Microsoft’s future updates could be 35 percent smaller than the usual

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Following the release of Microsoft’s Creators Update later this spring, the sizes of the operating system’s updates will be significantly smaller. Microsoft’s Unified Update Platform is set to shrink sizes of future updates to save you the trouble of downloading an entire build of your system every time. The feature they’re using is called differential download packages, which basically means it just “downloads what you need.” It’ll look at what files are on your system and use these to rebuild the new OS version from there.

It seems simple but it needed a lot of work in the background given the decades of legacy code and patches. Of course, the major release like Creators Update will need the download of the full build. But after that, the next smaller updates will be about 35 percent smaller, according to Microsoft’s Director of Program Management Bill Karagounis.

Source: Engadget