Microsoft increasingly fires ‘panic updates’. And just as often, those Windows 10 updates lead to more problems than they solve. How do you get rid of such a buggy update once it is installed?
Every Windows 10 users knows the horror of the forced updates. Multi-monthly patches are now being released. Officially only on the second Tuesday of the month, but a third Tuesday (or fourth depending on the weather and the position of the moon) has also been taken into use for ‘quality improvements’. Another update round. We also see that .NET has also had its own update round, usually Tuesday before patch Tuesday. All of them require a restart of your system. And then there are the strange patches in between, often not even documented.
Recently that went very wrong with KB4524244. Microsoft still hasn’t officially announced what that patch should have done, at least something with the (U) EFI bios. However, the patch turned out to be so buggy that a variety of systems failed to boot. Sometimes it worked through safe mode, but usually it was crying and starting over. Also with other loose fired patches outside the monthly ‘official’ update round (s) it is good to be very careful. Especially if Microsoft does not document them.
All too often it is a panic solution to a problem that only occurs in very exotic cases. Indeed: on the handful of affected systems, the bug is then resolved, but everyone else gets bugs. In short: how do you remove an accidentally installed ‘out of band’ update that turns out to be more problematic than solving?
Get rid of it!
Launch the Settings app from the Start menu and click Update and security. Then click in the panel on the right View update history. You will then see a list of installed updates. Now it becomes a bit illogical: to remove an update, click on the link Installation of updates Undo. You will see that list of updates again, but now in a different environment. Select the update that is causing problems and then click remove. Please wait (wait a bit longer for major updates …) until the update is removed.
To play completely safe, it is wise – even if you are not asked for it – to restart your system after removing the update. And as for the illogical part of the whole: after removal, the update has disappeared from this window. However, if you look in the default overview of the installed updates, it is still listed as being installed. So there is no notification in that list that an update has been removed. This is illogical, because first of all there is a difference between the two lists with update history, and it also becomes very confusing for the end user.
Anyway: Windows 10 is no stranger to such illogics, keep it in mind. The only valid list with actually installed updates can be found under the link Uninstall updates…
