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In a post from the Building Windows 8 Team Blog earlier today that addresses minimizing restarts after automatic updates from Windows Update I saw a small stat that I find absolutely encouraging.

Look at this:

windows7updateselectionpercentages

Nearly 90% of Windows 7 users allow automatic updates delivered thru Windows Update to be installed on their system without any intervention by the user themselves.  That is absolutely tremendous and a big reason why Windows 7 continues to be the most secure Windows operating system ever.

According to Farzana Rahman, who authored the post, Windows Update has come a long way:

Windows Update (or WU, as we like to say within the team) currently updates over 350 million PCs running Windows 7 and over 800 million PCs across all the supported Windows platforms. There are actually many more PCs updated by WU indirectly if you account for our Windows Software Update Server, and for those machines (or customers) that do all updates manually for any number of reasons.

Since its genesis over a decade ago, the Windows Update experience has evolved quite a bit to adapt to a changing ecosystem, especially the changing requirements around security. And Windows Update has been quite successful in updating PCs in time to stay ahead of large-scale exploits against Windows.

The post goes on to describe the manner in which Windows 8 users will be notified about update availability and installation when the new OS comes out which is expected to be sometime next year.