Depends on your software requirements, Shirley

I’d just like to say thanks for the PSA. Saw all the moaning and so turned on the PC to let it do its thing. By the time I was ready it was done. Most of the time through I’m time crunched and so can see where the OP is coming from.

I’ve possibly been a bit slow on the uptake, but I now foresee a problem in a couple of years time where Windows forces the latest features onto creaky old laptops making them unusable before their time.

You’re slow, it runs on my ancient Inspiron 9300.

Though now you mention it…

I’ve possibly been a bit slow on the uptake, but I now foresee a problem in a couple of years time where Apple forces the latest features onto perfectly capable older iPads making them unusable before their time.

Learn from the best!

http://arrival.io/ – LOL Thunderbolt! I forgot that was even a thing.

Aside; my bro used to use an apple laptop to interface with his sound desk. One day he gets an update, and discovers that it’ll no longer connect to the desk. He speaks to Apple and they tell him that yes, the latest update means he can no longer connect to external hardware using that type of cable, he’ll need to get a new, genuine cable. He says, where can I get this genuine cable? Apple say, oh, we don’t make one. OK, how do I roll back the update? You can’t. This of course is an Apple feature, protecting your enjoyment of your iproduct.

(I think he got it going again with a dodgy image off the internet and by disabling updates)

the-muffin-man – Member
a mac will do exactly the same.
No they don’t. Macs only do updates when you authorise them to.

You’ll get a notification on the App store icon and you can pick the parts you want to update
^^^This 🙂

I can see us soon going back to the bad old days of 500 page instruction manuals (that no one reads anyway) just to stop people complaining about shit like this.

Niether of my home machines are win10 compatible. The Tech office at work chose to stick with Win7 for the whole organisation. Win Win by the sounds of it.

So has everyone been to settings, declared the quiet times and said notify before a restart???

Of course not, next update the salt will be getting mined all over again.

WTF is the rationale behind W10 resetting your prefs?

Speaking of updates, i just had to explain to someone whose machine has updated itself from W7 and who is on a 3Mb broadband that they have to leave the computer on for a whole day to do all the updates and background tasks before they can actually use their machine again. It was ususable becase it was so busy, didn’t have any HDD time left and incomplete system files/prefs. :/

(On a 3.2GHz i5 with 8GB of RAM)

Awesome, not.

cannot find the quiet times settings, any further clues please?

also not sure if it will just download the update again in the future, or if by rolling back to the previous build thats it

Press start, type updates, then Windows Updates in settings should pop up – top win 10 tip is just to type what you want after pressing start

Under Advanced

Speaking of updates, i just had to explain to someone whose machine has updated itself from W7 and who is on a 3Mb broadband that they have to leave the computer on for a whole day to do all the updates and background tasks before they can actually use their machine again. It was ususable becase it was so busy, didn’t have any HDD time left and incomplete system files/prefs. :/

There’s a setting somewhere that allows windows to update a bit like (I imagine) a torrent works, using other local machines that already have it loaded. Might help if your office broadband’s slow

On settings and such, there is an option to back up your preferences. I never and got caught out but that was my own fault.

Go faster – its not a Dell laptop is it? Sounds similar to our Inspiron N5010.

There’s a setting somewhere that allows windows to update a bit like (I imagine) a torrent works, using other local machines that already have it loaded. Might help if your office broadband’s slow

It’s in Settings, Updates Advanced setting, choose how updates are delivered.
There’s a load of stuff in there that addresses most, if not all of the points above.

The Anniversary Update is basically Win 10.2. It’s a new version of Windows. More than a service pack even.

I can say for certain that major version updates of a lot of Linux distributions cause all kinds of havoc on upgrading and require a lot of effort and forum browsing to fix it. Usually the advice is that you shouldn’t be upgrading but should wipe and start again (used to see that about Fedora upgrades all the time, and they were frequent every six months or so and kind of mandatory as if you got two versions out of date, you’re unsupported).

I suspect OSX version upgrades also mess or reset things. Though they aren’t mandatory I guess.

richmars – Member 
It’s in Settings, Updates Advanced setting, choose how updates are delivered.
There’s a load of stuff in there that addresses most, if not all of the points above.

^^^ This.

There is also a defer option, although that’s not available to ‘Home’ users.

andytherocketeer – Member 
At least the Linux and OSX can do the upgrade in situ, even while bits that are being updated are still running

Kind of, but a lot of people miss all the manual config updates they need to be doing with many of them. The updates are generally silent, or wiz past if you manually run the update commands, but often in there are instructions that this or that has been deprecated and you need to edit a config or install something different. Most people don’t get to see this and continue on blindly until they realise that component isn’t actually working.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to spend hours on Linux forums trying to find out how to fix broken updates, and those forums are not very helpful. Attitude is that you should be sandal wearing wizard level Linux genius and have worked it out yourself.

thank you to the helpful ones

ok, so as a home user and with no updates waiting to install (at present) there is no option that i can see to set “quiet times”

i will investigate further regarding backup of preferences.

when the rest of you BetaTesting Anniversary updaters have worked out how to fix the boot time* please let me know and I might try again.

*i dont mean simply disabling options on the startup tab in task manager, that helped (90secs) but nowhere near enough.

Set the second one I put the pic up of to notify to schedule updates.

