14 DAY TRIAL // With Window 10, Microsoft is changing the way computers are updated, and the company is willing to give people more control over the patches and improvements they get, offering Windows Update for Business, a feature that allows them to choose what to install, when to install.
This particular feature, however, will only be available for users of Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise, whereas Home users will get updates when they are released all automatically.
Users of Windows 10 Home won’t be allowed to choose what to install or defer updates, so we asked Chris Goettl, product manager with Shavlik, to detail this new system for our readers.
Patch Tuesday will live on
Does this mean that Patch Tuesday will get the axe in Windows 10? No, he says, because Microsoft will continue to update systems on the second Tuesday of each month, but at the same time, release other updates when they are ready. These were previously known as out-of-band updates.
“For consumers, Patch Tuesday is a non-issue as their system will apply updates as they arrive, similar to their mobile device experience. Some of those may come on Patch Tuesday, but others will come as they are released,” Goettl explains.
“For Pro and Enterprise customers utilizing WUB, WSUS, or SCCM, security and other updates will still arrive on the second Tuesday of the month, giving them predictability and control over what gets rolled out to their environment.”
Windows Update for Business will clearly get more control over the updates that Microsoft ships every month, so home users will more or less become the ones testing the reliability of each of this fix.
It’s a well-known fact that some of the updates released by Microsoft in the past caused trouble on users’ computers, so it’s pretty clear that Windows 10 Home users can be exposed to additional issues because of this new approach.
The only thing that Microsoft can do to protect them is to test each update more thoroughly before releasing them to users, so this way everyone can get fully working patches without the risk of breaking down their computers.