Update Active Hours Setup -- Silly Question

While it is true my experience in computers goes back to the bad old analog days from 1960 and then after upgrading to digital sometime in 1968, when I left the Air Force, I finished my BSEE/Computer Science degrees. Then, 33 years later I retired to laptops and yard work. While this preamble may sound self-serving and snotty, please don't take it that way -- it just shortens the dialog to more than a lesson on computer theory.

Now, to the point; my daughter told me that MS updated her Dell laptop after she went to bed at night and was complete the next morning. She said that I had set it up for her! Hum, that’s news to me, but I am getting old and forgetful, so she may be right.

My reply to here is; if you shutdown your laptop then how would it update your PC if it is off? Maybe she just puts it to sleep, I asked. Of course, she had no clue, just as I have no clue, but if her Windows update Active Hours is manually set to update during the night/early morning hours, does her PC wake up and connect to the Net and download all that MS stuff? Not to my knowledge, but who am I? Dell and MS may have sneaked in something beyond my imagination. Yeah, this may very well end up a rhetorical question, but clue me in. please?

Yes, if you are connected to the internet, MS can tell your computer to wake up and reboot. But I haven't seen that in years.

If you go to "Settings - Windows Update - Advanced Options - Active Hours", you will find the settings for Active Hours. I have mine set for 3:00 AM to 9:00 PM, which is the full 18 hours allowable. That prevents a reboot from happening during working hours. However, I haven't had MS reboot my computer in many years. When MS first offered a W10 free update, they would wake your computer up in the middle of the night, install updates, and reboot. To me, and many others, that was annoying. But they stopped doing that.

I have a W10 desktop that is never powered down. I allow MS to install updates and reboot, whenever they want. However, with my W11 laptop I don't allow any of that. My laptop I always have something running that I don't want interrupted. When I close the lid, it is set to "hibernate". That saves everything that I am running, and then shuts down. When I open the lid, and hit the power button, everything comes back to where I left off. There may be updates waiting, but I always postpone them until a convenient time.

And, yes, I do remember the old Analog days. I still do a lot of analog work.

Thanks Martin. I think analog works better, but who am I? It should be quite obvious but at times the explanations MS programmers give can be quite annoying and irritating to say the least. Then after turning 83 or so things are more easily annoying and irritating. I have hesitated to leave a PC running without supervision due to the hacker breed that are every present on the web. It is often easy for them hack-in while we are watching and using a PC, but unattended PCs can be easy pickings for them.

At any rate I thank you for the reply post and now it makes me want to forget the whole thing and just let my Windows 10 machines take all day to update. My Windows 11 laptop updates quickly and runs so much faster it seems like a completely different Microsoft what takes care of W11.

My laptop has upated during the night when I'm asleep. I do 'sleep' my laptop rather than shut it down, so this behaviour is welcome.

jeffbeish said:

if you shutdown your laptop then how would it update your PC if it is off?

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Windows downloads and installs updates while it is running and it waits for the restart/shutdown to finish it off.

To be accurate, if your computer is sleeping, WU can wake the computer to download updates. I think it needs your permission if a reboot is required.

Thanks gang, sorry for the dumb-ass, self-serving bloviating about my experience, but it seems like when I ask a dumb question on one of these forums the reply is a lecture in basic computer wizardry that takes up room without a straightforward answer. In other words, some of us have been there and done that, so please get to the point kind of thing. Much of the confusion with software is the inadequate descriptions of the user interface with someone’s software coding that just does not get through the fog. It can happen to the worst of us. So, thanks for clearing up the mud in my eye.

TairikuOkami said:

Windows downloads and installs updates while it is running and it waits for the restart/shutdown to finish it off.

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Agree. Updates were partially installed and when she ask for shutdown it did install some offline and when she started the computer it finished the installation.