MS-DEFCON 2: Here comes 21H2 @ AskWoody

MS-DEFCON 2: Here comes 21H2

Posted on November 4, 2021 at 02:45 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

ISSUE 18.42.1 • 2021-11-04

MS-DEFCON 2

By Susan Bradley

Microsoft is beginning to push 21H2, Microsoft’s least interesting feature release in the Windows 10 era.

With new features that are interesting only to businesses, this feature release will serve only one purpose — that of providing you with lifecycle support for several years.

So what’s in 21H2?

Addition of WPA3 H2E standards support for enhanced Wi-Fi security
In Windows Hello for Business, introduction of cloud trust, a new deployment method to support simplified, passwordless deployments and achieve a deploy-to-run state within a few minutes
GPU compute support in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows (EFLOW) deployments, for machine learning and other compute-intensive workflows

In other words, not much that will excite most of us. I don’t recommend installing feature releases until several weeks (at least) after their release.

I strongly recommend that you use either group policy or the registry key methods to keep yourself on 21H1 at this time. You can review your options to defer feature releases.

Consumer and home users

For consumer and home users, I recommend that you push off updates until right before Thanksgiving, no sooner than November 23. Click on Start, Settings, Update and Security, and click the Pause for 7 days button. if you want to pause for more than seven days, click the button more than once.

Do remember my mantra. I always want to install updates — it’s just a matter of timing.

Business users

By now (hopefully), you have found a resolution to any printing problems that have been driving you insane over the last several months. If not, we can hope that the November updates will include more printing fixes. We already know that the preview updates released at the end of October helped to fix issues for some. Those patches will be included in the November update releases, because Windows 10 patches are always cumulative.

References

AskWoody Master Patch List

Read the full story in the AskWoody Plus Alert 18.42.1 (2021-11-04).

AskWoody Plus Alert, MS-DEFCON 21H2, Alerts, MS-DEFCON, MS-DEFCON 2, Patch Lady Posts, Windows, Windows 10

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