14 DAY TRIAL // In addition to cumulative updates for Windows 10, Microsoft has also released new security patches for Windows 7 and 8.1 on this month’s Patch Tuesday cycle.
This time, however, it’s not quite a typical Patch Tuesday rollout, as the updates shipped to older Windows versions are entirely about security improvements.
On past Patch Tuesday cycles, Microsoft used to release updates for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 with both security and non-security fixes. These updates, however, came alongside security-only packages that were distributed separately.
This month, all these Windows versions are getting only security improvements, and the same changelog is being used for both the standard updates and the security-only releases.
On Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, you can download KB4457144, while the security-only update, which comes with the same changelog, is available as KB4457145.
Users still running Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 can get KB4457129 or the security-only update called KB4457143, again with the exact same release notes.
Security changes exclusively
In all cases, the changelog only points to security refinements that Microsoft has made to Windows or the other components, as it follows below:
“Security updates to Windows media, Windows Shell, Windows Hyper-V, Windows datacenter networking, Windows kernel, Windows virtualization and kernel, Microsoft JET Database Engine, Windows MSXML, and Windows Server.”
All Windows updates appear to install correctly, but this isn’t, however, a big surprise, as most of the problems have previously been experienced with Windows 10 cumulative updates.
Keep in mind that Windows 7 will reach the end-of-support in January 2020, and Microsoft recommends customers to begin the transition to Windows 10 as soon as possible. Windows 8.1, on the other hand, will continue to get security fixes as part of the extended support program until January 2023.