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

to continue the trend?

[ctk76]

NT4 - 6 2000 - 4 XP - 3 Vista - 2 7 - 1 8 - 0???

Re:to continue the trend?

[CheshireDragon]

No, just seems like they are trying to phase out older OSes faster and keep people current.

Re:to continue the trend?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just seems like they are trying to phase out older OSes faster and keep people current.

Read: make more money

Re:to continue the trend?

[tlhIngan]

It could also be more benign. The fact that most of us have high speed internet connections and can update the system when the updates are made and tested. The Service Pack Concept is a throwback to them good old days where we would get a CD or Disk in the mail and run the upgrade. Because trying to get it online every week would be a major job.

Until you have to install a new version on blank hardware. One of the really big annoyances with Windows is the initial install. Install Windows 7 (no SP). Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.

The SP is basically a roll up of fixes so you can install all 500 or so in one go, or when slipstreamed onto the disc, during install. Which turns the Windows Update hassles from huge mess down to something much more managable.

And no, you don't need to get them every week. Once every few months or once a year is quite enough to ensure you aren't spending hours installing updates.

Re:to continue the trend?

[NJRoadfan]

Service Packs also include hotfixes that don't appear on Windows Update. You have to request them from Microsoft if you have that specific issue. One notable hotfix that dogged XP users was the UAA patch that enabled HD Audio sound cards to work. It wasn't available for download from Microsoft, you had to get it from the vendor who made the hardware.... it was later made part of XP SP3.

Re:to continue the trend?

[composer777]

From what I understand, the driver model for 7 and 8 are the same, and if anything 8 seems to run faster on older hardware (probably due to removing aero, among other things). This isn't like the upgrade from XP to Vista, where a ton of stuff broke. I still won't use it, because I think creating two separate UI's for the Desktop was a horrible design choice and I need to get work done. They could have been elegant, and created a generic font/icon/UI scaling engine that would allow the OS to work on displays of any arbitrary resolution, but I suppose they thought ratcheting the Xbox 360's UI on top of Windows was the quick and dirty way to get it done. I actually just bought an upgrade to Ultimate Edition for my laptop, if that says anything about what I think of Windows 8.

Re:to continue the trend?

[Anonymous Coward]

The way that Apple handles this makes sense.

There are no reinstall discs. There is a recovery partition and something called "internet recovery". If you use internet recovery, it just downloads the current version of the OS and installs it. No further updates required.

Re:to continue the trend?

[f3rret]

It could also be more benign. The fact that most of us have high speed internet connections and can update the system when the updates are made and tested. The Service Pack Concept is a throwback to them good old days where we would get a CD or Disk in the mail and run the upgrade. Because trying to get it online every week would be a major job.

Until you have to install a new version on blank hardware. One of the really big annoyances with Windows is the initial install. Install Windows 7 (no SP). Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.

The SP is basically a roll up of fixes so you can install all 500 or so in one go, or when slipstreamed onto the disc, during install. Which turns the Windows Update hassles from huge mess down to something much more managable.

And no, you don't need to get them every week. Once every few months or once a year is quite enough to ensure you aren't spending hours installing updates.

Problem being that Windows Update is a complete retard. I recently had to install Windows 7 from a DVD and when I first installed it I had to run windows update and I had to go through like one or two cycles up updates before it wanted to push service pack 1 to me, then there was like 10 rounds of downloading, installing and rebooting after the SP had been installed.

Re:to continue the trend?

[JamesTRexx]

Year of the Linux desktop! :-D

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.

Re:to continue the trend?

[kimvette]

Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.

. . . and contrary to the claim of some, both Windows and Windows Server still require many reboots while doing this, unless you streamline them into the install - which in itself is a major pain in the ass when it's hundreds of individual updates. APUP (autopatcher) is a partial solution but it stagnated for a long while and I'm not sure I trust it on production systems now.

Re:to continue the trend?

[Raenex]

Calling Windows 8 a service pack to Windows 7 is idiotic. It's a complete change in direction to accomadate touch-mania.

