An update of the drivers or controllers of a hardware component can fix bugs, improve performance and add new capabilities, giving your PC an improvement without requiring any additional effort or investment. But if it goes wrong, it can cause it to lose performance, be more unstable, or even crash. Gamers and other power users are used to updating their drivers manually and keeping them up to date, but most PC users let Windows Update take care of the task. And there may arise some problems for which Microsoft is testing solutions.
The Redmond company is testing two functions that can, in one case, Automatically revert the installation of a driver that causes problems and, in another, avoid that old Windows habit of install very certified, but antediluvian graphics drivers.
Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery
When a driver is distributed that is problematic for some reason, the relevant company must send Windows Update an updated driver that fixes the bug and the user is forced to roll back the update or find and download a better driver on their own.
Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery o Cloud-initiated driver recovery serves this purpose automatically. According to Microsoft, the feature allows ‘initiate a recovery action from the cloud, replacing the problematic driver on affected devices without requiring manual intervention from the user or hardware partner’.
In case of problems, Windows Update will first try to find an updated version of that driver. If it can’t, Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery loads the previous known working version of the driver and uninstalls the faulty one. Microsoft ‘manage recovery from start to finish’ and does not require any additional software or system agents to run on your PC. Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery will be deployed more widely next September.
No graphics downgrade
The second feature that Microsoft is testing in Windows Update aims to solve a traditional problem in Windows. One may have the latest driver installed from their GPU manufacturer, but, If you let Windows update it, the system will take you to an older version, often called ‘downgrade’.
To avoid this, the company is going to move from its allocation system based on four hardware identification elements to a simplified two-element model. The tech giant hopes this change will improve accuracy in driver distribution.
According to Microsoft, this new approach to Windows Hardware Compatibility Program o Windows Hardware Compatibility Program will group driver mapping into a combination of Hardware ID (HWID) and Computer Hardware ID (CHID). This will replace the previous, more complex, four-part structure used to publish and assign graphics drivers, in order to reduce incorrect installations that can cause problems with graphics drivers on users’ computers.
Microsoft has clarified that the updated policy focuses on improving how future drivers will be published and distributed. The existing ones will continue to operate under the current framework.
As for when we will see this change on end-user devices, Microsoft plans to roll it out between the end of 2026 and the beginning of 2027.