Author: Chris Hoffman / Source: howtogeek.com
The “Getting Windows ready, Don’t turn off your computer” message appears while Windows is installing updates. Windows will normally finish the installation process if you give it time—but, if it’s been hours, you may just need to restart your PC.
Unfortunately, it’s normal to wait a while for Windows to update, and this wastes an immense amount of time.
Microsoft says there are about 700 million Windows 10 devices and that the April 2018 Update will take 10 to 30 minutes to install. So, assuming an average of 20 minutes for 700 million computers, that’s over 26,000 years of humanity’s collective time wasted waiting for Windows 10 to install a single update.What Happens If You Restart Your PC?
The update installation process will fail if you restart your PC during this process. But how badly will it fail? Will it cause problems with your computer? To find out exactly what happens, we ran some tests.
First, we told Windows to install a standard update from Windows Update. We forcibly restarted our PC while the “Getting Windows ready. Don’t turn off your computer” message appeared on the screen. The PC restarted and we quickly saw the normal sign-in screen.
After we signed in, Windows displayed a “We couldn’t finish installing updates” notification. The update installation had failed, but Windows was still working properly. Windows will just try installing the update later.
Second, we restarted our PC while the screen said “Working on updates, 27% complete, Don’t turn off your computer.”
Windows restarted normally and we saw a message saying “We couldn’t complete the updates, Undoing changes, Don’t turn off your computer.” After the process was complete, Windows booted normally and everything worked as expected.
We also tested this process while installing a major Windows 10 update, going from the Fall Creators Update to the April 2018 Update. We rebooted our computer when the message “Configuring update for Windows 10, 10% complete, Do not turn off your computer” appeared on our screen.
After the computer restarted, we saw a simple “Please wait” message, and then the sign-in screen appeared normally. Once again, we saw the “We couldn’t finish installing updates” notification.
Finally, we tried restarting the PC when it said “Working on updates 48%, Don’t turn off your PC. This will take a while.” A “Restoring your previous version of Windows…” message appeared as Windows rolled back the update, and our PC booted and worked normally afterwards.
In every test, turning off the computer didn’t cause any problems. Windows just decided to stop updating and roll back any files that were updated. Windows does insist on re-downloading the update before trying to install it again, just in case…
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