wsus monthly rollups

[jjohnsoncantell]

Hi everyone.

 

Im a couple of the main quality rollups behind and want to know if its safe to skip the last few and only install the most recent one and still be covered. Normally I approve just the security monthly quality rollups as opposed to the security only updates.

 

The way I understand it is I don't need to do this on a monthly basis and that each Security monthly quality rollup contains the most recent updates plus previous updates and fixes. There must however be a limit to how long that will work for? The reasoning behind this is our wireless struggles to cope when a class of students try use laptops while pulling through large updates (such as the rollups) which only seem to be getting bigger and bigger. I'm trying to mitigate this by only patching whats absolutely necessary, with the exception of anything major cropping up (spectre/meltdown).

 

Can you please tell me if i've got this right or if you have suggestions on how I could change things to reduce the load.

 

THanks

JAmes

[Michael]

In the context of Windows 10, yes you can skip a monthly update as they're all cumulative.

 

In the context of Windows 7 however it's not as clear and I believe you do need each one. It's a rollup of that overall month, instead of 10 individual updates for that month for example.

[jjohnsoncantell]

Thanks Michael. That must be the case because looking through my list of approved updates I have the March17 security monthly quality rollup still approved. This update is showing both as a superseded update and as an update that supersedes another. Normally I would decline that update however since its one of these rollup updates should I need to keep it approved? If it was working as the win 10 updates do I should be able to decline that and only approve the most recent one in the chain but if the win7 updates dont work that way I should leave it? Am I just confusing myself here?

[jjohnsoncantell]

In addition to this, I have looked at another update (kb4015193) for 2008r2 which is showing as both superseding and superceded .It lists a number of the security monthly updates since said update was released as updates its been superceded by. This would suggest to me that those monthly updates are cumulative for 2008r2/win7 and I can decline them. I want to be sure before I start doing that.

[Michael]

In the context of Windows 7, it is very confusing and Microsoft haven't done a good job of it really.

 

Windows 10 is very clear, as the latest update is generally the one you should deploy, but I don't deploy every update. Read the notes of what exactly it addresses, based on your environment.