W11 2025-01 24H2 cum update KB5050021 scary

Pls bear with me, Im not a nerd, just a long time user and wish to get on with real home/office type work without machine distractions. I generally leave my desktop machine on 24/7 with screen auto/off energy saver. So W11 has been updating itself once/week overnight . So for years this has been working - sort of. Sometime I find my m/c stuck in restart waiting for me - and this can waste a bunch of time. This latest update as above has my confidence disturbed. I came to a black screen/off and couldnt get it going again by power cycle. In the end I hade to - several times - press my Acer 8085 16GB off button. and eventually got a screen up showing update progress etc. The result was a full 2 hours installing before I got some kind of basic desktop operating, but it then took another hour before it completed housework and the cpu went down to normal state. This is the worst upgrade experience I had so far. So clearly , as I dont trust Microsoft not to meddle with stuff, my confidence is depleted badly

Has anyone else had this for this latest ug.??

Hi, welcome

robintes said:

So W11 has been updating itself once/week overnight

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Updating what? We get updates on the 2nd and 4th week of the month.

But no, I havent experienced this. If the computer is working OK now, I’d suggest it was just a glitch.

24H2 is full of surprises.

I hope you’re in the habit of backing up your system, creating a system image of when your PC is working properly?

antspants said:

Hi, welcome



Updating what? We get updates on the 2nd and 4th week of the month.

But no, I havent experienced this. If the computer is working OK now, I’d suggest it was just a glitch.

24H2 is full of surprises.

Click to expand...

I stand corrected. I know there was an option to delay installing updates (min 1 week - default and max 5 weeks).
I’d suggest it was just a glitch. - hmm maybe it was some of the apps were still running and unsaved properly - that causes things to hang eg Word, Excel.
I must get into the habit of shutting down everything when an update was due. I think I get a note when one is mandatory.

24H2 is full of surprises. Care to enlighten a humble user here - I dont want Microsoft toys eg Copilot, I dont use Edge etc - I remember the good old days of W7/XP

antspants said:

I hope you’re in the habit of backing up your system, creating a system image of when your PC is working properly?

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AFAIK W11 seems to create a system back automatically and deletes old bu sys file. eg I have a file period 1-1-25 to 1-1-25 only left.

There are other files in there which look like data stuff and maybe config? What I would like to do was keep the W11 system file on one HD usb ext drive and all the data on another - or do they all have to be kept on the same drive for restore to work properly?

Windows 11 doesn’t do system image backups by default. For this you would need a secondary drive and a program like Macrium or Hasleo etc.



At minimum, you would need a program to backup your important user folders like Documents or Pictures. Something like OneDrive or freeFileSync.
If you use OneDrive, you’re fine, I assume (I don’t use it) This is recomended as well as a system image.

As mentioned above, a system image is a complete OS backup. If you didn’t want to restore your whole OS and only needed to replace files you may have deleted in your Documents or Picture folders, then an exact copy of those folders onto a secondary drive is advised. Again; if you use one drive, you’ll be fine.

As for 24H2 surprises. Like any new Windows version, there are always problems. 24H2 is no exception.
One only needs to type “24H2” into the top right search bar on this forum and read the assortment of complaints, fixes and concerns.

If you’re not experiencing any issues, I’d suggest giving it a miss. It could possibly be like giving a horror movie to a 5yo, not the best idea..

Hi @antspants AND guys thnx for insights - seems like ive opened can of worms (been down this route otherwise several times and even with Macrium.

First - dismiss suggestions for Onedrive - user reviews Reddit - Dive into anything . If it goes wrong then help is negligible with Microsoft. It seems its an archaic system with human intervention.

I instinctively dont want to be in the spiders web of Microsoft (nor Google or any other coercive monetising controller). I am a small one man home office with no access to IT experts as a medium biz would have.

It seems that Microsoft (ever profit driven to the detriment of users) hasnt implemented a proper back up system (other than the Win 7 basic compressed format disk copy method ie no ISO). For that reason you have to go to a third part like Macrium, Aomi etc . These profit driven services have a common culture of ensnaring in their subscription web (clickbait yada yada). You have to waste much time with microscope in the TnC to discover their dirty tricks before you sign up and get into bed.

