Ask HN: Does Windows purposely degrade experience to coerce an update?

3 points·the_only_law··4 comments

For years now, I’ve noticed otherwise performant machines stack choking. Apps will freeze, the desktop will lag, etc. and when I restart, there’s a Windows update. I can’t help but feel all those issues are Microsoft trying to make me want to restart so the update can be installed. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just crazy?

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Perhaps. Could it instead be 2 issues that are conflated? When it gets slow, have you rebooted without applying updates? Could be memory leaks, paging, misbehaving applications. Have you run Process Explorer (from sysinternals) [1] as Administrator when the slowness occurs? Windows 10 will also Suspend processes not in use rather than killing them which can eat up the pagefile.

[1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...

I did see this also.

I blocked windows update with its own firewall. The windows system was not updated for 1+ yrs. 6 month into the "non-update", the windows will randomly freeze for 5 or more seconds. Just rebooting it doesn't help. Eventually I updated it in a weekend and everything works fine from that point on. No freeze events for 2 months now.

No I can concur. There's definitely something odd about this. I've actually booted up where I don't have network connectivity and it all works well; until it gets news of an update (after I connect to a network).

This can also be caused on the home editions if your system can not reach the activity URL's but is not getting a tcp reset. Turning off telemetry won't disable this on the home editions and only reduces it on Pro. Do you have a home router that can intercept and log DNS requests? That makes it easier to see if this is the issue.

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