Prime95 and Windows Update

[TObject]

Investigating why Windows updates quit installing on some of my computers I discovered that Microsoft decided to be cute about it and postpones any updates until CPU is not 100% under load.

Well, guess what, running Prime95 on machines without hyper threading CPU is always at 100% load.

I can think of several methods to work around this issue, like maybe run one less core one day of each week, or experiment with PauseWhileRunning…

Has anybody solved this issue already?

[Mark Rose]

Sounds like you solved Windows 10 getting automatically solved!

Just tell people to run Prime95 :D

[GP2]

Originally Posted by TObject

Has anybody solved this issue already?

Haven't had the issue. I'm running at 100% CPU using v28.9, which runs one exponent at a time, with helper threads on the various cores accelerating the speed per exponent relative to v28.7.

According to Wikipedia, hyperthreading was available as far back as 2002. What kind of non-hyperthreading CPU do you have?

Windows 10 is currently up-to-date for me, and I looked at "Update & Security" → "Advanced options" to see the Update History, and then looked at the KBnnnnnnn entries and checked https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/nnnnnnn for the release date, to verify that the updates were applied in a timely manner, within a day or two of being released.

How much of a delay are you seeing?

Maybe check your prime.txt file, did you increase the Priority=1 setting to something higher?

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by GP2

According to Wikipedia, hyperthreading was available as far back as 2002. What kind of non-hyperthreading CPU do you have?

It could be:

• Any AMD CPU
• An non-U i5
• An i3 or i7 with hyperthreading disabled to help the OS better schedule threads on full occupied cores

[TObject]

Yep, also some Xeons are available without hyper-threading (such as E3-1225 v3).

Originally Posted by GP2

How much of a delay are you seeing?

The updates are not installing at all, until I take the load off. I can open the "Update & Security" window, and I can see it starting updates as soon as I stop Prime95.

Priority is set to "1."