• Is there a way to tell the Win10 1903 version upgrade routine to leave your drivers alone?

    Posted on July 25, 2019 at 07:47 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    Extensive testing by @Rick Corbett shows that the old tricks don’t work:

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
    “ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate”=dword:00000001

    Doesn’t prevent drivers from being replaced during a feature upgrade (version changes, such as the move from 1809 to 1903). As @b notes, the name of the key refers to Quality Updates, not feature upgrades.

    @Alex5723 notes that there’s a Control Panel setting that should work. You would think:

    @Rick Corbett tried that and found:

    Yes, it does have that setting (via Control Panel) but that setting is for metadata of a distinct class of hardware, not *all* hardware device drivers themselves… toggling the option makes Services start BITS to download metadata, not WUDO… so it’s not Windows Update-related. (BITS is no longer used by Windows Update by default.) As far as I can see there’s no effect at all on controlling downloads of device drivers themselves… but happy to be proven wrong.

    @Rick Corbett concludes:

    I’ve been through every setting in Settings and tried the previous REG tweaks to prevent hardware drivers from being included/downloaded/installed by Windows Update, all to no avail. It looks like with 1903 that Microsoft has removed all methods of preventing the inclusion of device drivers.

    Anybody out there have a solution? Lots and lots of people would like to keep their old drivers when upgrading, instead of having Windows Update wipe them all out.

    Windows Patches/Security ,
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