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Windows 7 RTM Support Ending Soon
jones_supa writes with this news from Ars Technica: "Windows 7 users will have to install Service Pack 1 if they want to continue to receive security fixes and other support beyond April 9th. With the release of a Service Pack, Microsoft's policy is to support the old version for two years. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was released on 22nd February, 2011, so the phasing out of support is happening more or less on schedule. In spite of a growing number of post-Service Pack 1 fixes and updates, Microsoft has shown no signs of shipping a second Service Pack. Should Service Pack 1 be the sole major update for Windows 7, it will continue to receive mainstream support — which encompasses both security updates, non-security bugfixes, and free phone support — until 13th January 2015. Extended support — security fixes and paid incidents only — will continue until 14th January 2020."
Well just because you're on Windows 7 RTM doen not mean that you're not updated. Windows 7 RTM receives security updates since it is still a supported version of Windows 7, but you should install SP1 in order to keep receiving them after April 9. Windows 7 RTM and Windows 7 SP1 lives side by side in parallel, and the release of SP1 did not mean that RTM stopped receiving updates.
Windows 7 SP1 has been out for nearly three years now. That's a very reasonable time to update, especially since the update is free to Windows 7 RTM users and in general should not break any software compatibility. So I don't get what the problem of dropping support for RTM would be.
A service pack is a roll up of all the important and critical updates into one big package. You can apply a service pack to any install to bring it up to that patch level without going through the intermediate stages.
The service packs are often slipstreamed into install media to produce a (fairly) up to date install right off the disk.
I'm one of those "sympathisers" here who doesn't loathe Microsoft.
Hot damn though, anyone here who does install Win7 SP1 regularly (as I do) there's about 2 to 300mb of patches and at least..70 or so of the bastards, they take forever to install as well (disk thrash)
For goodness sakes, just release SP2 already you bastards.
Use dism.exe. It will let you capture freshly installed machine - even with installed applications - back into an install image, i.e. slipstreaming. From the install image it will work exectly like the original image, only it will have all of the installed service packs, updates and patches already installed.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
A service pack will often include some new features, and has actually sometimes removed features. For example Windows XP SP2 removed the support for raw sockets. A service pack can introduce braking changes. That's why there is a fairly large overlap between the old and new service release.
Windows 7 RTM is NOT unpatched. It receives security updates just like any other supported version of Windows. See above discussion. If you read TFA you see that what it's all about is that RTM will soon no longer receive those updates.
If you don't have service pack 1 installed you are an idiot anyway to run a non-updated system.
There was almost zero benefits in SP1 for the average home user. Users can install all the needed security updates separately; in fact, this is often recommended, to reduce the size of the service pack download. Win7 received SP1 because Server 2008R2 needed the contents of the service pack.Here's what's in it for Win7:
Additional support for communication with third-party federation services (those supporting the WS-Federation passive profile protocol)
Improved HDMI audio device performance
Corrected behavior when printing mixed-orientation XPS documents
Change to behavior of “Restore previous folders at logon” functionality
Enhanced support for additional identities in RRAS and IPsec
Support for Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)
Improved Support for Advanced Format (512e) Storage Devices (devices with 4kb physical sectors)
Battlemaster--Game with friends in medival realms
I can add some clarity to this.
When Windows reaches RTM, the ownership of support is handed off from the Windows team to the Windows Sustained Engineering (WinSE) team. Two code branches are opened up for creating QFEs, a Limited Distribution Release (LDR) branch, and a General Distribution Release (GDR) branch.
The GDR branch is used for updates that are going wide to all users, which include security updates and high impact updates. Depending on the severity of the QFE, it might be posted to Windows Update as a security update, or alternatively it would be provided to OEMs to preinstall on shipping systems to resolve a specific issue.
The LDR branch is used for updates that aren't going to be distributed to a wide audience. This might be something like a QFE that fixes a bug that some enterprise customer is seeing, but doesn't have much applicabilty to the majority of Winodws users. Microsoft doesn't want to distribute an update like this wide, because there is a risk that it will cause regressions for other users. Every update in the GDR branch is also put into the LDR branch, because ultimately the user is going to be running a single instance of the binary file, and so it better have all of the security updates included if it is going to also fix issues of lesser importance
When you go to Windows Update and install a QFE, the package that you install usually contains at least two versions of the applicable binaries: One from the LDR branch, and one from the GDR branch. The hotfix installer will look at what is currently on system, and if you have the LDR version of the binary already installed, the hotfix installer will update with the corresponding LDR binary. The effect is that once you install an LDR update, you are now on the LDR branch for that binary for all future updates - that is, until the next service pack release.
The service pack is a release that includes all updates from the LDR and GDR branches rolled up into one major release. Pre-release versions of service packs are provided to enterprises for testing, and to see if any of the updates that were put into the LDR branch break anything. This gives the enterprise and Microsoft time to address the issue and fix it for the final service pack release.
Since not all enterprises participate in full testing of the service pack, there may be things that end up in the final version that can break things. This is why Microsoft will continue to support the pre|prior service pack release with security updates for a time, so that these issues can be resolved. At some future time, the pre|prior service pack becomes no longer supported, which is what TFA is all about.