How to Enable Security Updates on Windows 7 Without Compatible Antivirus

The March 2018 monthly rollup for Windows 7 (KB4088875) introduces a new behavior that was borrowed from Windows 10 and which brings new antivirus checks in the operating system.

With these checks, Microsoft tries to make sure that Windows 7 machines are running compatible antivirus solutions, as the company says that compatibility issues between security software and the latest updates could substantially impact system performance and stability.

This is exactly what happened on Windows 10 back in January when Microsoft released Meltdown and Spectre mitigations, so in order to prevent these issues from occurring on Windows systems, the company turned to antivirus checks.

In other words, Windows needs to check if your system is running whitelisted antivirus software, and depending on the result of this verification, it decides whether security updates are pushed to the computer or not.

If your security product is compatible, you’re perfectly fine, otherwise you ca...