Servicing and patching
When we talk about changes to the way to service (or patch) Windows, it’s important to first understand how things worked with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Each month, Microsoft released somewhere between 1 and 20 individual fixes for each one: some security updates, and some non-security updates. Most of these patches were General Distribution Release (GDR), meaning available on Windows Update (WU), WSUS, and Windows Update Catalog. Some patches were released under Limited Distribution Release (LDR) (also formerly known as Quick Fix Engineering (QFE)). LDR packages contain other fixes that have not undergone such extensive testing and resolve issues that only a fraction of the millions of Windows users might ever encounter. These LDR patches need to be downloaded on separate KB pages or sometimes requested from Microsoft services.
Most organizations deploy security fixes right away. But the non-security fixes sometimes aren’t deployed at all,...
