Samsung PCs to unblock Windows Update in a few days

Samsung seems to be finally working on patching the SW Update software that disabled Windows Update Venture Beat reported today. The company released a statement on the issue, which came to be noticed earlier this week, and vowed to correct the problem "in the coming days."

The S Korean electronics giant said, "Samsung has a commitment to security and we continue to value our partnership with Microsoft. We will be issuing a patch through the Samsung Software Update notification process to revert back to the recommended automatic Windows Update settings within a few days. Samsung remains committed to providing a trustworthy user experience and we encourage customers with product questions or concerns to contact us directly at 1-800-Samsung."

This comes as a quick turnaround from earlier this week, when researcher Patrick Barker reported on an application called ''Disable_Windowsupdate.exe'' that ran on Samsung PCs as part of the company's SW Update service. As implied by the name, the programme disabled automatic updates from Microsoft's software patching service, and required people to manually install individual patches if they wanted to update their PC.

The Samsung program runs whenever a PC with it installed started up, which meant anyone who re-enabled automatic updates would need to disable them again when the computer got rebooted. It did not come pre-installed, but users would need to install the SW Update app that installed it so that they could receive driver updates from Samsung.

Barker was told by a Samsung support representative that the service was needed to prevent Windows Update from installing default drivers that would break features like USB 3.0 ports. The company subsequently said in a statement that it was not preventing Windows users from receiving updates, it was just only allowing them to choose what updates they installed and when.

Microsoft said that it did not recommend that anyone disable automatic Windows updates, since they provided users with up-to-date security patches that were needed to protect computers. At the time, Microsoft said, it was in touch with Samsung about the issue and it now seemed Microsoft had prevailed.

Users who had not already uninstalled SW Update would have their Windows Update settings reverted to apply updates automatically when the company patched its service, as recommended by Microsoft.