Your PC is slow and its the second week of the month

So it’s the second week of the month, maybe a Weds or Thursday and your computer is just dog slow. Internet is super slow for uploads, things just don’t seem right. Darn that fly by night ISP, they must be throttling me. They have it out for me! No, we don’t. You are experiencing the Microsoft Windows Update user experience. Microsoft pushes large updates starting the second Tuesday of the even months, there are smaller updates on the odd months. If you see a little “orange dot” mark on your power icon in your start menu, your PC is asking you to “Update and restart”. Say you ignore it. The computer will gradually slow down, becoming less responsive till you cave in and perform the update and restart..

By slowing your PC down, they are “prompting” you to pay attention and get with their program. Just get it over with. I try to apply updates as soon as I notice things are acting a little off. I hack, so I use the “PRO” version of windows and delay the update by a week so that Microsoft has time to pull the update when it goes horribly wrong. (That never happens, oh yes it does). But for most folks, just updating when the popup indicates is perfectly safe. If you don’t know if your PC use is pushing the boundaries of normal computer use, guess what? You are normal. If you hack your registry, install alternative desktop explorer skins, have visual studio loaded locally, run split boot, dork with TPM, well, then you already know all this. But for 90% of my subscribers, it’s safe to just go with the Microsoft flow, and get back to normal performance.