One of Windows 10’s most frustrating features is the way it installs updates. Unless you’re using an enterprise version, updates are almost completely out of your control. You can’t prevent them from installing, and there’s very little you can do to control when they install, or when your computer restarts to complate installation.

While developing Windows 10, Microsoft somehow failed to understand that downloading, installing, and rebooting for updates automatically at potentially inconvenient times might be annoying to users.

The good news is that Microsoft is finally going to do something about this. What did it take to get Microsoft to look at the problem? A steady stream of customer complaints, starting immediately after Windows 10 was released.

The bad news is that you still won’t have any real control over when updates happen. Instead, Microsoft is planning to improve Windows 10’s ability to detect that a computer is in use before it automatically reboots. This is from the recent post Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17723 and Build 18204:

“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.”

It’s too early to know how well this will work in practise, but at least it’s a (small) step in the right direction.

Since the release of Windows 10, Microsoft has received feedback from certain users, to the effect that the O/S doesn’t meet the “demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads.” It either doesn’t detect, or simply doesn’t use the capabilities of some types of high-performance hardware.

Microsoft’s answer to that feedback is Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, which will become available for testing soon, via the Insider Preview program.

The new version of Windows 10 includes the ReFS filesystem, which is supposed to be much more resilient than the NTFS filesystem used by standard Windows. It also includes support for non-volatile NVDIMM-N memory modules, which provide high-speed access to files. SMB Direct provides a faster file sharing mechanism. There’s also more support for high performance hardware, including server-grade Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors, up to four CPUs (regular Windows is limited to two) and memory up to 6TB (regular Windows is limited to 2TB).

High-end system builders, and people running high-performance niche applications may find these features useful, but I suspect that most people won’t be interested, especially as the new version is likely to be rather expensive, as is the related hardware.

There’s no word yet on whether privacy-related instrumentation will be any easier to disable in Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, or whether system administrators will be able to control which updates are installed, or disable auto-update completely.

When Windows 10 was first released in July 2015, the version number assigned to it was 1507. (In case you haven’t noticed, those four digit version numbers Microsoft is using correspond to the year and month of the release.)

In keeping with Microsoft’s new policies, support for Windows 10 version 1507 will end on May 9, 2017. That meas no more security updates, and an ever-increasing risk from security threats.

If you’re still running the initial release version of Windows 10, you might want to think about upgrading, or perhaps reverting to a less problematic O/S, like Windows 7 or Linux.