Windows Updates have done more for my PCs over the years than anything else. They’ve arrived in waves of helpful, important, and often necessary changes and OS features for decades. But sometimes they also make me want to donate my computer to the nearest hungry, hungry hydraulic press to be crushed into a billion pieces.

Although helpful, Windows Updates have caused their fair share of problems. An update can ship in a faulty state, a program might not play well with it, or a long list of other possible, entirely too probable scenarios may occur. What’s more, the horrid results range from the menial to the downright catastrophic. Usually, I can wait for Microsoft to push a fix — no harm, no foul — but manually rolling back the update is sometimes my best choice, and here's why it might be good for you too.

Windows ships a faulty update

Bricked drives, erased files, and BSODs, oh my!

A faulty Windows update is a straightforward instance of deciding whether to roll back, because, frankly, they can do the most damage, and it might even be your only option to deal with it.

Most recently, for example, was Microsoft’s now-infamous August 2025 update (version KB5063878), which left quite the aftermath in its wake. This update caused several serious issues with Phison-branded drives, including data loss, the drive disappearing from the OS completely, and, in some cases, permanent drive corruption. Phison and Windows each denied any wrongdoing (classic), but the damage was nonetheless done. Eventually, the Chinese PC enthusiast Facebook group PCDIY! investigated and found the issue stemmed from a piece of pre-release firmware within certain Phison drives. This case was particularly egregious, as there isn't much worse an update can do than brick a drive.

Even the less devastating cases can still be deeply inconvenient, though. As was the case in 2018 for the 1809 version of Windows 10, which fully deleted huge chunks of user files of all types. In cases reaching this scale, the media pounces to cover it. Tech and PC news sites, YouTube channels, and even Reddit users flooded the news cycle with discussions about the findings.

That fact alone has completely changed how I have dealt with faulty Windows updates for the past several years. The issue’s severity, lending itself to a dramatic news cycle, became quite the silver lining. With so many people affected, I could always find coverage and key information with a quick online search. This makes it much easier to decide that it’s time to roll back the update.

Bugs, errors, and other smaller problems

A smaller scale can still mean big frustration

It’s certainly possible that you’ll encounter something so severe with your Windows Updates that it makes headlines. It’s much more likely, however, that you’ll run into something on a smaller scale.

One such experience occurred for me shortly after the Windows 11 update was launched in late 2021. Following the update, a game I played regularly began to short-circuit, seemingly overnight. In some cases, teammates would wait for me for minutes on end to crawl through the loading screen, or it would fully crash. The screen could tear repeatedly, often accompanied by freezing. This issue wasn’t a fault in the update itself, but rather a new security feature that the game’s anti-cheat software wasn’t yet ready for.

Sure, I could’ve waited the short two weeks for the game to be patched. But I’m an impatient nerd who wanted the game to work right away, so I rolled back the previous night’s Windows Update, and voilà! All was well while playing the game once more, and after the game was patched two weeks later, I installed the update again, this time with no unfortunate follow-ups.

More commonly, smaller issues like this occur within Windows Updates when they fail to install, rather than with any new security feature that is introduced too soon. Issues from failed updates typically include features failing to start or work properly in some other way.

Windows updates can be a compatibility nightmare

Causing your rig and apps to not play nice, or not at all

The game I had trouble playing in 2021 was due to a compatibility issue arising between Windows 11 and the game’s anti-cheat. This is considered a relatively minor compatibility issue. Most compatibility issues, however, involve hardware, and they tend to take longer to resolve.

Another unfortunate common software update for various software was the introduction of the relatively recent TPM 2.0 requirement throughout the 2020s. Simply put, TPM is security tech built directly into the hardware of a motherboard. Certain apps have since required their users to enable TPM 2.0 on their motherboards, thereby abandoning support for prior TPM versions.

Some lucky users were able to access their BIOS and enable the feature by setting a specific option. Those on motherboards without TPM 2.0 functionality, however, were completely out of luck. The fix? If I want to use the app again, I’d need to buy a whole new motherboard. These compatibility issues are usually highlighted by a blatant reminder of what’s gone wrong in the form of an error message. Sometimes, especially in the case of a component’s driver raising a flag, it will instead cause any number of other symptoms related directly to whichever component’s driver is misbehaving.

These issues are also quite difficult to diagnose. Due to the numerous combinations of components, the OS, apps, games, and other software, one thing is certain: Finding others online who have experienced exactly the same issue can be harder than finding a needle in a haystack. Luckily, there isn’t much harm in just rolling back the last Windows Update anyway. If it hadn’t introduced the compatibility issue, I’d have been able to tell right away.

Updates can slow down or fully stop your PC in its tracks

Performance issues can be difficult to diagnose

Having your favorite app, game, or entire machine halt in its tracks over a broken or failed Windows Update is certainly frustrating, but also usually pretty obvious. On the other hand, an update may instead wreak havoc in a sneakier, much more difficult-to-notice way.

On the software side, this can take several different forms. Here are just a few issues that might pop up while using the program:

1. The program takes a long time to open.
2. The app’s features crash, hang, or don’t work properly.
3. The program freezes or takes a very long time to perform tasks.
4. It uses more of your system’s resources than usual (RAM or processing power are the usual culprits).

These issues can occur if a Windows Update installation fails after attempting to install a new feature or update that the application interacts with directly. In the same vein, if Windows itself is slowing down, throwing more blue screens as time passes, or Windows Explorer is freezing or crashing, it could be due to missing or corrupt registry or system files. In other words, the issue lies within the OS itself, rather than any specific application.

On the other hand, there are also behind-the-scenes hardware problems. These can range just as widely as potential software issues, as they can vary and behave differently based on your unique combination of components and apps installed. If a Windows Update of a component driver fails in this manner, symptoms related to that component may begin to appear unexpectedly.

For example, if a sound driver update fails for any reason and the installation of the update is corrupted, it may not be immediately apparent. At least, not until other symptoms begin to show, such as crackling audio, a crashing audio driver, or features like Windows Spatial Audio halting or behaving erratically.

Similarly, a failed RAM or other chipset driver installation can send your system’s resources out of whack. This can potentially starve certain programs of accessing the resources they need, such as CPU processing power or active memory. The list of possibilities here is long, but the solution is always the same: Roll back!

Both software and hardware issues in this category are typically caused by a failed update installation, too. But, just as in every category so far, there’s an impossibly long list of causes why this could happen, and trying to narrow down specifics may cost precious time.

If the OS or a PC component is involved, waiting could mean a later need to buy a replacement component or reinstall the OS.

Rolling back after all? Backup, backup, backup!

Don’t forget your safety goggles

If you’ve decided to pull the rollback trigger on a Windows Update, be sure to practice good PC hygiene. Back up your data and any important files, and take a Windows System Restore recovery snapshot. Close any programs. If you’re using the Windows Recovery Environment to find the update, you simply need to choose which update you want to get rid of, then go to town.

Once it’s begun, let the rollback finish completely before turning off the rig or attempting anything else with Windows Updates, such as rolling back another update, reinstalling, or checking for more updates. Good luck!