But from then it'll be able to fetch and install a single rollup to make it fully patched. As such, a fresh Windows installation might need a couple of individual patches to get the Windows Update components updated. Once the integration is complete, installing the latest Monthly Rollup should be all that's needed to bring a Windows 7 or 8.1 system up-to-date, with a couple of exceptions: Adobe Flash has separate patches, and so does the Windows servicing stack itself.
Over the next year, Microsoft says that it will extend them to go back in time, slowly integrated all the patches released since the last "baseline." Although not specified, this presumably means Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8.1 RTM.
Initially, these Monthly Rollups will only contain new patches released from October 2016 onward. Subsequent months will have new Monthly Rollups, and these will be cumulative, incorporating the content of all previous Monthly Rollups.
Patch Tuesday will be delivered through Windows Update (WU), Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). This will be a single package delivering all of the security and reliability improvements released that month. October 2016's Patch Tuesday will see the release of the first Monthly Rollup for Windows 7 and 8.1. Today's announcement indicates that Microsoft is going to go further down this path. This rollup would cover several hundred individual updates, greatly reducing the time taken to get a Windows 7 system up-to-date. That's when Microsoft announced that a patch rollup containing all the patches released after Service Pack 1 was to be released. The situation for Windows 7 improved a little back in May. Windows 10 just grabs the latest cumulative update and, with that one package, is more or less up-to-date. If a system isn't updated for a few months or has had its operating system freshly reinstalled, the scenario of having hundreds of individual fixes never occurs. A single cumulative update incorporates not just all of the newest security and reliability fixes, but all the older fixes from previous months, too. Windows 10, on the other hand, has perhaps one or two updates released each month. In the case of a clean installation, that number can reach the hundreds. Microsoft's two older operating systems usually need to fetch a handful of individual patches each month. If a system hasn't been patched for a few months, this can require dozens of individual fixes to be retrieved. One of the major differences between Windows 7 and 8.1 on the one hand and Windows 10 on the other is what happens when you run Windows Update. The company is moving away from the individual hotfix approach it has used thus far for those operating systems. Microsoft is switching Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to a cumulative update model similar to the one used by Windows 10.