Last Wednesday, Microsoft’s Mike Benson revealed that the company will stop releasing delta updates starting in February 2019 and will only release Express Updates.
Microsoft releases cumulative updates to Windows 10 to “reduce ecosystem fragmentation” and to “make it easier for system administrators and end users to stay up to date and secure.”
But cumulative updates have come with a lot of problems. The biggest one is that from administrators to end users, no one knows whether the update will be installed or not. And if it is installed, will it cause other problems on the computer?
Microsoft, however, mentions another important issue: the ever-increasing size of the updates. Benson says that cumulative updates started out as 100 to 200 Megabytes but today their size reaches 1-1.2 Gigabytes.
So the company announced in 2017 that it was reducing the size of Windows Updates by using different packages.
Microsoft designed and develops three different types of updates:
- Full updatesincludeall the components and files that have changed or been added since the last major update. Microsoft calls these updates LCU, which stands for Latest Cumulative Update.
- Delta updates include only the components and files that have changed since the last update. Delta updates can only be installed if the system is updated on a regular basis.
- Express updates only provide the system with what it needs
Delta updates are larger in size than express updates, and Full updates are larger than Delta updates.
Express updates have another advantage over Delta updates: they do not require the previous month's updates to be installed.
Delta updates were released by Microsoft primarily because the express update protocol was only available on devices that had Windows Update or Windows Server Update Services and not on third-party update management systems.
Microsoft extended the express update protocol in January 2017, but did not disable Delta updates to "give companies time to upgrade their update management tools to support express updates."
So recent versions of Windows 10 (Windows 10 build 1607 through 1803) will support Delta updates. Windows 10 build 1809, (October 2018 Update) will also support Delta updates, but it will be the last version to support them.
Microsoft announced that it will end support for these updates (delta updates) on February 12, 2019.
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