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Ask HN: Why are Windows security updates larger than the ENTIRETY of Windows?
3 points by alister on June 8, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
A vanilla install of Windows XP uses 1.2GB of disk space.

But 83 critical security patches need to be downloaded and installed right away. These add 5.3GB to the system. That's 4 times as big as all of Windows XP!

(This is all according to a recent RISKS article.)

I'm reminded of the story of how a statically-linked "Hello, World" program was over a megabyte. It turned out that all the Unicode characters were thrown into libc.

I'm thinking that there has got to be a similarly interesting reason as to how security patches can be massively bigger than the OS itself.




There's probably multiple updates affecting the same code, with the effect that bits are downloaded which get replaced without ever being used.


So you're saying that (eg.) security patches 1 to 83 download eighty-three slightly different versions of file X, only the last of which is used. Presumably versions 1 to 82 shouldn't be saved -- and I don't see evidence in XP that they are for security updates.

The original article -- here, by the way, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.47.html#subj8 says that the final result is 6.5GB of hard drive space for a patched XP install.


I believe that Windows keeps patch downloads stored somewhere even after they have been extracted and installed.




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