That might seem like an obvious statement: the OneDrive client is updated frequently, so of course the version of OneDrive that is included in Windows 10 and 11 media is going to be out of date. But just how out of date? Let’s take a look.

OneDrive is not installed in the images on Windows 10/11 media. Instead, each Windows image contains a copy of OneDriveSetup.exe in the C:\Windows\System32 folder. This is automatically executed for each user that signs into the computer via a “Run” registry key in the default user profile:

Before we look at how old the files are, let’s look at the current versions, from a recent thread:

I believe those version numbers are effectively timestamps: a two-digit year, the day of the year, the hour and minute. (The last part is likely a patch level, as fixes are integrated and the version is re-built.) Since we’re in the middle of 2024, those seem quite reasonable.

If we look at the properties of that OneDriveSetup.exe file, we can tell about how old it is. Here’s an example from the Windows 11 23H2 media:

So that one is over two years old. And that’s from media updated in February 2024 — a good sign that this file does not get updated when the media is updated each month. That means that the old version will install, detect that it is out of date, download a newer version, and then restart into that version. If you watch closely, you can sometimes see this happening when each user signs in: the OneDrive icons show up, they look like they start syncing, then the icons disappear and show up again a little later.

Alright, let’s take a survey of the Windows media that I have lying around to see what versions we can find:

It looks like they at least remembered to update it somewhat for Windows 11 24H2, as the 23H2 release was untouched. But the 2022 version shipped in 2023 was still better than a 2019 version that shipped in 2022.

So if you wonder why the Autopilot Branding package downloads and installs the current release, that’s why: It can do a per-machine install prior to any users signing into the machine, guaranteeing that they will have the most up to date (and in theory, the least buggy?) OneDrive client without having to wait for it to auto-update.