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Update and shut down no longer restarts PC, 25H2 patch addresses decades-old bug

119 points| taubek | 4 months ago |windowslatest.com | reply

86 comments

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[+] SirFatty|4 months ago|reply
"Microsoft shipped a broken “Update and shut down” toggle with Windows 10, and it never acknowledged it until now."

I guess they know what's best for the user base, and this was obviously deemed not important. But boy did they get Copilot integrated in everything post haste.

Typical Microsoft hubris.

[+] nusl|4 months ago|reply
Different teams, perhaps. No idea. A monster org like this must be massively disconnected internally, specially for non-critical bugs and such.
[+] Tadpole9181|4 months ago|reply
These kinds of comments make me question how many folk here are actually in tech or if my experience has been uncharacteristically grim.

Does your company not have hundreds to thousands of backlogged tickets and bugs? Are there not different teams for different parts of the system? No triage policy for prioritizing work?

[+] pjmlp|4 months ago|reply
It is easy to have such hubris, when the competition at the shopping mall where most folks buy hardware is either crimpled Chromebooks and Android tablets, or overpriced Apple laptops, at least in what concerns most tier 2 and 3 countries.

It would be nice to have somethig like Asus or Dell XPS, with Ubuntu LTS fully working laptop hardware at Dixons, FNAC, Publico, Worten, Cool Blue, Saturn, Media Markt,..... but it ain't happening.

However after the netbook phase, that is yet to happen again.

[+] delfinom|4 months ago|reply
"Update and shutdown" always worked for me in Windows 10 :shrug:

Probably race condition galore that was hard to repro.

[+] medwards666|4 months ago|reply
No, the truth of the matter is they needed Copilot in there to analyse and identify the bug for them. And then write the code to fix it...
[+] noir_lord|4 months ago|reply
> Typical Microsoft hubris.

That hubris combined with a whole bunch of decisions I resent/actively dislike and the hassle to opt out of things I never asked for is why for the first time since the late 80's I don't have any Microsoft OS's on any of my PC's.

I only used windows 11 for gaming and I don't really do that much anymore - I may have a look at steam/proton but not really in any hurry either.

90-95% of my computing life was spent inside Linux anyway.

[+] ale42|4 months ago|reply
I had often reboots followed by more update installation and then a shutdown, so I assumed this was working as intended (i.e. finish installing the updates, which might require a reboot, and then power off).
[+] waltbosz|4 months ago|reply
That was a bug? I always thought it was because of my dual boot configuration.
[+] coolness|4 months ago|reply
Yeah, even with this fixed it's going to be annoying because it first restarts, so you have to stay at the PC to select windows in grub
[+] nerdjon|4 months ago|reply
I honestly thought the same and kind of just gave up the idea of hitting that at night and being done.

Figured having 4 OS installations was already fairly niche that it was largely a self imposed issue. Looking forward to confirming that this fixes the issue in my use case.

[+] cybrox|4 months ago|reply
Looking at the rest of their recent update history, this likely just broke...

Task failed successfully.

[+] yalue|4 months ago|reply
For a long time, windows had two options:

1. Update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and restart

2. Update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and update and restart and prompt for bitlocker password and shut down (and restart)

Finally, they fixed the last bit of option 2

[+] poolnoodle|4 months ago|reply
I can't believe I'm alive to witness this.
[+] hollow-moe|4 months ago|reply
My laptop did something like it last night but not exactly : it booted from HIBERNATION to apply updates and reboot. Auto updates have been turned off for a while and yet this happens. You can't trust micro$oft for even the smallest thing. Edit: And I'm fairly sure this is a wanted malicious behavior. The thing was hibernating for quite a time before doing it, like it would wait for me to leave the office/for the computer to be in a bag on the way back home and I wouldn't notice what happened.
[+] 8cvor6j844qw_d6|4 months ago|reply
I noticed Windows's start menu only updates certain tracked files (e.g., remove deleted files) on a normal shutdown + start, and not on a restart.

Which is odd because I was under the impression a restart is the only "true" shutdown due to fastboot behavior.

I didn't look too much into it and chalked it up to a quirk of Windows start menu behavior in tracking recent files.

