Hardware driver updates can be both a blessing and a curse. When they’re good, they can fix bugs, improve performance, and add new capabilities, giving your PC a minor upgrade without requiring any extra effort or investment. When they go bad, they can make a once-reliable PC slow and unstable, giving you a one-way ticket to blue screen town (or whatever color the Windows error screen is these days).
While gamers and other enthusiasts may be in the habit of downloading and installing new driver updates for their systems, most PC users let Windows Update handle driver installation and updates. PC manufacturers may submit their own tested and validated versions of drivers for distribution through Windows Update, which (at least in theory) should maximize stability and minimize problems.
But mistakes happen, and sometimes a driver update is distributed that causes more problems than it fixes. Usually when this happens, the company either has to submit an updated fixed driver to Windows Update, or the user is on the hook for rolling back the update or finding and downloading a better driver.
Now Microsoft is offering another way: automatic rollback to the previous working driver, even after a buggy download and install. Cloud-initiated driver recovery, as the company calls it, allows Microsoft to “initiate recovery operations from the cloud, replacing the problematic driver on affected devices without requiring manual intervention from the user or hardware partner.”
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