Every Samsung laptop ships with a little utility called ‘SW Updater’, which is there to update drivers, firmware, and the bloatware that every laptop (unfortunately) ships with. It’s pretty standard fare for a Windows laptop. Samsung describes its update tool as follows: “You can install relevant software for your computer easier and faster using SW Update. The SW Update program helps you install and update your software and driver easily.”
But, Samsung is actively disabling Windows Update on at least some of the computers it sells. Microsoft MVP Patrick Barker made the discovery and documented the details on his blog after trying to help a user troubleshoot issues with his Samsung machine.
It’s unclear exactly why SW Update chooses to do this; most likely, Windows Update and SW Update didn’t play nice with each other, as an untimely Windows update could break some proprietary piece of Samsung software. So, the best (and worst) half-assed fix is simply to disable Windows Update altogether — no updates, no problem! (This is basically pure speculation, but it’s also exactly the kind of corner-cutting I would resort to if I wrote bloatware updaters for a living.)
Windows Update appeared to be getting disabled “randomly” until Microsoft’s Auditpol utility pointed the finger to Samsung’s SW Update software. More specifically, Samsung’s update tool had managed to download and run a file inconspicuously named “Disable_Windowsupdate.exe.”
Barker found Disable_Windowsupdate.exe is configured to load automatically regardless of how Windows is set to startup. He also found that SW Update downloads the executable in question as part of a zip file from Samsung’s website and that its digital certificate is signed by Samsung. We downloaded and installed the zip file to verify that this is indeed the case:
Inhibiting Windows Update from doing its job is obviously the wrong way to go about ensuring your Windows machines function as intended. Samsung should be working with Microsoft, not against it, to make sure drivers in Windows Update are not apparently breaking the functionality of its computers.
