14 DAY TRIAL // Several Patch Tuesday updates that Microsoft released in the last few months are doing more harm than good, and living proof is the huge number of complaints posted by users online.
One of the issues that still exist on many Windows computers causes updates to fail to install, and what’s worse, it turns out that quite a lot of PCs are impacted these days despite the fact that the first reports on the matter reached the web in May 2014.
Users who turned to Microsoft’s Community forums claim that Windows update installation fails with an error saying that “We couldn’t complete the updates, Undoing changes. Don’t turn off your computer,” and no matter the workaround they try, nothing helps to update their PCs.
Basically, this means that some systems haven’t received updates since May 2014, while some users reveal that the issue only appeared recently, after Microsoft released its Patch Tuesday fixes.
Reinstall Windows 8.1?
Undoubtedly, users who got themselves stuck with this error turned to all kinds of workarounds, but those who wanted to let Microsoft fix it contacted technical support for professional guidance.
And surprise, surprise, some say that Microsoft staff detected some corrupted Windows update files on the affected machines and recommended users to install Windows 8.1 from scratch.
“The issue was raised to 2nd level support who quickly judged that there must be a corrupted file either on the original installation or one of the earlier updates. He concluded that the only answer was to reinstall 8.1, which apparently only for this operating system, can be achieved without affecting either existing applications or data. He did this remotely and it took a couple of hours. After restart, magically, all the updates are in, no problem and the system is working fine,” one user explains.
Basically, refreshing Windows 8.1 does solve the problem, but there’s no doubt that some don’t want to go this far to fix an issue that Microsoft’s updates caused in the first place.
In the meantime, no other fully working solution exists, so the only option is to wait a little bit longer to see if the company finds a way to address the bug.