I noticed this Tuesday morning that the limited Windows Update site has been retired and the more complete Microsoft Update site has taken its place. Furthermore, the automatic updates mechanism for Windows will automatically start showing at least some of the items from Microsoft Update regardless of whether or not you've actually visited the site. Thus, Office updates and other product updates will soon be coming to your computer and help further secure your system.

View: Windows Update => Microsoft Update
News source: In-House

I guess its the first step in their plans to make Microsoft Update more global. To my understanding, they'll have 'certified' third parties be able to do updates through Microsoft Update.

If they expand that to WSUS, it will be a true solution.

Finally! I was a beta tester for Microsoft Update, and I expected it to replace Windows Update back then. I was totally baffled when I saw them leave both services running.

Well I wasn't baffled by it, thought it was weird. Just thought they were "phasing" WU out.

I didn't see any reason to phase it out since Microsoft Update was a complete replacement. Get updates for Windows, plus other Microsoft software.

I didn't notice that when I updated the root certificates.

Anyway,
Been going to post this as a seperate thread for some time, but it is somewhat on topic here so,

Does the Microsoft Update site take up to 10 minutes of scanning stuff before it actually shows updates for anyone else?

I darn near dread checking for updates anymore, especially when they come up with these simple little root certificate type updates , which are out of typical sequence, as far as second Tuesday of the month.

Those are isolated issues. I have experienced the same thing on a few PCs, but some other PCs I've worked on the scan takes about a minute or less. I suspect it's to do with something that gets installed on these systems or a setting somewhere.

I checked on this today from an old XP machine and found that Windows Update is still active.

Hmm, that's odd Chug because I observed this behavior on both my home XP (SP2) system and my work XP (SP2) system. Both also had all of the previous Windows Updates to date though, so maybe some previous update changed the default.

To test that theory, I just tried it from a clean XP (SP2) system under VMware and it did indeed load the old Windows Update site, so looks like that's the case after all. Interesting.

FWIW,
I still get the Windows update site on all 5 of my Windows boxes. Have to manually go to Microsoft update site everytime. Man, that site sucks too!!