Those monthly Patch Tuesday updates are going to get smaller and easier to manage, Microsoft says. Here’s when and how.
Microsoft is about to make a significant change in the way it delivers security updates and new features for Windows 11. You can still expect to see a single update package on the second Tuesday of each month (aka Patch Tuesday). But instead of being delivered as a single update file that grows larger every month, Microsoft is introducing what it calls “checkpoint cumulative updates”.
In a post on the Windows IT Pro Blog, Microsoft’s Maliha Qureshi explains that the goal of the new update concept is to make the monthly routine “smaller, faster, and more sustainable”, especially for administrators in large organizations.
Under the new delivery system, the post explains, Microsoft might periodically release cumulative updates as checkpoints. Subsequent updates would then consist of smaller update package files that contain “incremental binary differentials against the version of binaries in the last checkpoint”.
Over its supported lifecycle, a Windows release might have several of these checkpoints. Starting with Windows 11, version 24H2, Microsoft says, the servicing stack (the code that manages the process of downloading and installing Windows updates) will be able to “merge all the checkpoints and only download and install content that’s missing on the device.”
If you think that sounds confusing, you’re not alone. Fortunately, there’s time to figure out exactly how it’s going to work. The new system won’t be publicly available until the end of the year, as part of Windows 11, version 24H2. The first release in this new format is going out as part of this week’s Windows Insider Dev Channel release.
If you own one or more Windows PCs, here are four things you need to know about the new update format.
