Microsoft to Offer Fewer Details About Windows 10 Updates

Congratulations! Your copy of Windows 10 has been updated with a new patch, which improves it in some great capacity. You'll have to trust Microsoft on that one, because Redmond will reportedly provide little detail about minor operating system updates going forward.

The Register recently asked Microsoft to describe in greater detail what some of its Windows 10 updates were actually doing, given that Microsoft wasn't very descriptive. For example, a recent cumulative update for Windows 10 dated August 11 simply indicated that the patch added "improvements to enhance the functionality of Windows 10" (in addition to fixing a few specific bugs). A new update for Aug. 14 said the same thing without the note regarding bug fixes.

So what, then, is being fixed? We still don't exactly know. Microsoft told The Register that "As we have done in the past, we post KB articles relevant to most updates which we'll deliver with Windows as a service. Depending on the significance of the update and if it is bringing new functionality to Windows customers, we may choose to do additional promotion of new features as we deploy them," Microsoft said.

Does this matter to most people? Probably not. Security updates are security updates; it's not like you're going to ignore them simply because you don't have lots of information about what they're doing (especially since most Windows 10 versions won't let you ignore them, anyway). That doesn't mean that Microsoft's new treatment is ideal, however.

"Suspicion of Microsoft is justified because Windows 10 is a data-slurper par excellence," The Register said, before arguing that "If Microsoft had nothing to hide, surely it would let us know what it's up to with each update?"

As PCMag sister site ExtremeTech.com noted, meanwhile, "there's no way for users to tell which Windows patch caused a problem."

"Microsoft may offer the ability to uninstall patches, but without some coherent method of determining which patches need to be uninstalled, there's no way of telling what's causing a problem," ET said.