Did Windows 10 forget your Anniversary Update? Get ready for a two month wait

Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Back in July, we heard that the Anniversary Update would have a staged rollout that would come in waves and would 'take some time' – but we didn't anticipate the length of the timeframe Microsoft was thinking about.

Dona Sarkar's comment at the time didn't mean that not everyone would get the update in the first week or two, but in actual fact, that not every PC would receive it in the launch month of August – or indeed September, as some of you have no doubt discovered (we did get our AU download through in August ourselves, about a fortnight after the rollout began).

And furthermore, some folks won't get it this month – or possibly not in October for that matter.

According to new details unearthed by ZDNet, it could be the start of November before some folks get the update delivered.

Three's the not-so-magic number

In an email, Microsoft stated: "The Anniversary Update will download and install via Windows Update. The download is automatically available to you. It will begin rolling out on 2 August 2016 and may take up to 3 months to reach all users."

Of course, there's a positive side to having to wait so long for the upgrade to arrive, namely that earlier users have found some fairly nasty flaws, and these will have been patched up for those later adopters. A good example is the bug which kept freezing up PCs, and was cured a couple of weeks back.

The webcam problems are also expected to be solved with a patch this month.

Indeed, as ZDNet notes, part of the reason for the slow pace of the rollout is so Microsoft can monitor progress and bugs, cross-referencing the latter with the hardware they're encountered on, building up stats and an overall picture of where problems lie, and taking appropriate action.

Hopefully though, the full three month wait will only be experienced by a very small minority of users, perhaps those running Windows 10 on less common devices. But who knows – a fair few folks may be left tapping their fingers impatiently on their desks…

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).