How do I force Windows Update to get the latest feature release?
Hey everyone, Leo, Notenboom here for askleo.com. I've
heard this from a couple of folks asking me.
They're on 21H1, for example, of Windows Ten,
and they've been waiting patiently, perhaps impatiently for 21H2,
the second half of 2021, the feature update for Windows Ten to arrive.
And it never does, for whatever reason.
So the bottom line here is that we can
force that to happen by bypassing Windows Update.
Let me show you.
So whenever I go to download Windows,
be it Windows Eleven or Windows Ten or whatever, I never remember the link.
I really don't. So I go to my own article,
Askleocom/Download-windows, which is on the screen right now.
And if we scroll down, we'll see that Download Windows Ten.
There's a Download Windows Ten link that says Download Windows Ten here.
I'm going to click on that, open that in another tab.
Just because Windows 10 November 2021
update, that is 21H2, the second half of 2021.
What I didn't show you is that this machine that we're running is running
Windows Ten, but it is in fact, running 21H1.
So it's exactly the scenario that I just described.
It's been months and this machine,
for whatever reason, has not been updated to 21H2.
We're going to make that happen.
I'll go ahead and close this and the way
to do that, honestly, is to go to this page and click on Update.
Now the update assistant will download and we will run it.
We will, of course, have to hit UAC to make it happen.
As you can tell, the Updater knows exactly what's going on.
This PC is currently not running
the latest and most secure version of Windows Ten.
This PC is running 21H1.
The latest version is 21H2.
That's exactly what we want.
So we'll just click on Update now
and it does a little bit of a compatibility test.
I would be shocked if that failed, if you're already running such a recent
update and it's going to start on its own, but now it begins.
This part will take a while.
This is a fairly large update.
The feature updates that happen every half year tend to be on the large side.
So what I'm going to do is stop talking,
let this run through.
We'll probably do it in fast forward.
So you can at least see the various steps that we went through,
the number of times we ended up having to reboot those kinds of things,
and we will then hopefully come back into Windows 10 21H2.
See you in a few seconds.
Well, that was painful, at least for me.
You can thank me later for saving you the some 40 minutes that that update took.
And as soon as it finishes,
this last round of tweaks will confirm that that's in fact, what we got.
Well, that was painful.
It took approximately 45 minutes a little
less than 45 minutes for that update to take hold on this machine.
Your mileage will, of course,
vary depending on the speed of your internet connection, the specifics of your
machine, the speed of your hard disk, all that kind of stuff.
But for this one example virtual machine,
it took 45 minutes and let's confirm we got what we expected.
Right clicking on start clicking on system scrolling down just a little bit.
There it is.
21H2.
That's how you force a feature update. For Updates For links related for comments
and more, visit askleo.com/144263. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com.