14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released the typical previews of the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 monthly rollups that will go live for all users as part of the next Patch Tuesday cycle.
The Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 monthly rollup preview is KB4507437, while the Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 sibling is KB4507463.
These new updates don’t come with too many changes, and the Windows 7 update, for example, only brings updated time zone information for Brazil.
A similar improvement is part of the Windows 8.1 monthly rollup preview as well, but this time, the patch also fixes an issue with the Workflow definition cache and improves the experience the Window-Eyes screen reader application.
No new known issues
There are no new known issues in these updates, albeit the ones that haven’t been fixed in the previous monthly rollups are still there. The most notable is a problem affecting McAfee security products and causing some devices to become unresponsive after installing the updates.
“Microsoft and McAfee have identified an issue on devices with McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS) Threat Prevention 10.x or McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention (Host IPS) 8.0 or McAfee VirusScan Enterprise (VSE) 8.8 installed. It may cause the system to have slow startup or become unresponsive at restart after installing this update,” Microsoft explains.
These previews are available on Windows Update, the Microsoft Update Catalog, and the Windows Server Update Services. However, when it comes to Windows Update, they are only offered as optional and need to be manually selected for install.
While the monthly rollup previews are supposed to help IT pros and administrators test the updates before the public release, consumers are recommended to wait until Microsoft ships them via Windows Update as an automatic patch. This is projected to happen on the August Patch Tuesday.