When Windows 10 was first introduced in 2015, the roll-out was not smooth sailing, but instead became a center of controversy for an operating system released by Redmond. It was accused of being an information collection tool for Microsoft, forced obsolescence of older version of Windows since DirectX 12 API is a Windows 10 exclusive and the controversial 1809 upgrade deleted random user files stored in their Documents folder. There is also recurring controversy of Windows Update forcing a restart of the user’s machine regardless if the PC is idle or currently being used.
Microsoft is trying to fix the most broken feature of Windows 10, Windows Update causing the computer to crash or become corrupted. A failed update may touch the boot files, which may render the computer unbootable. The usual fix for such issue is to repair install Windows by booting to the Windows USB/DVD media and execute the setup program again in order to overwrite corrupted startup files. But all of those are in the past, as Microsoft released an official blog statement saying that Windows will choose to automatically delete the most recently installed updates if it detects that it failed the startup process. This is in hopes that by removing the update, the necessary files that are prerequisite for the boot process is restored.
This is not the first time Microsoft changed the behavior of Windows in order to keep the operating system working as expected. Way back 2001 when Windows XP was released, a driver-update rollback feature was added to the System Setting’s Device Manager. The purpose of which is to give a user an option to rollback to the previously installed driver if the most recently installed driver cause problems with the device. Prior to that Driver-Rollback feature, in 2000 Windows Millennium Edition introduced System Restore which creates system snapshots for later restoration in case the OS is no longer working as expected.
The Windows 10 automatic removal of most recent updates when system fails to boot will be accompanied with complete blockage of the particular updates that caused the boot failure. The delay of the update for the particular package is 30-days, this assumes the next Patch Tuesday will address the cause of the earlier failure.
“We removed some recently installed updates to recover your device from a startup failure. If Windows detects this, it will try to resolve the failure by uninstalling recently installed updates. This is only done when all other automatic recovery attempts have been unsuccessful. To ensure that your device can start up and continue running as expected, Windows will also prevent problematic updates from installing automatically for the next 30 days. This will give Microsoft and our partners the opportunity to investigate the failure and fix any issues. After 30 days, Windows will again try to install the updates,” explained Microsoft in the blog.
The announcement is exclusive for Windows 10 computers only, a misbehaved update for Windows 7 and 8.x will remain misbehaved. Windows 7 and 8.x are under extended support notice, hence they will not receive any feature upgrade from Microsoft. Windows 7 support lifecycle is also ending less than a year, hence Microsoft is strongly encouraging Windows 7 users to upgrade to a supported version of Windows before January 14, 2020.