Windows updates often seem like a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. Who among us hasn’t been held up by a huge bundle of updates to download — or hit the “update and disable” option at the end of a long day, only to sit and watch the painfully leisurely percentage scroll by? Now, Microsoft has announced that it’s changing things up with “rollup update checkpoints,” which promise to speed up the process significantly.
Windows 11 24H2 has been available in the Windows Insider program for some time now, but its major release is scheduled for later this year. Microsoft says that as part of the update, it is rolling out feature updates and security improvements via smaller, incremental downloads that only contain changes since the previous update.
In general, up until now, Windows updates have tended to be larger in size, and the download package contained files that you didn’t necessarily need (via Windows Latest). Assuming you’ve been gradually updating your system (which you really should be doing to maintain a secure operating system), as of release 24H2 you’ll only need to download and install updates that contain exactly what you need, not the entire kitchen sink.
Microsoft also says it could release cumulative updates as checkpoints, rather than just feature updates and security patches. Repeating this process multiple times would generate multiple checkpoints, which could then be combined in a servicing stack to download and install only the missing content on a specific device.
Users who service updates via Windows Update, Windows Update for Business, Windows Autopatch, or Windows Server Update Services do not need to take any action to receive the benefits. If your system is set to regular updates and has been updated to 24H2, updates from that point on should be much smaller and quicker to install.
This is not only better for Windows users, but also for Microsoft itself. While Windows 11 was not as successful as Microsoft had hoped, leaked documentation showed that it was in employ last October on over 400 million energetic devices per month. That’s a lot of machines downloading vast update packages, so anything that could reduce the size of those files should also reduce the load on Microsoft’s update servers.
How much time this will save the average update install remains to be seen, though hopefully the effect will be significant — and those of you keeping petite SSDs or nursing leisurely internet connections will hopefully breathe a sigh of relief. Now, if someone could simply inform the countless third-party game launchers that they don’t need to install massive updates regularly — that’s just what the end user needs — well, that would be great.
