There are still a lot of people who use Windows 7, and Microsoft is fully aware of this. It is also aware that doing a fresh install of Windows 7 only requires downloading about five years worth of updates and plenty of rebooting. To solve the problem, it is releasing these updates as a single download. This sort of thing used to be referred to as a Service Pack – but it seems like Microsoft is deliberately staying away from the term.
Users must have already installed Windows 7 Service Pack 1 to make use of this latest update package. Interestingly, the updates will not be available as part of the regular Windows update process. Rather, they must be downloaded from the Microsoft Update Catalogue and installed manually.
Still, it is a shortcut for getting a fresh install of Windows 7 up to date with everything Microsoft has released up to April 2016. Beyond that, updates will have to be down loaded the old fashioned way.
Microsoft has also announced that it will be releasing non-security updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 as a single monthly bundle. This is apparently for the developers to improve the quality and reliability of the updates. Security updates will be kept on the same schedule, as fixing these problems are a little more important.
More than a few users are still stuck on Windows 7; some because of a preference for the OS – while others are mostly enterprise machines that are in the middle of their update cycle. Hopefully this change will make it easier for these users to keep up to date; and maybe save the IT department a few headaches.
[Source: Microsoft TechNet]
