Microsoft Is Slashing Windows 10 'Offline' Time During Spring Creators Update Installs

Microsoft says that with the Creators Update that was released in April 2017, the "offline" phase of the install phase lasted on average 82 minutes for users. Offline refers to the portion of the install where the user cannot interact with the computer. The "online" phase of the install refers to the time period during the install when a user can go about his or her normal computing workload.

With the Fall Creators Update that was released in October, the average time spent in the offline phase dropped to 51 minutes, which represented a 38 percent improvement. Now, with the upcoming Spring Creators Update, offline time will decrease again to an average of 30 minutes, which represents a 63 percent increase from the original Creators Update.

There is a caveat to the reduction the amount of computing time that the offline phase robs from users. "Because of these changes, the online phase for the feature update will take longer to complete," writes Microsoft's Joseph Conway. "However, this should not be noticeable to most users, as the setup processes run at a low priority, so they won’t have a large impact on a device’s battery life or system performance."

We think that this is a change that everyone can get behind when it comes to future [major] Windows 10 feature updates.