Windows 10

On a scale from 1 to 10, Microsoft in March has ratcheted the patching pace up to 11. The good news is that there are no known exploits for any of the “Critical” rated security holes. (Worth repeating: There are still no known exploits for Meltdown or Spectre.) The bad news? Reports of another forced upgrade to Win10 Fall Creators Update. Still waiting for confirmation on that one.

By the numbers

As usual, Martin Binkmann on ghacks.net, has the best summary:

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Microsoft has given us two messed-up patching months back to back, with January leaving blue screens and pandemonium in its wake, and February hitting the latest version of Windows 10 particularly hard. For those of you with some experience in the patching game, it’s more of the same-old same-old.

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Granted, February’s patches from Microsoft weren’t as malevolent as January’s patches, but they still managed to knock out lots and lots of PCs. That said, if you can tiptoe around the problems, now is a good time to get the latest versions of the latest patches installed.

Problems with Win10 Fall Creators Update

The worst problem I see at this point involves clobbered USB connections on Win10 Fall Creators Update (version 1709) machines after installing the latest cumulative update, KB 4074588. To its credit, Microsoft has acknowledged the problem. But the only offered fix, a complex manual workaround, would drive a hardened MS-DOS junkie to drink.

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The January 2018 Microsoft patching cycle may have been the worst and most invasive set of Microsoft releases in recent memory. The February updates, by marked contrast, only clobber a limited number of machines. How many? We don’t know — and Microsoft isn’t saying.

Bad Win10 Fall Creators Update patch

What we do know for sure is that the buggy Win10 Fall Creators Update cumulative update KB 4074588 tossed many PCs into bluescreen hell and disabled USB devices of various stripes. That’s quite an accomplishment for version 1709 which, according to AdDuplex, is now said to run on 85% of all Windows 10 machines. To look at it a different way, Microsoft blew the cumulative update to the most-used version (1709) of the most-used Windows (Win10 now surpasses Win7).

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Microsoft last night released a flood of unexpected patches. Yes, that’s a Thursday night dump. No, there weren’t any pressing security fixes – at least, none that were advertised. I have no idea why Microsoft’s pushing this offal out the Automatic Update chute.

In addition to a scattering of Preview patches for Win7, 8.1 and Server 2002 – which are usually posted on the third “Week C” Tuesday of the month – and the Surface Pro 3 firmware patch that was announced, but not delivered, Wednesday, we have two new cumulative updates: one for Win10 Anniversary Update (version 1607) and one for Win10 Creators Update (version 1703). Susan Bradley has a full list with links on the AskWoody site.

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One month ago today, Intel told the world that their Meltdown/Spectre patches were a mess. Their advice read something like, “Ooopsie. Those extremely important BIOS/UEFI firmware updates we released a coupla weeks ago are causing Intel machines to drop like bungee cows. In spite of what we told you then, stop installing them now. And if you installed a bad BIOS/UEFI patch, well golly, contact your PC manufacturer to see if they know how to get you out of the mess.”

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