MICROSOFT APPEARS to be making up its own rules regarding Windows updates once again as users report that they are being forced to download Windows 10 version 1803 (Spring Update) – even if they had set the option to defer the update.
Version 1803 is meant to be a targeted update. That means that for those who have chosen the semi-annual update path (especially popular with businesses who need their machines to be less bleeding edge and more bleeding reliable) shouldn’t be seeing 1803 at all.
However, it looks like Microsoft is doing it’s “mummy knows best” routine again and is rolling out the latest version even to people who have expressly opted out.
Others have suggested that Office 365 update cycles are also being ignored, but this is unconfirmed.
This is nothing new, of course. Windows has a long history of promising one thing and doing another, usually with a cheerful retort of “our customers tell us that they want…”. So far there’s been no explanation, but Redmond is so ruddy unresponsive, we’ve nearly given up asking.
In any case, it did this trick with 1709 too and didn’t explain itself, so this is really a Groundhog Day vibe going on.
What’s particularly concerning about all this is that Microsoft has had some spectacular compatibility issues with 1803 – in some cases the update has had to be blocked, for now, thanks to some compatibility issues involving SSD drives from Toshiba and Intel.
This is an inconvenience for a home user – but for an enterprise user, if the system admin had updated all the machines before the problem was caught, that could be at least half a day of business while they rolled them back by hand.
Microsoft used to say that to make an update enterprise-ready, takes about four months after the domestic release. Although that’s not the official line anymore, it’s also never been superceded by anything else, and we’re pretty sure that if there had been some sort of breakthrough on reliability then
- 1. We wouldn’t have had all this nonsense with 1803 on personal machines
- 2. The marketing department would have been all up in it
As such, we’re left to conclude that either this is a bug – that just happens to have manifested in exactly the same way several times before, or we’re going to wake up in a minute to the strains of “I Got You Babe”.
We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment. We don’t expect to get it. µ
Further reading
Source : Inquirer