Ive got “notify to schedule restart”
but not the timing options shown in the pic above, mine does say no updates available currently

3. How to block the Anniversary Update on Windows 10 Home PCs

Although Windows 10 Home doesn’t include the “Defer upgrades” feature, you can temporarily prevent the Anniversary Update from downloading on your PC.

On Windows 10, you get a feature to tell the operating system that you’re using a metered connection to access the internet. This feature is especially useful to reduce bandwidth usage on connections with data caps, public access Wi-Fi, and mobile hotspots, also, it prevents the operating system from downloading updates.

If you’re not ready to deal with possible issues during and after the installation of the Anniversary Update, use the following instructions to delay Windows 10 updates using a metered connection.

Open Settings.
Click on Network & internet.
Click on Wi-Fi.

Click the Advanced options link.

Turn on the Set as metered connection option.

Once it’s been a few weeks, Microsoft released new cumulative updates, and you feel that the update is ready, you can revert the settings to install the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on your PC.

The only caveat is that you can’t specify an Ethernet connection as metered. It seems Microsoft believes that only those on Wi-Fi connect to the internet using capped connections.

However, if you’re using Windows 10 Home on your desktop PC, and you want to delay the Anniversary Update, you can use this previous guide to set your Ethernet connection as metered on Windows 10.

After configuring a metered connection on your device, Windows Update won’t download the Anniversary Update or any other update until you revert the changes.

more here

Well it won’t restart until you let it, you will get a pick my restart time.

If it’s a desktop you can just sleep instead of shutdown, then it will do all the updating when you’re not using it.

I’m using the home edition (or whatever it’s called) and there’s an ‘Active time’ you can set, which sounds like the reverse of the quiet time mentioned above.

I can say for certain that major version updates of a lot of Linux distributions cause all kinds of havoc on upgrading and require a lot of effort and forum browsing to fix it.

Upgrading from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS murdered a production web server I look after. PHP 5 is replaced by PHP 7 (IIRC) so it helpfully just uninstalls PHP completely. Installing PHP 7 threw up a load of compatibility issues with our home-grown code, even brute forcing 5.5 on there instead of 7 didn’t work properly. I ended up doing a full system restore from backups to fix it.

Computers eh, who’d have ’em.

If it’s a desktop you can just sleep instead of shutdown, then it will do all the updating when you’re not using it.

Yep that was the first irritation once I updated, took a while to work out why my PC kept coming on and waking me up in the middle of the night.
I use the metered connection frig now to prevent my computer messing around.

Having updated (presumably overnight last night! didn’t notice any issues with unexpected restarts, sorry) I have to report that Cortana is back and with no obvious way to kill him/her/it.

I’ve just gone through these steps to disable and get the search bar back – but haven’t yet restarted to test it out so can’t vouch for it.
http://www.howtogeek.com/265027/how-to-disable-cortana-in-windows-10/

I have to report that Cortana is back and with no obvious way to kill him/her/it.

Easy to do. Have you found the Cortana settings?

I have a 6 year old Toshiba i5 laptop which won’t have anything to do with Win 10. I started with the upgrade from Win 7, which was OK until I tried to restart it. I fitted a brand new SSD and performed an absolutely clean install. Again, everything was brilliant until I restarted it then all the problems began again. Checking online brought up the news that Toshiba don’t support old models like mine with Win 10 compatible driver updates, where I suspect the problem lies. Reverting to Win 7 now! Note to self: Never, ever buy another Toshiba product.

To be fair, it is 6 years old dude.

@scardey – no other machines around, but thay could help if there were.

@squirrel – no it’s a DIY tower on socket 1156

To be fair, it is 6 years old dude.

Fair comment, thanks.

Never, ever buy another Toshiba product.

Fair.

I have a 7 year old HP with dual core Celeron, works fine with W10. Also an even older Sony Vaio P series (the tiny sub-netbook size) with one of the first Atom CPUs. It’s so slow it can’t even open most webpages quickly but W10 itself runs fine. To be fair I had to mess about a bit with the graphics driver, and use W7 drivers for some stuff – but still works well.

I’m stunned that the Sony still works. I’ve had nothing but murders with VAIOs and drivers.

To be fair, it is 6 years old dude.

My Dell is eight years old, shipped with Vista and is smashing W10 out of the park. It’s not just about age.

It’s about whether they’d anything in it for them to extend support to such an old product…. Apparently not.

To be fair Sony don’t actively support it. They did for W7 and they pretty much all worked. I did have to faff with it a bit mind. So perhaps not a good example after all 🙂

The HP did work though without issue.

My Sony Vaio is eight years old and was about to be confined to the bin but Windows 10 has given it a new lease of life.

Hey Sony owners – our VAIO HD died recently and took Windows with it. No sign of any DVD backup media.

I can’t use the stcker code to download W7 as it’s an OEM machine code… I’m guessing I should contact Sony, but that might take forever or where to actually contact* – any tips?

*”Just google it” would be my normal response too but I have next to no internet access most of the time

Download & install Win 10 instead? It’s still accepting Win7 codes.. just installed it onto another laptop this morning, using an OEM code.

We might be able to, but

we quite liked having one W7 machine left 🙂

No surprise: Microsoft seeks Windows Update boss with ‘ability to reduce chaos, stress’

Further help
http://www.howtogeek.com/264325/how-to-set-active-hours-so-windows-10-wont-restart-at-a-bad-time/
Active Hours/Custom Reset Times etc. all the stuff people are moaning about should be in there.