Microsoft launches new Windows 10 automatic driver update program

Microsoft announced that starting in March 2020, a new automatic driver update program will be launched to reduce the reliability issues users encounter in Windows 10.

According to the plan, it will gradually roll out new drivers to a small number of programmatically selected users, and then slowly release them to other Windows 10 users.

Microsoft explained that:

“The initial set is programmatically selected and is typically both highly active and representative of targeted clusters ofhardware ID (HWID) and computer hardware ID (CHID) combinations for the particular driver.The initial rollout targets highly active devices as there is higher chance of getting diagnostic data from these devices, which enables early failure detection. It targets specific clusters of HWID/CHID combinations so that the driver’s quality can be evaluated in a way that evenly representsthe total device population. 

Rolling out a driver to this initial set of its eligible population may take up to eight calendar days. However, the overall monitoring phase for drivers during the intelligent driver rollout process will continue to be up to 30 days.”

However, this time frame may also vary between drivers, depending on whether the driver is evaluated as a low-risk or high-risk driver, as shown in the following figure

Once the data analysis results are satisfactory and the thresholds required for successful deployment are determined, the driver will be pushed to all users to install and use via Windows Update.