Windows 7 Not Getting A Second Service Pack

An anonymous reader writes "Windows 7 was expected to have Service Pack 2 issued roughly 3 years from its introduction (late 2009). People, including myself, have been asking 'Where is it?' and the answer apparently is, 'It isn't, and will never be' which lends itself to the giant pain of installing Windows 7, then Service Pack 1, and hundreds of smaller hotfix patches. Why Microsoft? No go to Service Pack 2 for Windows 7!"

Comments

Re:to continue the trend?

[man_of_mr_e]

To be honest, NT4, 2000, and XP *NEEDED* all those service packs. This was before the great Security turnaround in 2003 that delayed the release of WIndows Server 2003, and resulted in the massive XP SP2 release.

Since then, Windows has had far less need of service pack because the code tends to be more solid.

SP1 is almost always a necessity though. The initial release of the OS tends to have enough niggly bugs that get fixed in SP1. I would argue that Vista SP2 was not really a service pack, but rather just a hotfix rollup. There were no new features introduced in SP2 (as it should be).

7 was pretty damn solid out of the gate though, still 7 SP1 had almost 1000 hotfixes and security patches (though a good portion of them related to specifically server functionality).

Windows 7 and Windows 8 have been pretty solid out of the gate. I don't see why MS wouldn't supply hotfix rollups for 7, but does it really need SP2? Only those people that want MS to provide Windows 8 features on 7 think so.

The one time where Mac updates have advantage

[quacking duck]

Special security updates aside, whenever Apple updates the OS e.g. 10.7.2 to 10.7.3, it's essentially a service pack. Normally there's a combo updater that rolls up all updates for that major release so you could go from 10.x.0 to 10.x.4 (example only).

There are times when Apple's monolithic updates are a drawback, especially for traditional enterprise IT who might need to exclude certain updates, but here they have a clear advantage over Windows' hundreds of individual patches (sometimes requiring 2 or 3 Windows Update runs and restarts to get them all).

At least release a goddamn rollup patch

[Nimey]

Microsoft hasn't done one of those since Windows 2000, but at one time they had a roll-up patch for 2K SP4 that incorporated all the updates released between the SP and the roll-up. I wish they'd re-institute the practice because it saves us desktop-support types a lot of time.

Maybe make a yearly roll-up so that I shouldn't have to install more than a few dozen updates at the most when I put our image on the computers. I've rolled my own image, but it's a bit of a pain to install updates.