[+] AJRF|4 months ago|reply
This happened to me last night! I was going to bed and I clicked Update and Shut Down, then I went in to the other room.

After a few minutes I could see the blue glow of my Windows background shining on the wall.

Glad it is fixed!

[+] aaronmdjones|4 months ago|reply
I wonder if they'll backport this fix to Windows 10 (Very much doubt).

I also wonder if they'll ever fix the menu entry delay bug. At the moment neither of the "Update and ..." options is in the menu when you first open it. Opening the shutdown menu then checks if there are updates available to install and will then add those options, shifting the existing menu entries. Which makes it incredibly easy to quickly click on an option you didn't want.

[+] portugueasey|4 months ago|reply
I’ve always assumed it’s either just something my corporate laptops like to do (my older HP would often switch itself back on even when you told it to shut down, forgetting about any updates), or that I had just clicked the wrong button.

Well, guess that’s my mentally stability so slightly restored!

[+] TiredOfLife|4 months ago|reply
For me 25H2 was the first update that didn't update and shut down. All the previous ones did (on multiple computers).
[+] xbar|4 months ago|reply
Microsoft denied a bug for a decade that harmed 100% of users every month in an obvious way.

It is the denial that is so very Microsoft.

[+] AaronAPU|4 months ago|reply
I have always blamed my Dell desktop for this.

Incredible.

[+] Fire-Dragon-DoL|4 months ago|reply
Oh so it wasn't a business decision for such horrible behavior,it was an actual bug.
[+] riffic|4 months ago|reply
it'd be nice if Microsoft paid just a bit of attention to the immutable/atomic Linux ecosystem a bit and if they could finally ship an OS that wasn't always a dearly loved "pet".

pity to those who have to work on/with this jank.

[+] chris_wot|4 months ago|reply
Seriously, on a Linux system, I update everything except the kernel without a reboot. Why can’t Windows do this?
[+] amiga386|4 months ago|reply
Windows won't let you overwrite files "in use" and "file" is determined by the full pathname.

Linux will let you overwrite files "in use" (though the program(s) using them may not notice) and "file" is determined by a magic number, the inode - you can delete a file from a directory, really it's removing _that inode_, and put a new file in place with the same name, it's a _new_ inode. Programs that still have the file open are referring to the _old_ inode, which only goes away once everyone stops using it.

So actually you need to go round restarting your programs/services on Linux to get them to pick up changes (most package managers do that automatically), but at least it's _possible_ to make those changes without a reboot. Windows has to go into a special mode where nothing else runs, to be sure that it can update files.

[+] magicalhippo|4 months ago|reply
KDE Neon used to do this. Almost always caused issues after update with stuff crashing due to mismatch of versions talking to each other over D-Bus and such.

So they moved to something more like the Windows style, where it downloads, reboots to apply and then reboots again freshly updated.

[+] anonymars|4 months ago|reply
Briefly: it can (see e.g https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130102-00/?p=56...)

Note that just replacing files on disk is not sufficient because all the running software would still have the old version.

In the first place it means the security issue could still be present in currently running software, in the second place exciting things can happen when two (or more?!) different versions try to talk to each other. Oh, and who's to say the whole file was fully loaded into memory (or wasn't partially paged out) - imagine the fun that would happen if you later page in data from a different version of the binary!

So you need to hot patch the running binaries. I don't really remember why it's not done in practice even though it's technically possible, I seem to remember the conclusion was that clustering (in whatever form) was the solution for high availability, rather than trying to keep a single machine running.

[+] AndrewDucker|4 months ago|reply
Windows locks files when they're in use, so that you cannot overwrite them. Linux doesn't do this.

So if you want to overwrite a running service then you can either stop it, update it, and restart it (tricky to manage if it has dependencies, or is necessary for using the PC), or to shut down everything, update the files while the OS isn't (or is barely) running, and then restart the OS.

[+] 1718627440|4 months ago|reply
You can even update the kernel while keeping userspace running by hibernating.
[+] cassonmars|4 months ago|reply
With things like kpatch you can even update the kernel without a reboot
[+] davidhyde|4 months ago|reply
The file system won’t allow you to overwrite an open file in Windows.
[+] OCTAGRAM|4 months ago|reply
How dare you shut down such a great operating system?