You must have seen texts in a format of “KBXXXXXXX” in some news. Do you know what these texts stand for?
In Windows updates, “KB” stands for “Knowledge Base.” It’s followed by a series of numbers to uniquely identify a particular update. These updates are typically patches, fixes, or improvements released by Microsoft to address issues, enhance security, or add new features to the Windows operating system or other Microsoft products. When you see a Windows update identified with a KB number, it refers to a specific article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base that provides detailed information about that update.
As long as you know the KB number, you can manually download corresponding update via Microsoft’s official tool: Microsoft Update Catalog.
How to Use Microsoft Update Catalog
Here is the link: Microsoft Update Catalog
There is a search area on the top right corner, where you can input a KB number, KB5036980 for example.
Click on Search button, and then the search result will be shown in a new page.
In this case, you can see there are four items, but they all belong to the same KB number KB5036980. Which one should we choose?
Firstly, we should check the Products column to find the target systems. Afterwards, we need to check the Title column, where we can find target versions and architectures. For example, I’m using Windows 11 23H2 on a laptop with AMD x64 processor, so I will choose the first one to download.
Once you have clicked the Download button, a new window will pop up, where there is a download link. Click on it will start to download the update file.
Soft Reminder
Unless for special needs, we highly recommand to download and install Windows updates in system settings automatically by system itself. Because the system evaluates current situation of software and hardware, and then determines when and what to install would be better.
