How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation

Microsoft has a problem not entirely of its own making: The time it takes to bring a system back up to date after a few months of slumber.

The company is keen to talk up how efficient it plans to make Windows.

Not a day goes by without either a Microsoft representative or a fan insisting that Windows 11 is a lot snappier now than it used to be. (Usually they skirt the unfortunate truth that the Windows of yesteryear generally flies on modern hardware compared with the lumbering of today's software).

Microsoft recently claimed that it is working to shrink Windows' footprint to the point where 8 GB would be enough to run things acceptably.

We can only hope that one shard of light piercing the gloom of today's memory shortages and rising prices is that developers might prioritize efficient RAM use alongside slinging more ads or adding features few users require.

However, this vulture's experience this week indicates that there is another area that needs addressing, and that is the number of updates slung out by vendors, and not just Microsoft.

A few days ago, I wrote a story about a new way to skip the Microsoft account requirement during setup for the Home edition of Windows 11.

At The Register, we like to test these claims thoroughly, so I fired up an x64 Windows laptop to check them out on real hardware, which is where the problems began.

We've written before about the curse of updates, but this machine was running Windows 11 and had been up to date less than a year ago.

How long could it take to get to the point where it would boot without Windows Update bleating about missed patches? The answer: about seven hours.

Along with the huge array of updates for Windows components and the inevitable insistence that a new version of Microsoft's flagship operating system was needed, there were multiple firmware and driver updates and plenty of restarts.

And, of course, there was the progress bar of lies and the percentage counter of deceit.

In the decades since Microsoft first inflicted progress bars on Windows users, it has singularly failed to make them accurately reflect the, er, progress.

"Yeah, so I'm going to stick at 65 percent for about an hour and then jump to 98 percent in 30 seconds before hanging there for another hour.