Summary: Monthly update rollups for Windows are nothing
new, but this month's release breaks some new ground. Alongside the normal
collection of bug fixes, the August 2014 Update Rollup includes a handful of
new features. Here's what you'll find.
By Ed Bott for The Ed Bott Report |
Windows 8.1 users will find a few surprises in the August 2014 update rollup, available under the Optional heading
in Windows Update along with this month's security fixes for Windows, Internet
Explorer, and the Adobe Flash code baked into Internet Explorer 11.
These
update rollups aren’t a new thing. It’s not even news that Windows Update has
switched to delivering performance and reliability updates alongside security
fixes every month on Patch Tuesday (AKA Update Tuesday).
What
is different about today’s update is the addition of new and updated features
along with the bug fixes in the monthly update rollup. Today’s release is,
perhaps, getting more attention than it deserves, thanks to persistent rumors
in recent months that Microsoft was planning to drop a major update to Windows,
comparable to the one it delivered in April.
Instead,
Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc said in a blog post last week,
this minor update is the new normal: “[R]ather than waiting for months and
bundling together a bunch of improvements into a larger update as we did for
the Windows 8.1 Update, customers can expect that we’ll use our already
existing monthly update process to deliver more frequent improvements along
with the security updates normally provided…”
And that’s exactly what’s in KB2975719. When installed
on Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, or Windows Server 2012 R2, the following new
features are installed:
·
More
information on the Windows Update tab in PC Settings, specifically the date and
time of the last update check as well as when updates were last installed.
Currently, that information is only available when checking Windows Update from
the desktop Control Panel.
·
Significant
refinements to settings for controlling the behavior of precision touchpads.
(The Precision Touchpad is a new touchpad design, co-engineered by
Microsoft and Synaptics, that was introduced last year
and is built into the Surface Pro 3.) Anyone who occasionally
uses a notebook with a mouse attached will appreciate the opportunity to
control the functioning of the built-in touchpad. Other new features include
the ability to double-tap and drag and to allow right-clicks on the touchpad
·
As
previously announced, out-of-date Java plugins are now automatically blocked in
Internet Explorer.
·
Anyone
who uses SharePoint Online with federated accounts will be grateful that they
no longer have to respond to multiple login prompts after clicking the “Keep me
signed in” check box.
·
The
Ruble is now supported for currency input and rendering.
A few API changes are of
interest mostly to developers and won’t pay off for end users until software
and drivers take advantage of these features. Specifically, device makers can
use the new Wi-Fi Direct APIs for Discoverability to build applications that
can turn a Windows device into a Miracast receiver. (In Windows 8.1 without
this update, PCs are able to send content to a Miracast receiver such as a TV.)
And video capture apps can write “Date taken” and GPS metadata to MP4 video
files.
The August update rollup
includes dozens of bug fixes, many of them for obscure issues, as well as the
monthly set of reliability and performance improvements for the OneDrive sync
client.
Today’s update isn’t mandatory, but it does require
the April 2014 Windows 8.1 Update
(KB2919355). If that update isn’t installed, today’s update isn’t
available.
Since the release
of Windows 8 in summer 2012, Microsoft has delivered significant feature
updates in big bundles spaced months apart. With Windows 8.1 dropping last
October and the Windows 8.1 Update arriving in April, it was reasonable to
wonder whether the plan was to follow a tick-tock cadence of updates every six
months, similar to Ubuntu’s schedule. Today’s release appears to answer that
question with an emphatic no, suggesting instead that new features will appear
when they’re ready, as part of a monthly update.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more
than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online
publications.
No comments:
Post a Comment