Does Windows purposely degrade experience to coerce an update?

Question

For years now, I&rsquo;ve noticed otherwise performant machines stack choking. Apps will freeze, the desktop will lag, etc. and when I restart, there&rsquo;s a Windows update. I can&rsquo;t help but feel all those issues are Microsoft trying to make me want to restart so the update can be installed. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just crazy?

LinuxBender · Accepted Answer

Perhaps. Could it instead be 2 issues that are conflated? When it gets slow, have you rebooted without applying updates? Could be memory leaks, paging, misbehaving applications. Have you run Process Explorer (from sysinternals) [1] as Administrator when the slowness occurs? Windows 10 will also Suspend processes not in use rather than killing them which can eat up the pagefile.[1] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysi...

tkinom · Answer

I did see this also.I blocked windows update with its own firewall. The windows system was not updated for 1+ yrs. 6 month into the "non-update", the windows will randomly freeze for 5 or more seconds. Just rebooting it doesn't help. Eventually I updated it in a weekend and everything works fine from that point on. No freeze events for 2 months now.

HaoZeke · Answer

No I can concur. There's definitely something odd about this. I've actually booted up where I don't have network connectivity and it all works well; until it gets news of an update (after I connect to a network).