Microsoft Looks to Overhaul Windows Update
Your Windows Update is getting updated.
An update will be coming soon for, appropriately enough, Windows Update and Microsoft Update. The update will appear in late August, and it will take a couple of months to complete the rollout.
Microsoft wrote in the TechNet blog, "This update will not change your current Windows Update or Automatic Updates settings. It will improve the user interface for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 computers running Windows Update, adding a more visible and detailed description of updates as well as improvements in how users are notified about service packs. This update will not change the look and feel of Automatic Updates."
The update is mandatory for those who wish to stay up to date with the latest patches and fixes. Grabbing the update is easy as it will come as a part of Windows Update. Keep an eye out for it starting next month. Read more about it here.

this isn't for win XP
WTF?
Doesn't sound like it will change XP at all, I would welcome a more detailed explanation of patches on the machine though
Ya, I'm a little confused here. So what exactly is being changed about this?
So manual updates will give more information, however if you choose Automatic Updates it just runs in the background like it normally would!
I can hardly imagine an update being harder than on the xp's update.microsoft.com site.
More then likely MS thought of blogging the page with more flash stuff that require (aka force) you to install silverlight, and slow down page loading.
I'm really having a bad aftertaste ever since Windows Vista came out, and silverlight, and the memory hog Internet explorer 6, and wonder if MS has their priorities right, or if they want to aim 'all for the user experience' by coloring the screen full of moving pictures and visual arts that at all not benefit the update experience, and instead decrease many people's user experience by having them to wait longer for page refreshing?
I mean I know it makes sense,and I don't know how far MS has corrected themselves of their past mistakes, but every time I read something in the likes of "MS did an improvement" article, I can't help but having these thoughts pop in my mind.
Especially now that Win7 is almost a Vista clone, makes me wonder if I'm still on the same track as MS...
Exactly my thoughts too!
The flip side is that there's a lot more to updates these days.
On WinNT you could go to the windows update website,and just download another service pack and install it like a program.
But these days, MS secures it's updates by a genuine or certified script, they back up old data for recovery or rollback purposes, they check every dll file on it's fileversion (as to in the old days one could actually revert a specific updated DLL to a previous one).
there's also a log generated when files did not succeed in installing,etc...
I know there's more to installations today, than before. Yet not all of this is necessary. Visual effects are the furthest from being necessary I believe.