Windows Latest reviewed the nine monthly updates for Windows 10 and Windows 11 from January to September 2026, finding that Windows 11 was busy fixing bugs it introduced almost every month, while Windows 10 remained much more stable.
The nine months for Windows 11 amounted to a chronicle of failures. The January update KB5074109 caused black screens, errors with Outlook Classic POP profiles, and Azure Virtual Desktop authentication failures. File Explorer no longer respected desktop.ini custom settings, and Microsoft later confirmed blue screens and boot failures on some PCs.
The March update KB5079473 broke Microsoft account logins, affecting Teams, OneDrive, Edge, and Office. It was fixed 11 days later via an out-of-band update, KB5085516. In the same month, the optional preview update KB5079391 was withdrawn due to an installation error loop.
The April update KB5083769 triggered BitLocker recovery on some PCs, requiring multiple reboots to complete installation. The May update KB5089549 failed to install on machines with less than 10MB of free space on the EFI system partition, returning error 0x800f0922 upon rollback, prompting Microsoft to urgently release a patch.
The June update KB5094126 caused boot failures and BitLocker recovery loops on HP business PCs, with over 150 reports within 48 hours. Meanwhile, OneDrive sync failures and Recycle Bin bugs affected all supported Windows versions.
The July update KB5101650 caused unexpected shutdowns, overheating, and battery drain on Dell PCs due to Intel driver conflicts. Microsoft directly blocked this update on Dell devices. The issue originated from the June preview update and persisted into the July mandatory security update.
September was the most severe month. Within days of the release of KB5124008, Microsoft confirmed or was investigating issues covering Remote Desktop failures, USB audio anomalies, crashes in Linux and WSL applications, and enterprise domain problems. Windows Latest also found that File History was broken, Explorer.exe was crashing, and AMD GPUs were unstable. On September 14, Microsoft urgently pushed KB5129195, but it still did not fix all the issues.
Windows 10 performed quite differently. The January update KB5073724 prevented some PCs with Secure Boot and Virtualization-based Security enabled from shutting down or entering sleep mode, which was fixed by the February update KB5075912. There were no known issues with the February and March updates.
June and July also suffered from the Recycle Bin bug and BitLocker issues because they shared the same patch base as Windows 11, but on a much smaller scale. The September update KB5122878 was basically a routine security maintenance update, whereas Windows 11 required urgent follow-up in the same month with multiple issues still under investigation.
Windows 10 was originally scheduled to end support in October 2025, but Microsoft extended it twice. Consumers can now receive ESU updates until October 12, 2027.
The reason for Windows 10's greater stability is not complex: Microsoft has stopped making changes to it. In contrast, Windows 11 adds new features every month. The more features there are, the higher the probability of bugs. Since Windows 10 receives no new features, it has fewer opportunities for failures.