Windows 8 Update to be less disruptive

Microsoft revealed Windows 8 will introduce a couple of changes to the Update process that most users will definitely appreciate. The new operating system will consolidate all the restarts in a month and synchronize them with the monthly security release (Patch Tuesday). Users will be given a notification in the login screen that a reboot is needed, and be given three days to do this before Windows will automatically reboot to finish the security update process.

Here is a timeline view of that experience:

1. A message about the upcoming restart is shown in the login screen for three days or until the PC is restarted (whichever is sooner). This means you now have three days to restart the PC at your convenience. All you need to do is see the login screen once in 3 days to see the message about the upcoming restart and by default the lock screen will appear after 15-minute idle timeout.

2. In addition to the restart notification on the login screen, the Power options on the lock screen will change to “Update and restart” immediately after the update occurs, and will include “Update and shutdown” on days two and three, to make the message even more apparent to you. This allows you to restart your PC at your own convenience.

3. If after three days, the restart still has not occurred, then WU will automatically restart your PC for you. In this case, the automatic restart will happen either at the end of the three-day grace period, or, to prevent data loss if WU detects that there are critical applications open at the end of the three-day grace period, it will wait to automatically restart the next time you login. I’ll address this behavior in more depth in the next section.

4. After the restart has occurred, the message on the login screen will go away and the power options will revert to the original choices. We know people would like Windows to automatically log in after the restart, but we strongly advise against doing so, given the potential security issues with this configuration.

Full details at Building Windows 8 blog