Why did MS stop doing service packs?
I mean they still have them but they seem to be really rare(and serve more as feature packs). I remember back in the NT days a service pack was typically just a rolled up collection of fixes in one big file. I think you could even extract the big file into the individual fixes if you wanted(never tried that myself).
I know that a few years ago(?) MS changed their updating scheme to provide more roll up style patches where everything is included in one patch at least for that given patch cycle in theory.
Since Win7 went EOL recently, in the past week I have been going around my home windows systems and VMs that run windows 7 (which is 7 I believe, the only other windows OS I have is XP on a dual boot laptop for games that I haven't touched in 18 months). Most of these systems get very minimal use, and probably spend 90% of their time turned off, so they don't get patches often. Probably 2-3 hadn't seen a patch in over 2 years. I patched them all, but on at least one occasion I was quite surprised that the OS at one point felt it was up to date when I knew absolutely it was not. It said no updates to apply even after forcing it to check again. Only after I manually deployed that servicing stack update (from march 2019 I think), did the system then realize that hey there were more patches after all. There are other patches that fail to install if the servicing stack update is not applied(why the servicing stack update isn't applied automatically in advance, or included with the patches in question I don't know since they don't install without it). At the end of the day it didn't matter to me if these got their patches as the risk is so low (haven't had a known security incident on my home systems since maybe 1993). The "OCD" in me just wanted to get them their last patches.
I just feel it would of been nice for MS to release a service pack that one could download as one big EXE, that had EVERYTHING (for that OS). Something that could take a windows 7 system from any patch level to the most current. Maybe the patch would be 5GB in size I don't know. But it would be simple, wouldn't have to wait hours and hours sometimes for windows update to look for updates, or track down forum posts to try to figure out why a weird update error is occurring, or in some cases like above why the system says there are no updates when you know there are. Same of course goes for XP and all of their other OSs. Would be nice if there was just a service pack released every 6 months that had everything, then at the end of the life cycle release one more. Make the service pack easily searchable and downloadable from Microsoft's site.
Another thing this big service pack would eliminate is the need to install patches, then reboot, then look for new patches, install and reboot. I wish windows update would just download everything it needs in one go even if it requires multiple reboots to install. I did in fact see more than one windows 7 reboot twice during a patch upgrade so they have the ability to even do that, install everything at one go and just reboot as many times as it needs to get it all in one cycle.
In my recent patching I found it odd how windows update would say it wants to install for example April 2019 rollup security patch and then the next rollup it wants to install is Jan 2020. I saw that (month may of been off) on multiple occasions. Did it actually get all of the patches? It claims to have them all but I really don't know how to tell for sure.
Linux has been my desktop/server of choice for almost everything since 1997, so windows is of course not my primary OS but I do still use it daily(in VMs).
Not sure when I'll consider again moving to windows 10, I have no win10 systems today but have poked around with it a bit in the past. I'd be more open to win10 if I got a build that would just stay stable for 5 years(they have the long term support builds but as far as I know those aren't available for consumers).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
