Microsoft has officially marked a frustrating printer bug as resolved, and those folks who were being blocked from upgrading to Windows 11 22H2 due to the compatibility issue will doubtless be pleased to hear that.
You might recall this seriously troublesome bug that emerged in late September 2022, forcing printers to revert to their default settings. By default, many important features weren’t available – we’re talking about printing in duplex, higher resolutions, and maybe even color, which could obviously be major stumbling blocks.
The good news is that as Neowin spotted, Microsoft officially marked the issue as resolved just a few days ago (November 18). In actual fact, the safeguard blocking devices which could run into this bug was removed a week previously – therefore allowing those machines to update to Windows 11 22H2 – though it could still take some time for the upgrade to come through.
At this point, though, any machine with a connected printer that could fall prey to this bug should be able to go ahead and upgrade to 22H2 successfully without waiting.
Microsoft observed: “Any printer still affected by this issue should now get resolved automatically during upgrade to Windows 11, version 22H2.”
Analysis: A rocky road, for sure
This has been a bit of a rocky road for those with an affected printer wishing to upgrade to Windows 11 22H2, of course, as the bug has hung around for quite some time. As noted, it was two months ago that it first came to our attention, so this has hardly been a quick fix.
With a lot of questions being asked about the prevalence of Windows 10 bugs in the past, and now Windows 11 apparently continuing with a worrying amount of problems in terms of quality assurance, the whole affair isn’t a great look for Microsoft. Yes, we’ve banged this drum many times, but we’ll continue to do so while bugs like this printer-related gremlin – or other flaws such as File Explorer crashing or slowing down Windows 11 PCs – are still popping up far too often for our liking.
If you’ve been suffering at the hands of a gremlin in the works with Microsoft’s latest OS, be sure to check out our guide to solving common problems with Windows 11.
