POLL: How successful are Windows Updates?

A poll that will hopefully give some insight as to how reliable Windows updates are.

If you have had major problems please post Windows version(s).

 

Apart from a few glitching out and not installing properly (later resolved), I can say I've never had any issues with Windows Updates. Even the upgrade to Windows XP SP3 went without a hitch. I'm probably in the lucky minority though.

 

Thanks n=1. Perhaps you are in the majority, it will be interesting to see an overview I think. Just hope that those who have had no problems participate as well as those with grievances.

 

I guess I'm in the lucky minority too, because in all the years I've used Windows PC's, I've never had a Windows Update not install properly the first time or cause problems later down the road. Keeping fingers crossed.

 

I'm lucky too I guess. I've had a hiccup here or there, but usually took little effort to correct it.

 

Same with my updates but what I did different was to windows update and then download the updates and then reimage to last working image and then did the updates and reimage. That way I could be sure all the updates are working and there was no issues with the software before the updates. That is the smart way to go and yes it does take more time but I can gurantee the image is clean or junk or malware or problems limited to only the O/S and should I need to recovery I got a working image to fall back on to reboot incase of malware or virus or other software installs that go bad I can reboot and try again. For those savvy users it still can hamper a good file transfers...

 

The only error I get with WU from time to time is "failed to installed" type. But that's easy to fix (install again) and occurs very rarely, then I'm doing like 100+ updates at a time (i.e. fresh OS install). Otherwise I don't think I ever had any hiccups with updates.

 

Flawless so far, I can't remember a time I had to manually fix a problem. Sure, I had updates fail, but it's normal for an update to IE10 to fail if you ran the update from IE10 to IE11 before since it has been superseded. Every time, I've had a failed update message it was because it was superseded by another update and thus there was no need to install it. MS needs to add a descriptive for that though rather than just update failed.

 

They've definitely gotten better looking back at XP days when I had updates mess up the system quite bad...more than once...or twice...

 

Ever since the implementation of Windows Updates in Vista, I haven't considered updating Windows a chore aside from having to restart which was promptly fixed by SSDs. Now, the only issue I have with updating Windows is having to update my dual boot setup on my M6700, but that is in no way related to Windows Updates per say.

One thing to note: I have updates on manual because I am a control freak when it comes to computers, but I could leave the important updates on auto and it wouldn't change a thing, I tend to update the day the updates are pushed and I have yet to run into problems.

 

Same here. Though I manually do the optional updates first then important ones second.

I've had a weird behavior recently where it doesn't want to manually connect/check and I get an error. Maybe it's their servers or something else.

 

All I remember is that the SP3 update for Windows XP caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people. Thankfully it went smoothly for me.

Same, I let Windows notify me when updates are available but I like to have control over which ones I ultimately download and install.

 

I have Windows 7 and no issues, I think especially for some going to 8.1 it may be different.

 

The only issue I've had is having Windows get rebooted due to updates when it was set to Automatic Updates, and losing a bit of work as a result. As long as it's set to "Notify me but don't download" or "Download but don't install", it's been perfectly fine.

Well, I suppose when I tried to install both MSE 4.4's latest updates and MSE 4.5 at the same time via Automatic Updates, that didn't work so great and it wound up with MSE uninstalled. But that's not a particularly major issue - just needs a reinstall of MSE and everything else is okay. So I'll vote "minor issues".

 

Thanks for the votes guys. Although there are not so many votes as yet it is good to see the positive results are better than I expected.

 

Well, the people who don't have problems usually don't post about it on forums, that is one reason why everything always seems to be riddled with problems on the Internet. Someone somewhere is bound to get some weird behavior when it comes to computers even if everyone else is fine.

Not that there aren't major problems at times.

 

This voting topic sort of implies that there are extremely complex software packages out there where upgrades never have a problem, and Windows is somehow special.

Just so you know, OS X can have bad updates. Linux distros can have bad updates. Computer firmware updates not-specific-to-the OS can have particularly fatal problems.

Upgrades can fail. It's sort of the problem with mass distributed things in our time.

 

In a well-oiled system, though, most people shouldn't have problems, and what problems there are should generally not be very major. It's accepted that your e-mail provider might be down on rare occasion, but it shouldn't be frequent, and they definitely shouldn't lose your e-mail. Same with Windows Updates - any glitches should be infrequent, and preferably not result in endless reboots (though I know that has occasionally happened for certain configurations - IIRC many of those have involved conflicts with anti-virus software post-update).

I would be interested in a short history of how Windows Update has changed over the years. Something not dissimilar to, say, Ars Technia's articles on the history of the Amiga. Starting up my Windows 98 computer with some new hardware, it offered to check Windows Update for drivers, but apparently you had to register first before you could use Windows Update with 98. With XP, there's no need to register, perhaps due to product activation replacing registration, and the updates seem to be installed completely during shut down. A flaw, however, is that with the automatic setting, you could sometimes lose your work by a restart countdown timer (of 15 minutes) expiring while you were asleep or otherwise away. Windows 7 seems to have fixed that flaw, but on the downside, the updates aren't completely installed during shut down, but also require some time during boot up, which can occasionally be inconvenient if you want to do something quickly and you shut down your computer after updates. IIRC, Windows 8 backpedals a bit on the lenient approach 7 (and Vista?) took with regards to shutting down to install updates, and will automatically install them after 3 (?) days if they are configured to automatically install.

But there's a lot in between that I'm not familiar with, such as 2K/ME policies on updates, when it was introduced (95?), and if there were any significant changes between 2001 and late 2006. Granted, Wikipedia's article probably covers a good chunk of that.