We have 40ish laptops that are quite old with a few newer laptops, my family has older laptops and I have a fairly good laptop, we also have 2 servers windows-2016 and windows-2019.
On all of these devices I have noticed that when a windows update is pending, please note pending not installing, pending not downloading, everything runs slower. It has become so obvious, that if one of our users comes to us with a weird problem, we tell them to check for updates.
Sometimes they will go to updates and there they are waiting to be installed, sometimes they have to click the check for updates, and then there they are and they start downloading. Often they say, but I checked them last week.
The better spec’d the computer the less noticeable the problem is, on my own laptop I generally notice a slowing, check for update there they are. Install them and away we go again. Same thing on both our servers, CPU monitor alerts get triggered, users complain our site is slow. So I go to the server, install the update (security ones that we haven’t found a way to stop from getting through), and away we go again.
I’ve had friends complain that their computers are slow, same thing, check for updates.
I’ve updated my laptop to Windows 11, and paused updates. I noticed my windows button wasn’t responding as quickly as normal, so I started updates again, there we have it an update. So pausing updates doesn’t seem to pause them from hiding in the background pending.
I know what you are saying it is the reboot after the update that is getting the speed boost, but some updates don’t require a reboot. On our SQL server it is plainly obvious, it goes from 70% cpu to 100% cpu when an update is pending. Then back to 70% after it is installed, often it is a security update which doesn’t require a reboot.
I can’t seem to find any thing on the internet about it, but surely I can’t be the only person experiencing this?
Throwing hardware at it, controlling the updates are all just Band-Aids I am looking for a fix. I can’t see why a computer that runs OK, can’t continue to run OK when it has been notified that an update is available to be downloaded.
Has anyone experienced this and solved the issue?
