- Microsoft gives us much more control over Windows 11 updates
- When testing, you can now delay updates indefinitely
- Forced updates are also a thing of the past, and there will be less disruption with more bundled updates.
Microsoft has already let us know that it is planning substantial changes in Windows 11 updates, and major changes are now in place.
This is currently happening in testing, as Microsoft announced in a lengthy blog post, with three main works highlighted.
The big change many want is the feature to pause a Windows 11 update for as long as you want. And for as long as you want, it means exactly that, with the ability to pause a given update until a specific date up to 35 days in the future – but you can initiate another pause after that and continue.
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Microsoft explains: “This means you can now pause again for up to 35 days at a time, with no limit on the number of times you can reset the pause end date.”
Another important refinement to the update process is the end of forced updates, with Microsoft ensuring that the Power menu (button) still has the option to simply “Shut down” and “Restart” alongside “Update and Shut Down” and “Update and Restart” (the latter two only being present if there is a pending update, of course).
So you always have the choice to simply shut down your PC or restart it, avoiding an update, with the guarantee that “Windows will perform exactly this action, without starting an update unexpectedly.” You must explicitly choose one of the update options to apply the pending patch.
The third main change is that you can choose not to download and apply updates when you install Windows 11, to make setting up a PC much faster. We’ve heard about it before, with the rollout previously reported by a tester, but Microsoft is now widely offering this option to Windows Insiders.
It should be noted that the choice to ignore updates during installation is not available for commercial devices (where configuration is managed), nor does it apply to cases where a device may require updates even to work with Windows 11 (as it would obviously not be possible to ignore these scenarios).
Microsoft further explains that Windows 11 users will experience less disruption in terms of restarts for updates, as more of them – like .NET or driver updates – will be bundled with the monthly cumulative update.
In other words, you can delete them all at once (although with a longer overall update process). Driver updates will also receive more meaningful titles, so you can better understand what they are for.
Analysis: “cup of coffee” updates are over
Remember, this is all currently in testing – and therefore subject to change, potentially – but I wouldn’t be surprised to see these features arriving before long for all Windows 11 users.
Microsoft has indicated that it’s not slow to move forward with the plan to fix Windows 11 in 2026, and we’re already seeing evidence of that, so I imagine it will be done fairly quickly (before the 26H2 update later this year, certainly).
These are undoubtedly very useful introductions, and in particular the ability to delay updates indefinitely, which I’m really looking forward to seeing introduced. I didn’t expect this to allow users to pause for as long as they want, although technically you’ll still be forced to update when the version of Windows 11 you’re using is no longer supported. But it’s a entire There’s a long way to go to avoid an update, if you’re really worried about, say, reports of a nasty bug that applies to a hardware configuration you have with your PC.
The change to avoid forced updates is also interesting to see, although in reality the system should always have worked like this. Hopefully this will mean the end of “shower” or “cup of coffee” updates, in which a user leaves their PC for about 10 or 15 minutes for a break, and returns to find that their device is halfway through an update that they initiated on their own.
Overall, it’s impressive and Microsoft certainly gets some credit here, even if we had to wait a long time for this to happen.
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