Windows 7 and 8 Moving to Cumulative Patches

Back in August, Microsoft announced that they would be changing the way Windows 7 and Windows 8 updates would be delivered. According to the information at the time, it appeared that the new model for patches would have gone a Windows 10 like model. In a recent blog post, Microsoft has now clarified what patching their legacy Windows systems would look like and they are complex. These changes will take effect this month and continue going forward.

First off we have the usual security fixes for the month on each Patch Tuesday. The big change is that instead of multiple updates or KB’s, all of the security fixes will come in a single update with no option to split them up. The next type of update, also released on Patch Tuesday is a monthly roll up update that contains the same security updates as the security update mentioned earlier. In addition to that, it also contains all previous security updates from previous months as well as all non-security updates for the previous month. This means users choosing this update will have both security and non-security updates installed. It has the name of Security Monthly Quality Update.

Lastly, Microsoft is also introducing a new tier of updates, a monthly preview set. This will contain all non-security updates for the coming month to allow for compatibility testing. Of course, if you think there is a single update that causing trouble, there is no way to know which update is the problem and you would have to roll back all the updates for the month.

In a further complication, the security only update is only available on the online catalog or Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). This means most home users won’t be able to choose the stand-alone security fixes and will have to get them alongside the non-security fixes. Given the previously stated concerns about troubleshooting, I expect we may be seeing more issues popping and less-technical users being forced to forgo security updates.