14 DAY TRIAL // It’s that moment of the month again when Windows 10 users must prepare for a fresh patching cycle, this time with some important security updates in queue.
The February 2018 Patch Tuesday rollout begins on Tuesday, and Windows 10 users will receive the typical monthly cumulative updates bringing both security fixes and performance improvements.
This month, however, Microsoft will also ship patches for the Spectre Variant 2 vulnerability, as Intel has recently published revised updates for Skylake chips. Microsoft will include the fixes into its own Windows updates, and the rest of the industry will make them available with firmware updates as well.
Also, this new monthly update rollout comes after a huge fiasco that happened in January, and there are lots of users out there waiting for new cumulative updates to fix issues caused by the previous patches.
The Meltdown and Spectre fiasco
In January 2018, Patch Tuesday brought virtually no new cumulative updates for Windows 10 because Microsoft shipped them a few days earlier in order to address Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The updates aimed at specific AMD systems, however, got pulled shortly after that, as Microsoft discovered a series of issues with these patches and causing computers to be pushed into an unbootable state.
Even though the problems have since been fixed, there still are users struggling to install the updates or whose computers are still suffering from various bugs, so the February 2018 release is supposed to finally repair all these problems for everyone.
Installing cumulative updates on Windows 10 machines has become a challenge lately, as many of these patches caused various issues, starting with installation failures and ending with BSODs.
It remains to be seen how this month’s rollout goes, but February 2018 is likely to be a busy day for Windows 10 users. We’ll keep an eye on the shipped patches and let you know when they become available and what’s new in each of them.