My colleagues over in enterprise product support often get corporate customers who report that “Your latest update broke our system.” After studying the problem (which is usually quite laborious because they have to go back and forth with the customer to capture logs and dumps and traces), they eventually conclude that, actually, the system was broken even before the upgrade! Their prediction is that if the customer takes an affected system and rolls back the update, it will still be broken. And if they take a system that hasn’t yet taken the update, and reboot it, it will also be broken in the same way.
And the prediction is true.
What is going on is that three weeks ago, the company’s IT department updated some software or installed a new driver or deployed some new group policy that they saw in a TikTok video or something, and the new policy does some really sketchy things like changing security on registry keys or reconfiguring services or changing some undocumented configuration settings. The software updates or the new driver or the new group policy renders the machine unbootable, but they don’t notice it because they don’t reboot until Patch Tuesday.
And then Patch Tuesday comes around, the update installs, and the system reboots, and now the new software or the new driver or the sketchy configuration settings kick in to make their lives miserable.
It wasn’t the update that broke their system. It was the fact that the system rebooted.
Clearly this post was shared to other sites, and a few readers of those sites have then come here to vent. I found good value in the story and, as an ISV who has to work hard to parse what a customer says vs what is actually happening, I can very much relate to the story as relayed. It's not 100% of the time of course, not even 50%, but it's often enough that the Sherlock Holmes quote "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth", applies, and that's pretty much what...
> Clearly this post was shared to other sites...
No, it was picked by other sites who follow Raymond's blog just like most of us here do (and I personally do it since Windows Vista days). The Register and even Tom's Hardware often regurgitate Raymond's articles.
> ... and a few readers of those sites have then come here to vent.
I think you misread the room, most of the people commenting here are regulars.
> I can very much relate to the story as relayed.
And so can I as a former system administrator and IT support person, but that's not the point.
> I...
Windows should keep the information about planned reboot which requires to complete a component update, for example, after installation of new driver. Windows Update could check this and suggest user to manually restart OS after downloading the system update but before start of applying it. After that, the possible mess with different updates will be resolved.
Most of the time the change is not something Windows realizes could cause problems at next reboot. It’s some random setting that got deployed by a group policy script, and that setting (often a registry key) happens to have some indirect influence on something that runs at boot.
@Raymond Chen
I know there are such cases, but you really picked a bad time to argue how "It wasn’t the update that broke their system" after several KBs starting with November 2025 until the end of February 2026 were a patch upon a patch of what previous update has broken including NVIDIA drivers. At least it seems Pavan Davuluri is keeping his word -- he promised he will make Windows 11 more stable, there's no better way to do that than by making updates impossible to install like the March 26th KB5079391.
Disclaimer: I am aware that your posts are pushed...
So how would you phrase it so it doesn’t sound like excuse-making? “Gosh, you won’t believe what some people do! They cause a problem and blame the update!”? No wait, that sounds like it’s making excuses for bad updates. How would you phrase this so it’s not making excuses but rather pointing out “Sometimes people shoot themselves in the foot and don’t realize it”?
@Raymond Chen (replying to later comment): Well you can get defensive about it despite pretending you are looking for feedback and say that no change of wording would help because there are always Microsoft haters, but that's ignoring all others who are on the fence.
Oh and you can also totally ignore the part where I suggested that a single introductory paragraph with an up-front admission about ongoing poor Windows Update experience would totally change the tone of the article, but the damage is already done -- www[dot]theregister[dot]com/2026/04/02/chen_windows_updates/ (link neutered to hopefully avoid moderation queue)
To quote The Register writer's introductory paragraph...
(replying to later comment): “Alternative and less inflammatory title could be ‘The update didn’t break the system, the reboot did’.”
I don’t think that helps any. The people who misinterpreted the original title would also misinterpret this one as “Microsoft shifts blame for bad updates to users rebooting their systems.”
> “‘How to tell between update-induced and reboot-triggered failures’ if you wanted to be more precise.
Except that the article doesn’t teach you how to tell the difference between them, so it’s not a “How to”.
@Raymon Chen
Your current title focuses on placing blame instead of on determining causation.
Alternative and less inflamatory title could be "The update didn't break the system, the reboot did" or "How to tell between update-induced and reboot-triggered failures" if you wanted to be more precise.
The excuse-making vibe in your article comes from the fact that, to a user, the distinction is academic. If a machine doesn't boot after an update, the update is the catalyst, even if it wasn't the root cause. Acknowledging current poor state of Windows servicing at the start of the article with a single paragraph before proceeding...
Wrong! My two older PC’ all update from Win 10 had no problems. My newest PC (2 months) with much less software and a relatively clean installation failed. It had restarted after the last major Winn11 update to 25H2 and had no intervening installations eexceo for security updates all of which were fine. The problem is not what Mr. Chen suggests, and the recent patch makes everything work fine. Find the real problem to avoid in the future.