Windows 11 might soon give you an ETA for how long an update should take

If you've ever put off a Windows 11 update because you weren't sure if you had the time to run through the full process before, say, you had to leave the house, then you might be interested to learn about a new feature Microsoft is working on.

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Windows 11 update ETAs could be pretty useful, Microsoft just has to ensure that they're reasonably accurate (Image Credit: Microsoft)

This falls neatly into the category of 'simple but useful' in terms of feature additions. Windows Latest caught sight of it in the most recent preview of Windows 11, buried later in the blog post for build 26100.3902 in the Release Preview channel.

The change for Windows Update is simply that it "provides an estimated time for how long your PC will be offline to install updates."

Microsoft explains that this estimate will be present on the Windows Update settings page, and also in the Start menu where the power button resides.

Being able to see how long an update will take is clearly handy, as some upgrades can take quite a while. Of course, all this is based on the accuracy of the ETA provided, and whether that might go awry - in which case an errant estimated timeframe might be annoying. Which is perhaps the reason why Microsoft hasn't gone this route with Windows before.

At any rate, we appear to be getting this extra nugget of info for Windows 11 updates, at least if the implementation passes muster in terms of testers giving it the thumbs up.