The Win 7 “SP2” convenience rollup KB 3125574 might actually be worthwhile

This just in from Noel Carboni:

I now have a test Win 7 virtual machine on which I’ve installed the “convenience rollup update”, KB3125574.

Rather than start with a clean setup I chose a Win 7 system that was up to date as of January 14, had been set to do manual updates only, and was configured for maximum privacy (e.g., settings were tweaked, telemetry jobs were disabled, etc.).   The system also had several updates hidden.

These are the Windows Updates I had hidden on that system before installing the “convenience rollup update”.  They include GWX and telemetry, as well as the Windows Genuine Advantage update from years ago.

• KB2952664 (diagnostics to determine whether the system will be compatible with Win 10)
• KB3021917 (determines if performance issues will be encountered if upgrading to Win 10 and sends telemetry)
• KB3035583 (GWX)
• KB3068708 (Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry)
• KB3080149 (Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry)
• KB3123862 (Updated capabilities to upgrade Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 [to Win 10])
• KB971033 (Update for Windows Activation Technologies)

I have some uncommon software that allows me to see what communications are being attempted, and I can verify that this particular setup was completely quiet before the update.

The idea here is to see whether installing the “convenience rollup update” could be useful with an existing system that’s both up-to-date or mostly so, and which had experienced some Windows Update slowness before.

Today I installed the “convenience rollup update” from the catalog .msu file downloaded from Microsoft.

I’m monitoring the communications carefully.  Afterward, so far, I haven’t heard an new peeps out of the telemetry software.

I checked the various scheduled jobs and whatnot.  Pro-privacy configuration changes I had made were left in place, and disabled jobs were left disabled – which surprised me a bit given Microsoft’s recent moves.  Maybe the folks who are doing Windows 7 updates at Microsoft aren’t all bad.  Yet.

This is good news so far; it hints that this “convenience rollup” update really might be worth using.  However, I’ve only been monitoring it for a few hours after the installation.  It needs to be running for some days (and especially overnight) before I can say with any confidence whether it’s staying quiet.   I’ll let you know if I detect anything out of the ordinary.

Other observations:

I tried a manually-initiated Windows Update.   It took a few minutes, then failed with hex error.  However, a notification pop-up came up shortly thereafter claiming an update was available.  I think the error may have happened because it was checking on its own after I had started the Windows Update service, and my manually initiated check couldn’t start up a second instance.

When I clicked on the notification pop-up, this update was the only one listed as available:

• KB971033

After the update, this reduced list is now shown as still hidden:

• KB3021917 (determines if performance issues will be encountered if upgrading to Win 10 and sends telemetry)
• KB3035583 (GWX)
• KB3068708 (Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry)
• KB3080149 (Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry)

As mentioned above, KB971033 is an update from years ago that will actively check to see whether Microsoft wants to deactivate your license.  I use only legitimately licensed software, but I can imagine any number of things could go wrong with that, so as a matter of course I always hide it on all my Win 7 systems.

It was a bit of a surprise that only that update showed up as available.  What I don’t know is whether they’re trying to tell me that KB971033 must go in before I can see any other updates, or whether there just aren’t any more right now that are not included in the convenience package.  If this update is now required, that represents a change, as it has never been required before.

Experimentation and observation continues…

[Woody again… I had a horrible time starting with a clean Win7 SP1 and running the rollup – hours and hours of delays, odd behavior. I’ll try to write it up at some point, but my top priority right now is the second edition of Win10 All-In-One For Dummies — a Herculean task.]