Microsoft bringing a useful Windows Update feature to Windows 11, but restricts it artificially

Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system has its fair share of annoyances. From mediocre apps, Telemetry and ads to other design decisions that seem to serve Microsoft more than the users of the operating system.

Windows Update and the requirement to restart the PC to install updates is certainly on the list of some users. Especially the operating system’s habit of restarting the PC when it perceives it as idle needs to be mentioned. You find plenty of horror stories online about users losing work because of automatic restarts of their PCs.

Hotpatching

Microsoft created a solution for that some time ago. Hotpatching was introduced in 2022 for Windows Server. This allows updates to be installed without a reboot of the system. Unfortunately, this feature has been limited to Windows Server products up until now.

Good news is that Microsoft has finally ported the Hotpatch functionality to Windows clients, more specifically, Windows 11, version 24H2. Bad news is that this is limited to Enterprise clients at the time of writing.

Microsoft employee David Callaghan revealed the news on the company’s Windows IT Pro Blog. Hotpatching, according to Microsoft, offers several benefits over the traditional method of installing security updates.

• Updates are applied immediately and not after the next reboot.
• Security is always up to date.
• Disruptions for users are minimized, as systems do not need to be rebooted anymore to install updates.

Note that some updates, feature updates or firmware updates for example, still require reboots. This is also true for what Microsoft calls cumulative baseline updates. These are released in January, April, July, and October of each year. They continue to require restarts.

The updates inbetween are hotpatch updates, which means that they do not require restarts.

In other words, four updates per year continue to require restarts, while the other eight cumulative updates of the year do not.

The big downside to the improvement is that home users and many small and medium-sized businesses do not gain access to the functionality. It is reserved for Enterprise customers (Windows 11 Enterprise E3, E5, or F3, Windows 11 Education A3 or A5, or a Windows 365 Enterprise subscription).

Another restriction is that the ARM version is still in public preview. It requires additional prerequisites, specifically a Registry Key needs to be set as outlined by Microsoft.

Closing Words

Windows is not the only operating system that requires reboots when updates get installed. It is still a major nuisance, especially if the system reboots automatically suddenly, which may lead to lost work.