Defer preview builds to (drastically) minimize incompatibility support requests
As support technicians specialized in Remote Access for many years, we recommend to our customers to defer 10 days preview builds and feature updates, in order to avoid incompatibility cases between termsrv.dll and Remote Access kernel.
As an example, on Server 2025 the local policy that controls this is:
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Updates > Manage updates offered from Windows Update > Select when Preview Builds and Feature Updates are received
To illustrate the impact of this setting, here is a video in the current context of KB5058499 released two days ago:
https://od.lk/s/NDZfODE5MjQ1NDVf/Defer%20preview%20builds.mp4
Finally, we leave you the command lines we used to enable/disable this behavior:
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdates /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdatesPeriodInDays /t REG_DWORD /d 10 /f
reg delete "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdates /f reg delete "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdatesPeriodInDays /f
Thank you for your attention and best regards!
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Comments3
Jun 2, 2025
PinnedHello, thank you for your feedback!
We agree that Administrators should not allow Microsoft to install beta versions on their production servers.
And also: why would it be different for Patch Tuesday and stable updates? Best practices are to delay updates until production servers are ready and updates have been validated by your IT team. Should we also delay them in TSplus products?
Since several years, we are trying our best to minimize the modifications to customers’ servers settings. While we recommend they adapt their settings to prevent preview build installs, we do not want to force this choice (or really any choice) on their own production servers.
We will for sure add the command lines to our technical documentation 👍
Kind regards,
Adrien
Leontic
Jun 2, 2025
Hello Adrien
I must say that this topic is controversial. Please allow me one last argument:
We agree that each administrator should take responsibility for his server, and that he alone should decide on the updates policy.
However, while it is hard to imagine the harm of deferring preview updates for 10 days, the consequences of not doing so are more than real, and cause discomfort throughout the chain: developer, partner and end customer.
To illustrate this, despite systematically recommending the use of these policies to our customers, we have recently dealt with 11 cases of incompatibility with W11 KB5058499.
In fact, one could well understand this deferral as a modification required by design, just as the decision is made to include the “everyone” group in “remote desktop users”, for example.
Again, thanks for your time and best regards!
Leontic
May 30, 2025
Our suggestion is the integration of these registry modifications as an advanced setting of the AdminTool, so that the deferral is done by default, but that the administrator has the possibility to revert.
Also, the command lines are misspelled above. They are as follows:
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdates /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdatesPeriodInDays /t REG_DWORD /d 10 /f
reg delete "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdates /f
reg delete "hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v DeferFeatureUpdatesPeriodInDays /f