How to prevent Windows Update from automatically updating drivers

Everyone knows the importance of having updated drivers in Windows for the system to work properly. However, today we are going to go against the grain a little and we are going to see How to stop Windows Update from automatically updating drivers. We explain the reasons below.

Since Windows 10, the management of everything related to drivers has been considerably simplified, to the relief of the user. The system itself began to incorporate the basic drivers so that everything could work well: the keyboard, the mouse, the graphics card... and things were simplified even further with the arrival of Windows Update, which is responsible for carrying out these update tasks automatically, without the user having to worry about almost anything.

The arrival of Windows Update made tedious tasks such as wasting time searching for and downloading drivers on the Internet, or using installation CDs for the different components of our computer a thing of the past. A leap forward.

Then, -You might be wondering- Where is the problem? Why prevent it? Windows Update update drivers automatically? There is a reason for that.

Windows Update malfunction

Even for Windows Update, which is a function designed specifically to fulfill this purpose, the work of installing and keeping up to date all the drivers that make the different systems of our PC work is a very complicated task.

So much so that the risk of errors occurring when install new drivers, is higher than we might think. Paradoxically, a tool created to make our lives easier could be responsible, in certain circumstances, for causing chaos on our Windows PC.

This is not an exaggeration. There are many. Cases where Windows Update was unable to detect the most recent version of an update and installed an older one. It has also been reported that the feature falls into an absurd loop that leads to installing outdated versions, which are detected as such and are again incorrectly updated. And so on.

All of this, as you can imagine, translates into a mess of considerable proportions and results in system malfunction. It is not usual, there is no need to be alarmed by it, but it happens more frequently than would be desirable.

Solutions to the problem

What to do in a scenario like the one we described in the previous section? There are a number of preventive solutions that we can apply, thus preventing Windows Update from updating the drivers and eliminating the risks. However,, we will have to assume that we will have to be the ones to take care of that task from now on.

Disable automatic driver update

The first thing we can try is to stop Windows Update from acting on its own and let us, as we did before, take care of running the updates that we need. To do this we have to access the advanced system settings. These are the steps:

1. First we open the Control panel using the Windows + R key combination, typing “control” and pressing Enter.
2. Then we click on "Security system".
3. Next, we select the option "System" and after that of "Advanced system settings".
4. In the next step, in the Hardware tab, we click on «Device Installation Settings».
5. Finally, there we must select the option "NOT" and save the changes.

Use the Windows Registry

Another method that we can use to prevent Windows Update from updating the drivers is to act from the Registry Editor.This is what we have to do:

1. We open the Start search engine with the Windows + R keys. In it we write regedit and we press Enter.
2. Then we go to the next file: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate.
3. We right click on it and select "New".
4. In section "Key code" we assign a new name: ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate.
5. Next, we double-click on the newly created key and we set the value to 1.
6. In conclusion, we reboot the system for the changes to take effect.

In addition to these two methods, there is also another internal solution to carry out this operation successfully, which consists of Using the Group Policy Editor (This is also part of the advanced system features.) However, it only works for the Pro, Enterprise, and Education versions of Windows 11.

Finally, we could say that there is still one last option, which is to use some external tool, such as winaero tweaker o O&O ShutUp10However, there is no need to complicate things further, as the two solutions we have proposed are more than sufficient for what we want to do. Through them we can control the automatic installation of drivers, thus eliminating the risks explained above.

So, preventing Windows Update from automatically updating drivers isn't such a bad idea after all.