Dear Bill Gates,

I have been following him on social media and admire his efforts, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to spend billions of dollars to make the world a much better place.

Let me offer you a simple suggestion that could make a big difference to many people. You are listening?

Consider telling your Microsoft friends to switch Windows to FULLY UPDATE WINDOWS WITH A SINGLE CLICK OF THE MOUSE by the owner of the computer!

Do not wait an indeterminate time and confirm that you do want to restart now, only to wait another indeterminate time for the update to install or fail.

There are no repeated entries for the root login password during the upgrade.

There are no incomplete updates when additional updates are available.

No googling cryptic fault codes.

Without manual invocation of Windows Update Repair, invoke Repair automatically when necessary.

There is no need to rediscover an antivirus that must be disabled manually.

Add a failure timeout. There are no days of waiting to find out that the update is stuck and the device needs a manual reboot.

No “Waiting for updates. 21% Please do not turn off your PC. This will take a while” messages. Instead, tell your user when to return. IN MINUTES, not as a percentage of an incomplete intermediate stage.

Of course, keep the current update process available to anyone who wants it.

Consider wrapping an automatic retry cycle and failure timeout around the current process, with an escape ([ESC]?) to abort and return to manual process.

Test this thoroughly before posting, keep track of every Result Failure Mode in your lab that didn’t end up in a full update. Allow users to anonymously fax an update failure log to Microsoft to report failed update result modes so they can be tracked, prioritized, and corrected.

Let’s put an annual economic measure on this suggestion. Suppose there are 1B of Windows computers in use, and each computer undergoes 4 hours of update every quarter, and suppose an average world wage of $ 10 / hour for computer users, then the automation proposed here could save USD $ 160B / year.

By comparison, a more efficient utilization of older workers in the US has been estimated to increase US GDP by more than $ 800 billion / year.

But again, maybe automating the Windows update is a much easier change?

Thank you very much for listening and for all that you have done and continue to do.