• Things I didn’t know: “Check for updates” in Win10 1903 now warns about optional and feature updates

    Posted on September 5, 2019 at 07:37 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    I must’ve been sleeping when this announcement hit the waves:

    https://twitter.com/edbott/status/1169570258283139075

    Best I can tell, as is so often the case, Ed’s right. It looks like Microsoft has fixed one of the most abominable come-ons in Windows history. In every test I could come up with, clicking Check for Updates only in Win10 1903, triggers an “Optional updates available” notice and “Download and install now” link, instead of just carpet bombing the PC with anything in the update bucket.

    Are any of you seeing anything different? It hasn’t always been so.

    If that behavior’s true and consistent, I now have a second good reason (after Pause updates on Home) to upgrade to 1903.

    A related observation: It looks like we’ve definitively lost the user interface for “Choose when updates are installed” in Win10 1903 Pro if either feature or quality deferrals are non-zero. At first I thought that was a bug. Now I guess it’s a … feature?

    UPDATE: Ed just changed his long-standing ZDNet explainer about Windows updating. He’s included a section on this new “Download and install now” behavior for “optional” (= not Patch Tuesday) patches.

    As of version 1903, Windows 10 no longer installs feature updates automatically. Instead, as with the optional cumulative updates delivered in the “C” and “D” weeks, the update is listed as available in Windows Update, but you have to click Download And Install to kick off the installation. This change affects all editions, including Windows 10 Home.

    As best I can tell, that behavior changed very recently. It may have coincided with the change in the appearance/disappearance of the “Choose when updates are installed” part of the user interface in Win10 1903 Pro.

    There’s a whole lot of paddling going on beneath the surface. Fortunately, the changes (if they work the way Ed describes) are definitely in the right direction.

    Details in Computerworld Woody on Windows.

    Windows Patches/Security
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