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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> it doesn't get slower anymore

It absolutely does. I have friends running the latest Windows who still report speedups after reinstalling. Who knows what sort of cruft silently accumulates in a Windows system?

> you don't need to reboot all the time

You absolutely do. Not only do users still have to reboot, Windows has become ridiculously aggressive about rebooting and updating. It doesn't matter what users are doing, it will stop everything and spend an hour applying updates, rendering the computer useless because obviously people have nothing better to do than watch the computer reboot itself continuously while a progress percentage slowly increases on the screen.

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Running Windows 11 here, tons of stuff installed, including bloated Visual Studio 2022 with almost everything. Runs great, but I do have a beast of a machine.

I routinely have weeks of uptime, rebooting only to update...usually a 5 minute affair. I don't think an hour long update for Windows 11 even exists.

You are right about Windows being aggressive about wanting to reboot and update, though you're able to configure 'active hours' for this to happen outside of normal usage. Furthermore, you can use the Group Policy editor to fully customize every aspect of how Windows Update works if you're running Pro, Enterprise, or Educational SKUs, thereby disabling auto-reboot if you desire.

> I don't think an hour long update for Windows 11 even exists.

One such update just happened a few hours ago at work.

So I'm doing my job and Windows randomly loses its connection to the internet in the middle of my work. Who even knows why? This happens every day at work and only rebooting fixes it. So I Alt+F4 at the desktop to open the reboot/shutdown dialogue and it says "Reboot and update". I scroll up to another option that says "Reboot", and only "Reboot", and start the process.

Of course the goddamn thing starts updating the second it boots back up. Not only did it disrespect explicit my choice, it wasted 48 minutes of my time doing stuff that doesn't get me paid. I know exactly how much money that time is worth. Do I get to send a bill to Microsoft?

This is almost always down to third party software and people installing tons of junk software that starts with the machine. My laptop that I've used every day for 6 years is still as fast as it was when I got it.

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