Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed that the upgrade offer to Windows 11 is entering its final phase of availability and is designated for broad deployment for eligible devices.
“Since the launch of Windows 11 in October, we have seen strong demand and preference for Windows 11 with people upgrading their eligible PCs at twice the rate we saw for Windows 10. Based on this trend, we are advancing the pace of the rollout faster than we originally announced and entering the final phase of availability for Windows 11 ahead of our initial plan of mid-2022,” the company said.
However, Microsoft added that despite its efforts, they have found that devices that don’t meet a certain amount of connected time are very unlikely to successfully update.
The company calls this measurement “Update Connectivity”, which means the time (in hours) that a device is powered on and also connected to Microsoft services such as Windows Update.
“What we found is that devices that don’t meet a certain amount of connected time are very unlikely to successfully update. Specifically, data shows that devices need a minimum of two continuous connected hours, and six total connected hours after an update is released to reliably update. This allows for a successful download and background installations that are able to restart or resume once a device is active and connected,” Microsoft added.
Update Connectivity data enables to: (1) better understand which devices simply don’t have enough connected time to successfully update, (2) examine how to treat those devices in reporting and success measurements, and (3) consider how to evaluate the security risk these rarely connected devices actually pose to your environment.
In order to find devices with an update policy not meeting the minimum Update Connectivity requirements, you can navigate to Devices > Monitor and select either the Feature update failures or Windows Expedited update failures report.
Further, the Insufficient Update Connectivity alert is also available in the Summary report in Intune. Navigate to Reports > Windows updates, then select the Reports tab, and select Windows Expedited update report. Devices with Insufficient Update Connectivity can be found using the Alert type column, as shown below.
Microsoft has encouraged users to leave their devices plugged in and connected — instead of powering them off overnight — so that updates can download and install properly. It also suggests using the Optimizing Windows Update Adoption, which offers recommended power settings that are a good balance of power savings while also enabling devices to keep up to date with the latest security updates.
