Microsoft
Further advances in technology (new high-performance processors and remaining hardware) will affect the entire update process, changing the code will have less of an impact on the speed of the update.
Deleted I have to disagree strictly on that. As a Senior IT consultant and for home use, I have access to hundreds different models of computers (not exaggerating here at all) and it does not really matter what CPU and RAM you have.
Even with the latest CPUs it takes exceptionally long time for installing a Windows CU, and this on top of drastically reduced CU sizes, as compared above.
Of course, and stone-age AMD hexacore or Core2Quad will take longer. But more importantly it is done in few minutes on modern hardware.
Installing a Windows CU takes much longer than it would take to install the entire OS, as said: OS Install takes about 2 minutes on my machine applying a 5 GB WIM file.
Interestingly the .net CUs are applied relatively fast.
For Windows 11 or beyond we need to get away from this Vista+ servicing. Sure it has been improved in reliability and size but the rest seems not going with the time.
I have made some theoretical examples how to improve it and certain brainpower should be invested into it. It would be great to discuss this in detail.
A computer does NOT need to be online for 6 or 8 hours, David_Guyer is absolutely correct with this.
Yet the current system is insufficient. Quite the opposite the faster the hardware is (new CPU, RAM / NVMe) the more it becomes obvious that the servicing is a comparatively slow process that does not scale well on modern hardware.
If you have old hardware, even with SSD it could take 10 or even 30+ minutes to install the CU. I see this regularly happen.
I think the main point is that Microsoft does not really care how long it takes as their point of view is updates are installed without user interaction and the user should be at best neither notified nor personally impacted and the computer can do it when the device is not used and restarted etc. But that's not how it goes. This would work for enterprises where computers are online for 8+ hours and everything could fit into this timeframe. This would be great, but many computers are not online for that long. The more mobile the form factor (ultrabooks, netbooks, laptops, convertible), the shorter this time could potentially be. Why? Because they have CPU power limits and contraints on energy.
If you run your device on power in a dock, fine but that's not something that happen outside business were a 8 hours workday applies.
For anyone that is using the PC at home be fine with 1 to 3 hours online time for most. Except you are gaming. Please keep that in mind. You basically could have the telemetry about how long home and business computers are in use and how often they are online before being rebooted or shut off or hibernated. It is all in the eventlogs.
Please also keep in mind that according to unofficial data we have 0,1 billion Windows 10 computers that are not on supported releases anymore, and it would be interesting if this is because of errors or just because they are not online long enough to complete the servicing operations of CUs, SSU and upgrades. It is sad that Microsoft does not provide own data
