updates

I got home from the second day of my PRINCE2 training today and fired up my desktop PC from sleep and tried to log in to Windows 8.1. My home domain user account was still logged in from the previous night with a locked session so I unlocked it however it hung on the please wait message. After a few minutes, I’d had enough to gave the PC the finger of death and restarted it.

When it booted back up, I saw the Configuring Windows Updates message appear. I’ve got an Intel 520 Series SSD so I normally don’t have to wait at all for things like Windows Updates being that the overall boot time for the PC from a cold start is about 15 seconds. On this occasion though, the PC reboot at least three or four times with the Configuring Windows Updates message each time.

I was worried initially that I’d got myself a bad update download and I was going to be stuck in a reboot update loop (not that I’ve seen this happen for a long time) but eventually the machine came back to the login screen as normal. Once I got logged in, I checked the update history for Windows Update and the PC had prepared and downloaded two major updates last night. The first being Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 General Availability Update Rollup, KB2883200 and the second being Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Update Rollup: October 2013, KB2884846.

Looking at the file information in both of these updates, they look like pretty substantial updates which you’re obviously going to want to apply but be patient. With updates of this size and type, you could end up seeing your PC reboot multiple times like I did. Have faith – It’s all working just fine.

If you’re deploying these updates at work or in your enterprise, make sure you’re users know to expect the multiple reboots otherwise your helpdesk team might not like you the next day.