Microsoft is increasingly firing '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 installed?
Every Windows 10 users know the horror of the forced updates. Meanwhile, multi-monthly patches appear. 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 now been taken into use for 'quality improvements'. Another update round. Furthermore, we now see that .NET has also received its own update round, usually the Tuesday before patch Tuesday. All of them require a reboot of your system. And then there are the strange in-between patches, often not even documented.
Recently, that went badly wrong with KB4524244. Microsoft has still not 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 range of systems no longer booted. Sometimes it still worked in safe mode, but most of the time it was crying out and starting over. Also with other loosely fired patches outside the monthly 'official' update round(s) it is good to be very careful. Especially if Microsoft doesn't document them.
All too often it concerns a panic solution for a problem that only occurs in very exotic cases. That's right: on the handful of affected systems, the bug is then solved, but all others get bugs. In short: how do you remove an accidentally installed 'out of band' update that appears to cause more problems than it solves?
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 gets a bit illogical: to remove an update click on the link Installation of updates Undo. You will see that list of updates again, but this time in a different environment. Select the troublesome update to be removed, then click remove. Wait a while (for major updates, wait a little longer...) until the update is removed.
To play it safe it is wise - even if not prompted - to restart your system after uninstalling the update. And as far as the illogical part of the whole thing is concerned: after removing the update, the update has disappeared from this window. However, if you look in the standard overview of the installed updates, it is still listed as installed. So no notification appears in that list that an update has been removed. Illogical, because first of all there is a difference between the two lists with update history, in addition it becomes very cluttered for the end user.
Anyway: such illogic is not strange to Windows 10, but keep it in mind. The only valid list with actually installed updates can be found under the link Uninstall updates...
