It’s very frustrating to be in the middle of working on your PC, or just having walked away for a few minutes, only to return to see your computer rebooting. Microsoft realizes how annoying that is, and is trying to solve the problem in the latest Windows 10 Insider Build.
Love them or hate them, Windows Updates are very important. They ensure your PC has the latest security updates applied and that everything keeps working so that you can too. But the way in which those updates get installed needs some work, and Microsoft is attempting to solve the most annoying problem in the latest Windows 10 build. That problem is untimely reboots.
Microsoft doesn’t want to force you to stop what you are doing so a reboot can occur. Windows 10 allows you to choose a more preferable time window in which to apply updates, but the Insider Preview Build 17723 goes a step further with some updated reboot logic.
The Windows development team trained a predictive model which allows Windows 10 to « accurately predict when the right time to restart the device is. » The decision is based on the answer to two questions: Are you currently using the device? and did you stop working only for a short period of time?
The first of those two questions is pretty easy to answer, but the second one requires Windows learns from your behavior. For example, if you typically go and grab a coffee around 10am every morning, that’s not going to be a great time to trigger a reboot. However, if you are regularly gone for an hour at lunch, Windows will know and use that time for rebooting.
Internal testing by Microsoft shows « promising results. » Let’s hope it performs as well outside of the lab so I can see fewer tweets from people complaining about Windows 10 suddenly rebooting and ruining their day.
Microsoft has already improved the Windows Update process this year by cutting feature update disruptions to 30 minutes. Combining that with intelligently-timed reboots means we could soon reach a point where you don’t even notice an update has occurred (wishful thinking, I know).
