It’s Patch Tuesday for Windows (and Adobe Flashplayer). I recommend this rather balanced explanation. Starting this month, Microsoft releases all the patches as a single rollup bundle and you no longer get to choose. That is, you cannot choose to avoid something you don’t want. Most users don’t know enough to decide, so it may not matter. It will most certainly save Microsoft a lot of money.
Until there’s a backlash. Given the serious trouble Microsoft has with quality control on patching, particularly with Win10 lately, this may turn out to be quite a mess. The most annoying thing for users is that Microsoft always insists that there is only a relative few folks who suffer trouble with this process, but they word it in a way the hints they blame the users who are having trouble.
I’m watching to see how this works out.
Edit: I forgot to add this little tidbit —
Starting in February 2017, Microsoft intends to add older fixes from before the current month to the packages. Over the course of several months, the cumulative updates will become bigger and bigger, incorporating an ever larger quantity of the available Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 fixes. The ultimate goal is that these cumulative updates will be sufficient to get a PC completely up to date.
This means that the telemetry updates a great many people refused in the past will be forced on them. Those telemetry updates were designed to make Win7 and Win8 just like Win10 with its built-in snooping of keystrokes and such, sending that and so much more back to Microsoft. I guess it depends on whether you trust them, but a lot of comments on tech sites suggest users would rather risk turning off updates altogether.
We turned off updates altogether long ago. But then our tech needs seem to be more easily served than most peoples’; no games, no ‘chat’ or skype or anything like that.
Ditto, Christine! Probably most people don’t need the updates either. They just don’t know any better. Of course, who knows if MS will try to exploit those of us that don’t get the uodates! Ha ha I am just going to replace MS with one of the Linux operating systems once I get up the nerve to do it. Plus at my age, learning new tricks is a pain, but I will bite the bullet soon.