Microsoft has eclipsed the smaller size of Windows 10 1909, the fall feature upgrade that broke the shape the company used twice a year in 2017 and 2018. But how a lot of is it smaller?
According to members of the insider team, the one Online discussion Thursday, a amount smaller.
The so-called “enablement package”, the download that transforms into November 1909 when Windows 10 1903 is installed – the full functionality upgrade released on May 21 – weighs just 180 KB kilobyte.
(In context, 180 KB is about 0.18 MB or less than 20% of a megabyte. More typically, it’s about ten times the size of a two-page Microsoft Word document. Downloading a 180 KB file seems slow at all but the slowest broadband connection immediately; a torpid 1 Mbit / s connection would download this file in about a second, for example.)
“The 180 KB package is exactly what turns the light switch on,” said one of the team members who gathered around a conference table.
Indeed.
How Computer world Has Unlike previous feature upgrades, Windows 10 1909 is almost non-functional. Instead, it’s a Windows 10 analogue of the old school service packs of the past, a collection of fixes made to a current but outdated operating system since its debut (or the release of an earlier service pack).
In the case of 1909, it was months and not years of corrections since Microsoft took May 1903, collected everything that changed from that point on, and then added a handful of new features. Voilà … Windows 10 1909.
The two – 1903 and its successor 1909 – are identical, according to Microsoft, with the exception of the few new functions that are integrated in the latter. “Windows 10, versions 1903 and 1909 have a common core operating system and identical system files,” said Microsoft. The cumulative update for 1903 that was released on November 12 was actually identical to the Windows 10 1909 that shipped on the same day.
(Microsoft completed Windows 10 1909 at least a month before its release. The October 8 cumulative update for Windows 10 1903 also included the dormant features of 1909 and could have been converted to 1909 if the tiny 180K activation package was available at the time Note: It was not.)
1909 is a pilot?
Along with the discovery that the transformative activation package was a measly download, the insider team also commented on one of the most important, unanswered questions about 1909. Is this concept published on the Internet without an upgrade with a feature-rich update? Spring and a revision released in autumn, how will Microsoft proceed?
“Will we see this cycle every year?” marked a question marked on a slide FAQ That was shown during Thursday’s webinar. “Main feature update in H1, minor update in H2, a cumulative update for both?”
The response was more revealing than a response from a Microsoft spokeswoman, who declined to comment earlier this week. “The provision of the 19H2 feature update via a cumulative update and an activation package is a pilot program,” says the frequently asked questions. “There is no formal plan to deliver future releases the same way.”
It was the first time that Microsoft called the major-minor cadence shown in 1903 and 1909 a “pilot program”. However, the latest wording still denies that a decision has been made that there is actually a possibility that the Windows 10 service model will return to the rate of two equally complete upgrades per year.
( First, argued that returning to the major-major model would eliminate the corporate and two benefits, and would reject the time and money spent developing an at least complicated solution for the outsiders to the Windows 10 1809 debacle. )
“We are monitoring the feedback closely and hope to learn from this type of publication to influence our future plans,” Microsoft concluded in the FAQ.
“Much of it was seen … to see if we could make it,” said another team member about the 1909 un-upgrade and whether it was a one-off. “Are we doing this again? There is no formal plan that says there will be a 20H2 like a 19H2 was made. We wanted to try and see how it turned out. Obviously there were a lot of things that we learned along the way: the downstream effects, the domino effects, how it all fits together, but if we continue to work through insider preview builds, we’ll see what happens. ”
