Samsung has announced that it will soon release a patch for its PCs in order to unblock updates from Microsoft for Windows operating systems. Last week, the Korean electronics company had come under fire after Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) and researcher Patrick Barker has revealed that Samsung was disabling Windows Update on some of its laptops distributed with Windows 8 and 8.1. Even more shockingly, after disabling the Windows Update capability, Samsung was installing a utility that prevented users from re-enabling the feature in the future.

Samsung distributes its own update software with its PCs, dubbed "Samsung Update," which promises to keep apps and drivers up to date on its computers. Barker, who is a crash-debugging and reverse-engineering expert, as well as a Microsoft MVP, had claimed that Samsung's software update changed the service's settings to stop automatic downloading and installation of updates, which is recommended by Microsoft as the default setting. According to Barker, who wrote an extensive blog post, an examination of the software had revealed that Samsung's "software updater" tool also included an executable component called "Disable_WindowsUpdate.exe", which installed automatically without the owner's knowledge. Each time the computer was rebooted, Samsung's update software ran this program and changed the setting to "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download or install them". This setting continued even after the Samsung software had been uninstalled until the application was removed manually.

Samsung had earlier denied blocking Windows update on its hardware, but had acknowledged that it was manipulating Microsoft's Windows Update. On Friday, a Samsung spokesperson finally emailed a statement that read:

"We will be issuing a patch through the Samsung Software Update notification process to revert back to the recommended automatic Windows Update settings within a few days."