Have you ever needed to downgrade or "sidegrade" Windows from one version to another? I had to the other day and this is how I did it.

My customer's $2000 Roland GS-24 vinyl cutting machine quit working due to a Windows Update from June. Roland's "fix" was uninstall the update... or buy a new cutter.

They hadn't used the cutter in a few months, so other Windows updates had been installed, and Windows was not allowing us to uninstall the offending update.

The "Go back" option in Settings > System > Recovery was grayed out and unavailable.

I tried to remove it from Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates, but nothing happened. The progress bar completed, the update disappeared, but if I went back and clicked "Uninstall updates" again, it was still there.

So I tried to remove it manually from an elevated PowerShell prompt:

wusa /uninstall /KB:5040442

This resulted in error 0x800f0905. Very descriptive.

A few Microsoft Community forum posts and YouTube videos later, I found this video which mentioned UUP dump for downloading old versions of Windows. I did a little research (checked reddit) to see if it was legit and took a gander at the source code. Looks good!

UUP dump downloads the packages for old versions of Windows directly from Microsoft's file servers using a program called aria2, then packages them up into a nice, convenient ISO file.

I found the version of Windows immediately before the June update which broke the vinyl cutter. Then I confirmed the offending update was not listed by searching the included files using !updates in UUP dump's search box.

I created the download package using the "Download and convert to ISO" option. Under Conversion options, I made sure "include updates" was checked.

After the download package downloaded (isn't it funny how words start to look funny when you see them a lot? download, download, download), I extracted it and ran uup_download_windows.cmd from within the unzipped folder.

This created the ISO in the same folder. I popped this on a flash drive to take to the client's site.

Once there, I made a backup of the computer. Then I copied the ISO to their computer. I right clicked the ISO file and selected Mount. I opened File Explorer and double-clicked Setup.exe on the mounted drive.

I confirmed I was keeping all apps and files and clicked Install. Then I let it sit.

The computer rebooted a couple times on its own, and finally, we were back at the Windows login screen.

After logging in I disabled Windows updates by opening services.msc, stopping the Windows Update service, and setting its status to Disabled.

I don't recommend disabling updates, but for this customer, she needed her vinyl cutter working. Until Roland releases a software fix for their vinyl cutter, updating Windows would break it again.

I confirmed the computer was on the older version of Windows, and we tested the cutter successfully.

I've got UUP dump bookmarked anytime I need an older version of Windows. Hope this helped you.