Windows 10: How Microsoft will stop software updates from ruining your day

If you're one of the Windows 10 users whose important work has been put on hold by a forced software update, there's good news for you: Microsoft is working on a solution to rid the system of this irritating behaviour.

Announcing two new Windows 10 Insider previews, Microsoft also said that its update habit has been a pain to users but assures them that it has heard the complaints and is working on an answer.

"Have you ever had to stop what you were doing, or wait for your computer to boot up because the device updated at the wrong time? We heard you, and to alleviate this pain, if you have an update pending we've updated our reboot logic to use a new system that is more adaptive and proactive," wrote Microsoft's Dona Sarkar and Brandon LeBlanc.

In the Creators Update, it tried to reduce this frustration by adding a snooze or schedule feature. The secret to its new approach, unsurprisingly, is artificial intelligence which will check if you're currently using the device and hopefully will accurately predict whether you're merely taking a short coffee break or leaving the computer for long enough to install and restart after an update without messing with you work schedule.

"We trained a predictive model that can accurately predict when the right time to restart the device is. Meaning, that we will not only check if you are currently using your device before we restart, but we will also try to predict if you had just left the device to grab a cup of coffee and return shortly after," the pair added.

Microsoft warns that its prediction model isn't perfect but says in testing on internal devices it's seen "promising results". Fortunately it's got a few months to improve on it with Windows Insiders on the Windows 10 Redstone 5 release as well as those on the next version of Windows 10, known as 19H1 rather than Redstone 6. The codename refers to the first half of 2019.

Besides Insiders testing out Microsoft's new emoji in preview builds 17723 (the Fast ring build for insiders testing Redstone 5) and 18204 (19H1), they'll get first hand experience about how accurate Microsoft's model really is, while Microsoft has a chance to refine the model before the public release later this year.

Related: 20 pro tips to make Windows 10 work the way you want (free PDF)

"Due to the nature of its architecture, we're able to update the model with minimal turnaround time based on our insights from its performance. It's all thanks to our cloud infrastructure," said Sarkar and LeBlanc.

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