Windows 10 users are baffled as re-released patch fails to install
Patch has been deployed to those on April 2018 Update or earlier
A patch has been rereleased for Windows 10 and it’s apparently causing problems on some PCs, as it's failing to install.
KB4023057 is the patch in question and it has been pushed out to machines running Windows 10 April 2018 Update or earlier (so basically, everyone except those on the very latest October 2018 Update).
The patch delivers reliability improvements for Windows Update itself, and can also free up disk space – by compressing files in your user directory – in order to make more room for Windows updates. And if it does indeed do the latter, it can be a lengthy affair.
Still, that isn’t the issue here. Rather, the problem, according to reports on Reddit, Twitter, and indeed Microsoft’s own Answers.com support forum, is that KB4023057 is failing to install (with an ‘Error 0x80070643’), and informing the user that a newer version of the patch is already present on the system.
That’s not surprising, because this particular update has been pushed out by Microsoft several times in the past. Although quite why an older version is arriving now is another question…
Troubleshooting workarounds
At any rate, if you’ve hit this stumbling block, one solution is to simply uninstall your current KB4023057 patch, and then the newly arrived one will successfully install, as suggested on Reddit. Either that, or one Microsoft advisor on Answers.com feels the best solution is to hide the freshly offered update.
Neither of these seem like massively satisfactory solutions, and of course we would hope Microsoft will be looking into exactly why an apparently outdated version of a patch has been deployed to Windows 10 PCs – and that the company will fix things at its end, rather than leaving users to pick up the pieces.
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).