This provided an alternate route to obtain security and non-security fixes as individual installable packages. Less helpfully, however, Microsoft will stop publishing individual update packages on the Microsoft Download Center. This package will be distributed and deployed over Windows Update (and similarly, Windows Server Update Services and System Center Configuration Manager). With this new process, the company will publish some number of security fixes, and a single combined, cumulative non-security fix. You'll have to explicitly download and install the rollup if you want to skip that.įor updates released after April 2016, Microsoft will also produce monthly rollups of non-security updates, for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2. Try to update a Windows 7 system the naive way and you'll still be faced with the tedium of multiple reboots and update cycles. The biggest awkwardness will probably be its distribution Microsoft isn't planning to ship the rollup over Windows Update. Microsoft will also support injecting this rollup into Windows 7 Service Pack 1 system images and install media. It's not quite the same as a Service Pack-it still requires Service Pack 1 to be installed, and the system will still report that it is running Service Pack 1-but for most intents and purposes, that won't matter. In other words, it performs a very similar role to what Windows 7 Service Pack 2 would have done, if only Windows 7 Service Pack 2 were to exist. Installing the rollup will perform five years of patching in one shot. The company has published a 'convenience rollup' for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (and Windows Server 2008 R2), which in a single package contains all the updates, both security and non-security, released since the Service Pack, up through April 2016. The answer to that particular question will, unfortunately, remain a mystery, but Microsoft did today announce a change that will greatly reduce the pain of this process. Typically, this means multiple trips to Windows Update and multiple reboots in order to get the system fully up-to-date, and it is a process that is at best tedious, typically leading one to wonder why, at the very least, it cannot pull down all the updates at once and apply them with just a single reboot.

Service Pack 1 for the operating system was released in 2011, meaning that a fresh install has five years of individual patches to download and install.

Anyone who's installed Windows 7 any time in the last, oh, five years or so probably didn't enjoy the experience very much.

Windows 7 pack 2