Slashdot Mirror
Windows 10 Updates Are About To Get a Lot Smaller To Download as Microsoft Switches To Differential Patching (theverge.com)
Microsoft currently distributes major Windows 10 updates -- Anniversary Update, for instance -- as essentially full operating system installs, going as much 4GB in size. But that is changing starting today (for some users). From an article on The Verge: Microsoft has been promising smaller updates to Windows 10, through various methods, for what feels like years, but the company is now starting to test a new Unified Update Platform (UUP) that will make a big difference. "One of the biggest community and customer benefits of UUP is the reduction you'll see in download size on PCs," explains Bill Karagounis, a Windows program manager. "We have converged technologies in our build and publishing systems to enable differential downloads for all devices built on the Mobile and PC OS." Differential downloads only include the changes that have been pushed out since you last updated a Windows 10 PC. This new change will debut with the Windows 10 Creators Update that's expected to arrive in March, but Windows Insiders can start testing the technology in today's latest build update for mobile devices. Microsoft will start rolling this out to PC builds later this year, alongside HoloLens devices. Xbox One devices running Windows 10 won't benefit from UUP as Microsoft distributes operating system updates to consoles using different methods.
German neighbor here, hi.
My cell phone gets 200 MB monthly. For six Euros I can buy another 200 MB.
My DSL caps out at 448/96 kbps. That amounts to roughly 100 GB maximum download over a month, but obviously doing that would ruin any kind of latency-sensitive activity. Like loading Slashdot, believe it or not. If I have a download running the https handshake to Slashdot actually times out.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Windows 10 uses a cumulative patching system. To update a Windows 10 out-of-the-box install to this month's updates you only need this month's update, not every single update that has been released since that CD was made. That's a huge change from previous versions.
The downside of this is that cumulative updates have gotten much larger over time. October's update clicked in at around a gig. That is a lot of data to move around on a network. With this change the computer only pulls down the differences between the last time it patched and today. The hope is that this will take some of the pain out of patching.
Full disclosure, I work for Microsoft in an unrelated group.