Microsoft cleans up expired cumulative updates for Windows 10/11 to save network resources and improve installation efficiency

Every month, Microsoft releases multiple updates to Windows 10 and Windows 11. These cumulative updates may be feature updates or quality updates.

Of course, from the name of the cumulative update, it can be seen that the update package is cumulative, and the update content of the previous version will also be included in the latest cumulative update.

This means that users only need to install the latest version of the cumulative update, and do not need to install the old cumulative update of the previous version because those are redundant.

But in Windows 10, Microsoft did not optimize this mechanism, so that after a long period of non-update, there may be multiple cumulative updates waiting to be downloaded at the same time.

According to a message released by Microsoft, in order to improve update efficiency and save network bandwidth resources, Microsoft has begun to automatically clean up expired updates on the update server.

For example, when the cumulative update in October 2021 is released, the C and D test updates released before that, and the cumulative update in September 2021 are all considered redundant.

The user only needs to install the latest update, and the previous updates are all included in the latest update, so of course, users do not need to install the update repeatedly.

Now when users check the Microsoft update page, they may notice that some pages are marked as expired updates, and Microsoft no longer provides download services for such updates.

In addition, Microsoft will prohibit downloading updates that have been marked as expired, including but not limited to deleting updates from the Microsoft Catalog update library.

Therefore, the next time you click on some update links, if it prompts that it does not exist or has been removed, it means that this update is an expired update and has been directly cleaned up by Microsoft.

For Microsoft, the biggest benefit of cleaning up redundant updates is to save bandwidth resources, because some cumulative updates start to waste server bandwidth resources in GB.

For users, when downloading updates, the download speed may be slow and it takes a long time to complete the download. Cleaning up should help improve the speed.

At the same time, the system does not need to install those old and expired cumulative updates after cleaning up redundant resources for users, which can save disk cache space.

Via: windowslatest