Dell Command Update

[supton]

Why is that Windows has figured out that when it is time to reboot for updates that it should be gentle in shutting down, prompting to save all files etc--and Dell Command will just nuke your system?

And what is with all the BIOS updates anyhow? I swear, ten years ago I never saw BIOS updates. Now it's a few times per year it seems. I get it, security updates forces Windows updates. But BIOS? Is security updates impacting that too?

Hard life I know. Just a rant (good thing it's not on a day where multiple restarts is required).

 

[KC8FLB]

In the life of the motherboard/mainboard, the early updates within the first couple of years are mostly functionality updates/bug fixes. The later updates are usually security updates. I do them all.

 

[Pew]

Windows will also get to a point where you cannot shut down or restart without updating the system. To a critical point, Windows will also force a restart after giving you like a 5min heads up. This is adjustable via the Group Policy settings.

UEFI has eclipsed BIOS and integrates with the Operating System. You may have one or two but the updates are not required for operation and may contain anything between critical security firmware updates for things like sleep states or critical functions like workarounds for CPU microcode (like the Intel 13-14th gen cpus.)

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

You can have Windows not load Command Update at startup and just run it manually once in a while if that helps. I'd rather have control over it than the automagic update process.

And yes, all the BIOS updates are for security reasons as the Internet cooties are quite potent nowadays. My wife's Dell desktop has averaged a BIOS update every month over the year that she's had it.

 

[OVERKILL]

Before UEFI and MEI, and then TPM and now extensible firmware, the primary purpose of BIOS updates was to address bugs, add features (support for LBA any of you old codgers?) and maybe the odd security vuln. Now, as @Pew mentioned, we are not only doing CPU microcode updates, but firmware on a whole host of connected devices that are often rolled into these "BIOS" updates, such as USB-C controller firmware, webcam firmware, touchpad firmware, MEI firmware, TPM firmware...etc. On top of that, UEFI is much larger than legacy BIOS, so there's a lot more going on there, which means a larger bug and vulnerability surface.

All that said, "back in the day" Gigabyte introduced a system where they had a backup BIOS on the board so that if you nuked your system flashing it, you weren't scrambling to try to recover it using a boot floppy or an EEPROM programmer and this was revolutionary at the time and likely helped them with sales to the DIY and gamer crowd. I was thinking about this when I was flashing a patched BIOS for my 486 recently, how something that used to be like "make sure the computer is connected to a UPS, you have no weird peripherals connected and cross all your fingers and toes" to something so routine it is being pushed out in Windows updates now. A process that used to be so incredibly fragile that it was dreaded, has become wholly routine because it has been so massively de-risked by OEM's who understood that they had to make it resilient, because they were going to be relying on it a LOT more.

I think one of the biggest/best innovations here was the move away from flash software (awdflash, amiflash...etc) that "did the deed" in Windows, or from a boot floppy, CD or, later on, USB flash. The first advancement was the inclusion of the flash tool in the suite of firmware tools on the actual board, allowing you to upgrade the BIOS from the BIOS, which was clearly safer than doing it in a Windows environment. And now we've moved on to having a Windows program basically just hand-off the flash image to the UEFI and, on reboot, the system firmware handles the update(s) itself, keeping Microsoft out of the picture.

HP has a neat little "connected" feature where, if you are in the BIOS/UEFI, you can, if you have an active internet connection, actually have it check for updates (these are not always the most recent I've discovered, but they are probably 80-90% of the time) and then update it right from there. This is extremely useful if you are running an OS that isn't Windows.