The Third Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Shows Up Late Friday

Microsoft simply calls it the Cumulative Update for Windows 10: August 14, 2015, but the bulk update released on Friday is the 3^rd such update in two weeks. Welcome to the frantic pace of Windows 10 updates.

As we’ve reported, the first two introduced issues of their own. They wouldn’t install for some, causing the update to attempt to reinstall over and over again without ever completing successfully. There’s hope that this one will finally fix that issue, but we’ll never know. Microsoft has a habit these days of providing very little information about what’s contained inside its OS updates. The KB article for the Friday deliver only says that…

This update includes improvements to enhance the functionality of Windows 10.

But, also contained in the KB article is a list of all the files that will be updated after installation. The list is enormous. I scrolled the page for a while to get a look before I gave up, and the page still looked like it could take at least another 50 pagedowns before getting close to the bottom. I updated my own devices and found no problems installing or using Windows 10 after the required reboot.

If you have nothing better to do over the weekend, you can try scrolling through the list yourself here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3081438

These silence about what’s included in these updates have created a new community of “feature watchers” – people who go on a scavenger hunt for new capabilities after an update. Microsoft likes to mix new features into these updates without announcing them. CU2 brought the Windows Spotlight feature. Announced at BUILD 2015, in its current form Spotlight is a lockscreen component that rotates images and asks for feedback on them. Who knows what they’ll surface this time?