I often have older VMs pre-configured with a lot of custom tweaks, installed applications, and other elements.

Windows 10 tip: Turn on File History for automatic backups.

Windows 10 tip: Create a recovery drive.

Windows 10 tip: Create a full image backup using this hidden tool.

Here are three great articles by our own Windows sensei, Ed Bott, that should help you backup before you go forward. Before you go rummaging around in your system's innards, it's always good to make sure you can recover your data. I know this should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway. I'll show you that, then I'll share with you some of the additional steps I would have taken if the update still hadn't worked. Fortunately, in my case, the very first tactic I used succeeded. You can try a bunch of tricks to fix updates when they fail. It made some progress, but then it failed. The template hadn't been updated in a while.Īs is always the case when re-activating a VM, I ran Windows Update. I use a standard Windows 10 starter template VM whenever I need a fresh machine. Because they are essentially just files, virtual machine images tend to sit around, powered off, unless you need them. This weekend, I fired up a Windows 10 VM image I hadn't used for a while.

Windows updates keep turning off