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 short version

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

What happened

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.

Why it matters

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.

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