Coming soon. Windows Update Patch Tuesday ==> Windows Autoupdate

[Tom G]

Windows will be rolling out availability of Autoupdate to replace Patch Tuesday, starting in July 2022 with its Enterprise E3 and upward contracts. I anticipate this to be more widely available within the year. It aims to reduce IT support teams' time needed to apply Windows Updates on Patch Tuesday. I'm not convinced that it will. Instead of a predictable time to apply patches and also potentially roll back bad ones, it's supposed to apply them as they are released. Furthermore, there is no indication of the same policy change to other software makers who have coalesced their patch releases to MS's Patch Tuesday releases. IT would still need to pay attention to other software on a Patch Tuesday unless they also follow the new pattern.

Here's where it affects us.
We have certified video card drivers specifically installed so that our design software operates well. This should not update.
I have read that,

Some non-Microsoft drivers are supported through the service. Drivers approved for "automatic" are delivered through the service but drivers that are "manual" won't be.

I can only hope that the video card drivers are already categorized as manual, or at least that they are able to be toggled as such.
In a Worst case scenario, even more things may break mysteriously at any time.

[bnemec]

Windows will be rolling out availability of Autoupdate to replace Patch Tuesday, starting in July 2022 with its Enterprise E3 and upward contracts. I anticipate this to be more widely available within the year. It aims to reduce IT support teams' time needed to apply Windows Updates on Patch Tuesday. I'm not convinced that it will. Instead of a predictable time to apply patches and also potentially roll back bad ones, it's supposed to apply them as they are released. Furthermore, there is no indication of the same policy change to other software makers who have coalesced their patch releases to MS's Patch Tuesday releases. IT would still need to pay attention to other software on a Patch Tuesday unless they also follow the new pattern.

Here's where it affects us.
We have certified video card drivers specifically installed so that our design software operates well. This should not update.
I have read that, I can only hope that the video card drivers are already categorized as manual, or at least that they are able to be toggled as such.
In a Worst case scenario, even more things may break mysteriously at any time.

It seems that our nvidia drivers already are updating with windows updates. I have not changed from the last SW certified version of 441.66 however sometimes I have a new driver installed.

[the_h4mmer]

My concern wouldn't be about video card drivers (nvidia studio specifically) as I generally keep these up to date and (so far) have not had stability issues. With auto-updates from MS, I'd be more concerned about file system issues or randomly deleted data (this happened not too long ago during an update). SWX 2021 occasionally yells at me that the nvidia driver is not compatible, but that's only usually after the software crashes, otherwise it runs quite well (Quadro RTX-4000), even with the 'enhanced graphics performance' enabled.

[berg_lauritz]

Funny thing:
Just last week some of our computers got Windows 11 automatically installed because it was labeled as a 'critical update'. Our IT was not happy to roll back all the design computers....
And at the same time the graphics driver were updated so that realview is gone now on several pcs. We do not render & we have a tight schedule - so this fix has to wait. It's still incredibly annoying.
D*ck move by Microsoft.

Edit:
(Sorry for the swearing. It just also happened at the worst time possible for us...)

[jcapriotti]

Funny thing:
Just last week some of our computers got Windows 11 automatically installed because it was labeled as a 'critical update'. Our IT was not happy to roll back all the design computers....
And at the same time the graphics driver were updated so that realview is gone now on several pcs. We do not render & we have a tight schedule - so this fix has to wait. It's still incredibly annoying.
D*ck move by Microsoft.

This is also the Onshape and 3DX philosophy, you always get the latest changes, whether you want them or not. What could go wrong?