Some users are complaining about Paint and Notepad disappearing from Windows 10, without any logical explanation. Here's what's going on
After the latest Windows 10 cumulative security update, the July 2020 Patch Tuesday that brought 123 fixes against as many vulnerabilities in Microsoft's operating system, some users are reporting the disappearance of some pieces of Windows history: the Paint and Notepad apps.
For some time now, rumors have been circulating that Microsoft wants to remove these two apps from Windows 10, but there's no official confirmation. To be fair, though, some reports about the disappearance of these two apps had arrived well before the recent update. But that's not all: even some users who haven't updated Windows to the May Update (Windows 10 2004) found themselves without Paint and Notepad overnight. The problem, therefore, is patchy and according to some interpretations it depends more on the Microsoft Store than on Windows. But what's even stranger is the high variability with which this problem of disappearing apps occurs.
How to reinstall Paint and Notepad
If you can't find the Paint and Notepad apps on your computer anymore, then you have to look for them in your installed apps and, if they aren't there either, reinstall them. So we need to go to Application Settings > Apps & Features and look for them in the search box. There are very strange cases where the two apps are not found in Apps & Features, but if you search for them from the normal Start menu search they will pop up. If in both cases the apps aren't there, then you have to go to the Microsoft Store, find them and install them. But, even here, there's no shortage of problems.
The problem at the Microsoft Store
Some users with the 2004 version of Windows 10 have reported that they can't download or install the Paint and Notepad apps from the Microsoft Store. The Store tells them that both apps are already installed, although this is not true, or that the operating system is not updated to the latest version, which is also incorrect. In other cases, users are told by the Microsoft Store that they need to upgrade to Windows 2004 in order to download the two apps, but they can't because the update is not yet available for all computers.
Many users also claim that they can't download Paint, which is a very old app, but they can download Paint 3D, which is much newer. It seems that the problem lies in both Microsoft's store and its Windows operating system, which are not communicating with each other so much so that the former does not understand the version of the latter.