducing the inconvenience of the disruptive restart that’s required for some updates–you can now schedule the restart for each update to a date and time that’s most convenient for you, or choose to have Windows predict the best time for an automatic restart based on when and how you use your device.
Moreover, where it makes sense, we want the Windows Update experience to feel as similar as possible across devices, so customers who have multiple devices running Windows 10 have a familiar and consistent experience. As with many other areas of Windows 10, this doesn’t mean we’ll have the exact same experience across devices. But we want any divergence to only occur where it has real value, so we’re taking cues from both Windows 8 and Windows Phone to provide some of that familiar look and feel across different devices.
It’s also important to note that for enterprise customers, we have a robust set of policies to control updates in a very granular fashion. We’ll share more about that at a later time, but if you’re an IT admin concerned about whether the new Windows Update experience can be managed the way you’ve done in the past, we are completely committed to that support.
What we don’t recommend…
We’ve seen a few forum posts talking about changing registry keys to alter the update experience we shipped in Technical Preview build 9926. There are a couple of reasons that we don’t recommend doing things like that.
First, the default experience is what we’ve tested across not just the Windows 10 team, but across all of Microsoft before we released it to you. That doesn’t mean that you won’t still find bugs, but it’s definitely the code that’s been most thoroughly tested. Changing things back to older versions is risky because the combination of those old settings with the rest of Windows 10 is not something that’s been validated or supported, so we can’t predict the side effects. It’s possible that changing registry settings related to update could cause a machine to no longer be able to get new updates or Technical Preview builds.
The other reason to avoid changing the default update experience is that a lot of update-related code is actually being re-written in order to scale across the variety of different device types Windows 10 will support. Since Technical Previews are a work-in-progress, some code that may still be in build 9926 won’t actually ship in the final version of Windows 10 that we provide to all our customers, so trying to re-enable that code temporarily won’t provide a way to accurately assess Windows 10’s update capabilities.
Keep giving us feedback!
Finally, and most importantly: we want to hear your feedback! We’re sharing Technical Preview releases early so we can understand exactly how customers are using our software and make sure we are designing our experiences to address those scenarios. The more specific the feedback, the more helpful it is for us – saying “I hate <feature>” isn’t very useful, but when we see “I have a small business with no management capabilities, so <fill in the blank> is painful for me”, or “I create video content and I need <fill in the blank> because of the way I use drivers and how I render my content”, we can actually understand what changes we could make to solve those specific problems. We can’t promise to fix everything that everyone asks for – and sometimes what one customer wants is exactly what another customer doesn’t want – but the more you can help us understand why you want something changed, the better we can try to meet those needs. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to hearing your responses.
