Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Update Rollups

At times, Microsoft has released a significant number of updates between service packs. It is cumbersome to install a large number of updates separately, so Microsoft releases an update rollup to reduce the labor involved in applying updates. An update rollup is a cumulative set of hotfixes, security updates, critical updates, and other updates all packaged together for easy deployment. An update rollup generally targets a specific area of a product, such as security, or a feature of a product, such as IIS. Update rollups are always released with a Knowledge Base article that describes the rollup in detail.

Update rollups receive more testing from Microsoft than individual security updates but less testing than service packs. In addition, because update rollups consist of updates that have been released previously and are being run by many other Microsoft customers, it is more likely that any incompatibilities associated with the update rollup have already been discovered. Therefore, the risk associated with deploying update rollups is typically lower overall than the risk of deploying security updates, despite the fact that rollups affect more code. However, you still need to test update rollups with critical applications before deploying them.