Microsoft has managed to reduce the downtime of feature update installations by 60%. The company provided a detailed explanation of how they’ve managed to speed up the feature update installation process by this much.
The company explained that there are four phases of a feature update installation process. Each of this phases is performed in an online/offline manner. Online phase occurs while the device is being used and the operating system is running. During this phase, the update process is done in the background. The offline phase requires a restart of the device and during that time the device, as you’ve probably guessed, cannot be used.
To shorten the downtime, Microsoft has moved portions of the update process from offline to online phases. This change has brought faster installation process of Fall Creator’s Update released in October of 2017. Fall Creators’s Update installation time has dropped to 51 minutes which was a 38% improvement over the previous update.
With the latest Spring Creators update, Microsoft has continued to further improve installation times and now has moved portions of migration operations to the online phase as well. This has resulted in an overall reduction of the offline time to an average of 30 minutes which is a 63% reduction from the first Creators Update.
The Windows 10 Spring Creators Update is scheduled to be released in April.