How to Prepare for the Windows 10 April 2018 Monday Update
Right. The Spring Creators update is gone; Microsoft is currently calling its upcoming Windows mega update “Windows 10 April 2018 Update,” and the company barely holds that name as it rolls out the update on Monday, April 30, the last day of the month.
The big update contains new features, most of which you can play with right now by running the latest Windows Insider Preview . We’ll cover all of this on Monday when the update comes out. More importantly, is how you should prepare your PC for an upgrade of this magnitude. Yes, for some of you the upgrade process may go wrong, but you shouldn’t be distracted.
Pause updates
You probably won’t have to install the Windows 10 April 2018 Update when it releases on Monday. Like the Microsoft Fall Creators Update, we expect Microsoft’s April Update to be available to those impatient beavers who manually check for system updates on Monday – and, no, Microsoft hasn’t told us the exact time when the update will launch. …
If not, Microsoft will begin rolling out the update to all Windows 8 users on May, and even then, you will probably have a little time before Microsoft puts it on your system.
To give yourself extra time to check and make sure that the creators of your favorite program have released all compatibility updates for their apps (if you’ve had issues with large Windows updates in the past), take a note on your May 7 calendar. Remind yourself to pause Windows updates so you have a little more time before the April changes affect your system.
To do this, click the Start Menu button and type Update. Click the first entry that appears – Check for Updates – and click the Advanced Options link. Turn on paused updates to get an additional seven days before the April update hits your system. You will only get one chance to pause before Windows updates start rolling in, so make sure you do that as close to May 8 as possible.
We do not recommend looking for any fancy trick to turn off Windows updates completely. It’s one thing to give yourself a little extra time to make sure everything you run doesn’t break with the new big update. Another thing is to disable any and all useful updates, including security fixes and other fixes, from getting into your system. They are good and useful, and we don’t think they should be turned off permanently.
Update your drivers
Think about all the different devices you’ve connected to your desktop or laptop, or better yet, the expensive hardware inside it. Contact your device or component manufacturers to see if they have any updated drivers or firmware that you intend to install prior to a manual or forced Windows update.
If your system comes with any software preinstalled to check for updates, try these applications. Update the drivers for the Nvidia or AMD card if applicable. Make sure you are using the latest drivers and firmware provided by your motherboard manufacturer. Need to use a USB webcam for business meetings? Make sure you also have the latest drivers installed. You get the idea.
Create your Windows partition just in case
One thing you can do to make sure you have a way to quickly restore your system – perform a pre-upgrade in case something goes wrong – is to create a complete image of your Windows partition before installing the April Update (or 8 May). The free Macrium Reflect app is great for this.
Download it, install and run it. Click the Backup menu and select the Windows Backup option, which will automatically select all partitions you want to combine into one large image file. Choose a location to save this file – ideally a spare disk, since you can’t just save it to the disk you’re imaging – and let the program do wonders.
Then click the large CD icon in the upper left corner of Macrium Reflect. This will allow you to create bootable media on a bootable DVD or USB stick. You will use this to boot into an offline environment if Windows update messes up your operating system and then you can restore a previous version of Windows from a backup.
Since Windows will likely try to reinstall the update anyway, now is the time to save all your work, note the programs you have installed on your computer, and consider reinstalling Windows from scratch . It is possible that something you have installed or some feature of the OS prevents the April update from being performed. It can help you start from scratch. Sure, this is annoying, but this is just a working day and at least your computer will work properly – hopefully.
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