Re:to continue the trend?

[man_of_mr_e]

Pro Tip: Install SP1 manually first, then do Windows Update.

Re:to continue the trend?

[hairyfeet]

Except that price is only good until Jan 17th just as it was with Win 7, then it'll be right back to the $200. You see THIS is the bitch, you have MSFT trying to charge like its only putting out one and a half every decade but crank them out every 3 years, and its gonna fucking bomb HARD. if they had any sense they'd be selling features and offering the appstore to Win 7 for free, instead like the media cartels they are gonna try to hang onto the old business practices while trying to glom on to the next wave, retarded.

Re:to continue the trend?

[hairyfeet]

Let old Hairy fix that problem right up...blam! there ya go, no charge. hell I'll even be nice and take care of the third party stuff most folks want...slam!. Just use these two and go make you a sammich while they run, totally unattended, no muss, no fuss, and with WSUS Offline you can even have it apply the updates for MS Office and .NET while its at it. I keep WSUS on a network drive at the shop, it has every SP and update for every version of Windows from XP - Win 7 X64, while I'm installing the OS I just tell WSUS to drop the latest patches and SP along with .NET into a folder labeled for that OS and its ready to run by the time I hear the Windows chime, couldn't be simpler. you can even have it put the updates onto a thumbstick or DVD if you need to do it somewhere where else, easy peasy friend.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. People won't willingly switch to Windows 8, so this is just another way to push them there.

Having barely used Windows for the last few years I'd almost forgotten the horror of Windows Update compared to apt-get or yum update.

Re:Why?

[zlives]

perhaps if they actually developed beautiful code in the first place... unless you mistyped bloated...

Re:Why?

[gander666]

I am in marketing and product management, and I can state that this is not true. Often it is engineering who wants to cut or discontinue support for older products.

It is far more common that I have to force them to support a reasonable life cycle after the launch of a new version (reasonable being 3 or 5 years).

FWIW, Microsoft publishes their PLC, and is quite good at giving you runway to plan for end of support.

Disappointing, but not surprising

[JDG1980]

This is disappointing, but not surprising. Microsoft knows that most experienced Windows users don't want any part of Windows 8. But they are convinced that Windows 8 is a vital part of their business strategy going forward. So they are doing whatever they can to bribe, force, or coerce users to switch to Windows 8. They don't want Windows 7 to become the new XP, even though they profited handsomely for many years from XP licenses. The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.

Annoying, but ...

[Splat]

DISM supports offline patching of .WIM Images:

http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2012/01/31/offline-wim-patching-with-dism-a-more-automated-method/

If you're just installing Windows 7 from CD on a large install, you're doing it wrong. Deploy a patched WIM.

The answer is simple:

[kheldan]

Microsoft wants to shove Windows 8 (The Playskool OS) down everyone's throat, so they'll phase out Windows 7 as soon as they think they can get away with doing so. Step 1 in that process is not issuing a Service Pack 2.

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.

Aero isn't gone

[Sycraft-fu]

Glass is gone, not Aero.

Aero is the desktop composition engine that uses the GPU to do all kinds of rendering shit. This is present in 8 and in fact faster/more capable than ever. Glass (Aero Glass) is the shiny UI in Windows 7, that is gone in Windows 8, replaced with an uglied up flat, square, UI.

So basically there is an even better desktop composition engine, that is used to composite something that looks like Windows 3.1 :).

In terms of drivers, yes older drivers seem quite compatible. My pro sound card works no problems with the 7 drivers and pro audio cards have some of the most finicky drivers out there.

Re:patches on patches

[lennier]

Windows isn't distributed as individual packages from desperate sources

And that's Linux's secret edge. Its developers are outlaws, lean and dangerous. We could do anything, anytime. We could fork your OpenOffice.org and call it LibreOffice... and then fork it right back. We could switch your default filesystem to btrfs, stone cold. We could drop X11 and replace it with Wayland... just like that.

Don't push us, man.