Newsletter Archives

• Getting to know the Windows Update History KB articles

  Posted on February 22, 2019 at 07:49 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  It’s easy to be snarky about Microsoft’s documentation — I do it all the time, when it’s warranted — but this strikes me as a genuine attempt to both extend and explain the documentation.

  Christine Ahonen on the Windows IT Pro blog talks about the Windows Update History pages, particularly the ones with update histories for Win10, Win8.1, and Win7. I visit them several times a day — and lambaste them at least a few times a month.

  Ahonen talks about the structure of the pages, tosses in a bit of marketing jargon, but then she gets to the heart of the matter, without addressing it directly.

  Somehow, in the past year or so, the Update History pages have become much more useful. Where they used to hide descriptions of bugs or coddle them in language that required substantial parsing, they’re considerably more forthright these days. Not perfect, mind you, but much better.

  We’re seeing more frank discussion of bugs, and the acknowledgments are appearing a day or two (or three or four) days after discovery, instead of seeing them buried in various forums, including this one, and languishing for weeks.

  We’re also seeing (recently, with Win10 1809) notes about version change hangups that Microsoft’s customers can identify with — “we blocked 1809 rollout on such-and-such because of so-and-so, and it’ll get fixed sooner-or-later.”

  That kind of openness — call it “transparency” if you must — goes a long way toward making me feel better about the inevitable mayhem of supporting 8 or 10 versions of Windows simultaneously and sending out hundreds of separate patches every month.

  I just wish MS would acknowledge less-common bugs, give us more details about changes in the patches, and… turned out better patches in general, eh?

  Other Windows Update History