Microsoft has released a 'convenience rollup' for Windows 7 which contains hundreds of updates for the operating system. The updates in this rollup are from after Service Pack 1 up to April 2016.
The convenience part of the rollup is that users who do a clean install no longer have to wait till the hundreds of updates released since Windows 7 SP1 have been downloaded and installed. The update process could take several hours after which the Windows 7 installation was finally up-to-date.
Windows 7 was released in October 2009 and the first Service Pack (SP1) was released in February 2011. It took Microsoft more than 5 years to release this 'convenience rollup'.
Users that want to do a clean install of Windows 7 are now able to download and install Service Pack 1 and today's rollup to end up with a fully up-to-date system. This saves hours of time.
Microsoft also announced that it will continue to release monthly rollups for Windows Service Pack 1 and also for Windows 8.1. Convenience rollups for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will also become available in the future.
The updates will be distributed through the Microsoft Update Catalogue, which currently only works with Internet Explorer because it requires ActiveX support. Later this year the update process will become browser independent.