Macrium bad experience was 5 years ago and technology has changed. I feel comfortable with an external 1TD 2.5" branded drive , so my instinct is to find a simple way to do a system ISO that will save my C disk 500GB and schedule a once per month BU. Whats the simplest way to do this for a non IT nerd.

and of course, how do I test my BU works as last resort when my HD crashes (been there - its like a bereavement). HDD drive crash is like an unmentionable disease no one wants to talk about - only happens probably after 5 years 24/7 use - BUT IT DOES HAPPEN?

robintes said:

First - dismiss suggestions for Onedrive - user reviews Reddit - Dive into anything . If it goes wrong then help is negligible with Microsoft. It seems its an archaic system with human intervention.

Click to expand...

You can find plenty of help for OneDrive, in this forum
But not wanting to use it is fine, I certainly don’t, either do many others, but there are also many that do.

robintes said:

Macrium bad experience was 5 years ago and technology has changed. I feel comfortable with an external 1TD 2.5" branded drive , so my instinct is to find a simple way to do a system ISO that will save my C disk 500GB and schedule a once per month BU. Whats the simplest way to do this for a non IT nerd.

Click to expand...

A 1TB drive is fine. As I posted my beginners first start tutorial, in my opinion, Hasleo is the simplest. Considering you had a bad experience with Macrium.

Hasleo (as do others) has a image test check that takes place after the image is created. This is also mentioned in that tutorial.

Backups are not ISO’s, (but they probably could be with the right software) they are created for the purpose of the software that you created them with.

Restoring an image is also mentioned in post 2 of that tutorial.

But as I mentioned, having a backup system for user folders, as well as an image creation backup, is a good practice. The 1TB drive should be able to accommodate a System Image and your User Folder backups

I use FreeFileSync. (Which is totally free and very popular)




Video Tutorials



Homepage

I find leaving any machine connected to the internet when you're not using it is probably not a good idea. If you have systems that need access to the internet to update for security reasons while you aren't using it may be ok, but at best, an end point device like a desktop or a laptop should be off if you're not using it. You would be surprised at what happens on a PC when you aren't using it. My firewall appliance either rejects or blocks up to 500K communication attempts per month, all of which are unsolicited. If you want better insight into what your machine is doing I'd recommend a deep dive into your firewall logs. You'd be surprised at what communicates without your knowlwdge. I have 3 IOT TV's connected to the internet via my firewall/router and these things chat all the time even when they are "off" (They aren't really "off", they are merely "asleep" (or not as it were)). My Samsung TV got so chatty communicating with it's company server I had to disconnect it from my network. Don't get me started on Apple TV, it's without a doubt the "chattiest" device I've ever seen. I block probably 80% of the communications it attempts, and it hasn't affected the functionality of the device at all. I also have other IOT devices firewalled and all of these so-called "smart" devices will initiate connections and communicate over the internet without your knowledge. If you want real insight into what information your devices may be sharing, try Wireshark, you'd be amazed.

Here's an example of 24 hours of my comms events (no interactive PC activity at all):



I generally think having anything connected to the internet when you aren't actively using it to be a bad idea.

Jabiru

hi @antspants As I posted my beginners first start tutorial, in my opinion, Hasleo is the simplest.

so Im on the same page have you a link?

I started looking at How to use a Hasleo System Backup file to restore PC but then quickly saw certain controversies arising. I dont want to get submerged in nerd speak ( I am a bear of very little brain - honey pls)

The way I see it I may be face with two cases
a) a physical HDD Cdrv crash - needs a new sata drv to be installed - what should I do prepare for?
b) Win11 os corrupted (or maybe malware/ransomeware) so it wont allow basic operation and say needs a complete clean up or format? what should I do or prepare for

c) what have I overlooked?

Looking at Hasleo AWS - good review from Techradar so far

Link is in post 6 above.

A system backup is so you can restore your system to an early working state at the time you backed up.


I think you need to read about system backups first, in easy speak

It was late when I made my last post, so just to tidy up:

Using Hasleo as an example here.

When you use Hasleo to backup your system using that tutorial above, which I should mention, I made as easy as I could, you are backing up Windows and everything on your C drive, for the purpose of not having to reinstall Windows if you run into critical issues.

Lets say an update really screwed up your PC, you could use the USB created restore (WinPE) to help you get your system back to a previous state. (All in the tutorial)

• Create the System Image at a point of being happy with how Windows is working
• You experience unrecoverable or undesirable issues with Windows 11
• You restore your last or earlier image to get you back to a previous state when Windows was working

System Images are imperative when using Windows these days as the simplest update can render your system unusable, or a software you installed could of been malicious or caused havoc with your PC

As for drive problems, if a drive dies it dies. But there are genereally ways you could use your System Image on a new similar drive if this occures.

