Microsoft begins to impose a 'expiry date' for Windows updates

For now, Windows 11 and Windows 10 users will receive monthly updates, which come with general bug fixes and security enhancements. This is an important part of the so-called 'Windows as a Service' service model that Microsoft has implemented fairly consistently over the years.

These periodic Windows updates are mainly of two types: 'feature updates' and 'quality updates'. Each of them offers different bug fixes or feature additions. Users will not be able to ignore (refuse to install) quality updates. For example, Patch Tuesday is a quality update, and it will be installed automatically on the system, unless you actively intervene and manually pause the update using Windows Update or Windows Update for Business.

For both Windows 10 and Windows 11, security updates 'B' are usually released with Patch Tuesday, while optional quality updates are released in the third or fourth week of the month. These updates will come with important bug fixes, and they are only distributed for a specific period of time.

If you pause or skip updates as they are delivered to your system, this can lead to a backlog of updates and increase the size of the update package. To make Windows Update work better, Microsoft is now starting to implement a plan to remove old, outdated quality updates from Windows Update servers. These deleted updates will be labeled as 'expired updates', as shown in the screenshot below.

Microsoft begins to impose a 'expiry date' for Windows updates Picture 1

In other words, old and redundant update packages will now automatically expire. According to Microsoft, this can help improve the performance of Windows Updates and reduce the update cache size. These old updates are replaced by newer ones, and as a result Windows Updates scan time is also shortened.

What do you think about this new update management policy of Microsoft? 

Jessica Tanner

Update 23 October 2021