I legitimately haven’t had a windows update take more than 5 minutes during the reboot phase for years.
I wasn’t just talking about the reboot phase…
Downloading gigabytes worth of updates, waiting for them to install, rebooting, see more updates, reboot again takes WAY more than 5 minutes.
But why are you paying attention to a process that a) doesn’t need supervision and b) is done automatically in the background? It’s such a weird thing to complain about.
Not to mention, the vast majority of windows updates are tiny. The only large updates are the yearly major updates. If you’ve got multi gig downloads happening even weekly, you might want to look into what’s wrong with your system.
I am guessing you run your computer all the time instead of putting it to sleep, because it’s never a process that completes transparently in the background for me. It will always build up and then I have to go in and manually trigger it. Or I have to restart because I installed a new application that requires it and then it decides to do them all at once and takes forever.
How long is it on for? Unless you’re turning it on for minutes at a time, I just can’t see how it would never have time to download things in the background.
The only way I can see this really happening is if you’ve a) got obscenely slow internet or b) have all networks listed as metered, which would indeed prevent automatic updates (unless you specify otherwise.)
Might be a good idea to dig into your settings, because the age of needing to babysit windows updates has been gone for years now.
How old is your machine? If it’s new enough to run windows 11 then it probably also supports modern standby (aka S0 standby). When plugged in during “sleep” it’s actually on, and should be doing the updates for you.
That said my work laptop only gets used during work hours and it almost always gets it’s updates done while I’m doing stuff throughout the day, and it just needs a quick reboot to finish.
