Don’t you just hate it when that happens. You accidentally hit publish, then delete, then realize nothing is ever really deleted online. And you watch as people post and write about the mistake, just to make it all worse. Well that’s what just happened with Microsoft’s seemingly bizarre revelation of a new and much improved Windows update—but only for the less than 30% of you that have shifted to Windows 11.
As Windows Latest explains,“a Windows PC needs to reboot after installing an update… but Microsoft has been trying to change that with ‘hotpatching’. Recently, Microsoft published a support document related to the feature and then removed it.”
This revelation comes courtesy of a post on X, with Phantomofearth spotting the mistake before it was erased. Fortunately, the web archive shows a draft document with the somewhat telltale headline “Hotpatch for Windows (Ge) – 2024.08 B.” The rest of the document is just a boilerplate on how to create a support doc, bizarrely.
The manner of all this is surprising, but we already knew hotpatching was on the way, removing the need for constant reboots after every update and ensuring that security fixes are faster and more seamless. Hotpatching, Microsoft says, “works by patching the in-memory code of running processes without the need to restart the process.”
In the current era of regular zero-days, this is a major improvement. Forbes’ contributor Davey Winder reported on the flurry of Windows Patch Tuesday patches just this month, with “fixes for a total of 90 vulnerabilities across… Of these, the Microsoft Security Response Center warns that five Windows vulnerabilities have confirmed and active cyber attacks against them already.”
Reboots are one of the (many) Windows bugbears. As PCWorld puts it, “it’s been the routine for decades now, basically for as long as Windows updates have been around. We hate it because it interrupts our workflows and forces us to start over, often at the most inconvenient times.” Hopefully that could all be about to change. Albeit not for the 70% of Windows users yet to move across to Windows 11, of course.
This won’t remove rebooting entirely, it seems certain that regular reboots will still be required and that hotpatching will be just interim or point fixing. The best info we seem to have so far is that a reboot will be required for every third update, with two hotpatches in between. It does present a neat option for urgent fixes, though.
Windows Central reported in February that “Microsoft intends to use hot patching on Windows 11 to deliver monthly security updates without requiring the user to restart. However, this doesn’t mean you won’t be required to restart for a pending update ever again. Hot patching relies on a baseline update that requires a reboot every few months. This means in an ideal world, only four monthly security updates will require a reboot a year, those being in January, April, July, and October.”
“Ge” in the deleted doc refers to Germanium, itself the code for Windows 11 24H2 “We may see a republishing of the support document in the future,” Windows Latest says, which it notes has already featured in Inside rebuilds, and which “the Redmond giant appears to be implementing with the upcoming 24H2 version update.”
It’s been a tricky few months for Windows, and the latest Recall headlines won’t help, as that particular privacy nightmare comes back to life. Against that backdrop, this is some much needed good news for Windows users—at least for 30% of them, that is.
This matters because Microsoft is still battling to push the other 70% of Windows users who can’t (given hardware limitations) or won’t (preferring Windows 10) to upgrade. With little more than a year to run before Windows 10 is end of life, the flurry of recent threats should terrify anyone without ongoing security support.
