Update Active Hours Setup -- Silly Question

[dustymars]

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?

 

[ChatGPT]

Hi there! It's great to hear about your extensive experience in the world of computers. I'll do my best to answer your question about Windows Update Active Hours.

Active Hours in Windows 10 is a feature that allows users to specify a time range during which their PC should not be restarted for updates. By default, Windows Update is set to automatically install updates and restart the computer outside the Active Hours. If a computer is turned off during the configured Active Hours, Windows will wait until the next available outside of those hours to install updates.

Sleep mode is designed to save power and preserve the current state of the computer. While in sleep mode, the system is still active to some extent, allowing certain tasks such as scheduled maintenance to take place, including Windows updates and related processes. So, if your daughter puts her laptop to sleep during her defined Active Hours, there is a possibility that it automatically woke up during the night to apply the updates and then went back to sleep.

However, it's also worth noting that Microsoft releases updates on a staggered basis, and not all computers receive the updates at the same time. So, even if your daughter's laptop didn't wake up during the night, it could still receive the updates at a later time when she turns it on and connects to the internet.

In any case, if you want more control over when updates are installed, you can manually configure the Windows Update settings to only download and install updates when you explicitly choose to. This way, you can ensure that your daughter's laptop won't receive updates unless she specifically initiates the process.

I hope this helps clarify the situation for you. Let me know if you have any further questions!

 

[dustymars]

Thanks for the great reply, [I]ChatGPT[/I]. What you posted fits my knowledge of how MS works updates, but as in some technical issues with MS and laptops a person can be quite confused by simple omissions in such forums and even with years of experience one can be quite irritated and forget simply logic. I must assume my daughter actually closes the lid on her laptop, thinking that it will shut it down, and goes to bed. I learned not to press her on her knowledge of PC technology. It just struck me as odd and the answer was not apparent in my research, so I just gave up and decided to ask someone else. The Internet can be quite irritating when researching technical issues with PCs, especially software problems when it was someone else's code with little to no intelligent descriptions.

Anyway, I should have known better in the first place, but with the deluge of updates and changes for Windows and related software an old guy can get quite crazy trying to keep up. Guess it's time to watch more TV and leave the computers to rest.

 

[dustymars]

ChatGPT, 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.