If installing Windows is no problem to you, then all you need do is backup (make an image of) your User Folders with your important files and photo’s etc… (Which you should do as well, anyway.
Haslao can also do File backups (Link in post two of tutorial)
You can also backup (make an image) of secondary drives or partitions.

I hope this helps.

robintes said:

Pls bear with me, Im not a nerd, just a long time user and wish to get on with real home/office type work without machine distractions. I generally leave my desktop machine on 24/7 with screen auto/off energy saver. So W11 has been updating itself once/week overnight . So for years this has been working - sort of. Sometime I find my m/c stuck in restart waiting for me - and this can waste a bunch of time. This latest update as above has my confidence disturbed. I came to a black screen/off and couldnt get it going again by power cycle. In the end I hade to - several times - press my Acer 8085 16GB off button. and eventually got a screen up showing update progress etc. The result was a full 2 hours installing before I got some kind of basic desktop operating, but it then took another hour before it completed housework and the cpu went down to normal state. This is the worst upgrade experience I had so far. So clearly , as I dont trust Microsoft not to meddle with stuff, my confidence is depleted badly

Has anyone else had this for this latest ug.??

Click to expand...

Is it possible it went into sleep mode while doing a big update ? So you couldn’t see the progress? I am avoiding 24H2 for now.

And yes it is annoying Windows doesn’t have its own backup program- except it does . It kept the Windows 7 one - which still works. Even though it’s not popular.

I started using idrive about a year ago which does cloud backups of all files daily (not system images though). I also have a Firefox account that saves all my passwords and bookmarks. When my laptop wouldn’t work recently (due to a liquid spill) I was able to just go onto another computer, login to Firefox and all my bookmarks and passwords were accessible and I could also access any files I needed in idrive - so I was up and running straight away. However I still do system images as well as it’s a total pain if you have to reinstall all programs from scratch.

Idrive isnt free - I pay £80 a year but I think it’s worth it because before that I was spending a lot more on external hard drives - once have 1.5gb of data you go through a lot of external hard drives - and they also fail sometimes. So now I just use external hard drives for images and update the image on it so I don’t need loads of external drives.

Having my files secure and easily accessible is the main thing though.

I don’t think any cloud storage is free. The difference between idrive and one drive is - idrive is backup software - one drive isn’t - I usually uninstall one drive straight away - it’s a resource hog and I personally have issues with it - but I know others are a fan of it. I just prefer to keep things as simple as possible!

When was the last time you did a disk cleanup?

It's a good to do a maintenance procedure periodically. I do it every Friday.
- Start by doing a cleanup (temp files, browser cache etc) (%windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe)
- Do a disk check on all volumes (chkdsk x: /scan). If it finds some issues run chkdsk X: /f). For C: you will need to do a restart .
- Do a Data backup by sync to a backup drive or by creating a drive backup image.

Megahertz said:

When was the last time you did a disk cleanup?

It's a good to do a maintenance procedure periodically. I do it every Friday.
- Start by doing a cleanup (temp files, browser cache etc) (%windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe)
- Do a disk check on all volumes (chkdsk x: /scan). If it finds some issues run chkdsk X: /f). For C: you will need to do a restart .
- Do a Data backup by sync to a backup drive or by creating a drive backup image.

Click to expand...

Good point - I cleared 0.5GB. Wonder why cleanmgr.exe is hidden away by Microsoft, IIRC it was common on XP W7 - disc properties? - YUP found it thru This PC - why does Microsoft deliberately P8SS off customers - cos they can - happens so often like this. So It will take an hour to go thru 500G but i never did it yet.

I rather thought that modern HDDs did their own internal checking on the fly anyway? Dont they give you some warning as they get older and begin to fail? or was that an urban myth?

robintes said:

I rather thought that modern HDDs did their own internal checking on the fly anyway? Dont they give you some warning as they get older and begin to fail? or was that an urban myth?

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If you only had 0.5G to clean it's an exception. Some time ago someone had 230G as temp files.
SMART (Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a self health monitoring but it only checks the hardware. Check disk checks for the software structure of the drive.

Thanks guys for reminding me about checking Disks using SMART and the venerable free windows Crystaldiskinfoportable utility - everyone should have this on a usb. - probably teaching granny to suck eggs here heh heh