How to get Windows 10 Anniversary Update outside of Windows Update

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update was one of the first major feature updates after the original Windows 10 release. Microsoft rolled it out gradually, which meant many systems would simply report that they were fully up to date even though the new release was already publicly available.

That behavior was not always a bug. Quite often it just meant Microsoft, or the hardware vendor, had not cleared that device for the next wave of deployment yet.

If you do not want to wait

If you wanted the update before it appeared in Windows Update, there were a few practical options:

• wait for the staged rollout to reach your hardware
• use a Windows 10 ISO and launch setup from the running system to do an in-place upgrade
• use the Media Creation Tool to download installation media or start the upgrade workflow directly
• use Microsoft's direct upgrade assistant style tooling when available

The right choice depended on how much risk you were willing to accept. Waiting was often the safest option, especially on laptops or vendor-specific hardware where driver readiness lagged behind the public release.

Why manual installation was attractive

Manual installation was useful when:

• you needed to test the new release before broad rollout
• you were working in a lab or VM environment
• the update was available publicly, but Windows Update had not offered it yet

In those situations, installation media gave you more control than waiting for the automatic rollout.

Practical note

If you used the ISO or Media Creation Tool from inside an already running Windows installation, you were not limited to a clean install. You could also use it for an upgrade scenario.

Once installed, the device would be on Windows 10 version 1607.

Current note

This post should now be treated as historical guidance.

The Anniversary Update was Windows 10 version 1607, released on August 2, 2016. For mainstream Windows 10 editions such as Home and Pro, that release has long been out of support, and Windows 10 itself reached end of support on October 14, 2025. So the modern equivalent of this advice is simply: use current Microsoft installation media only when you are upgrading to a version that is still supported.