
Now lets hope...
It deletes the right nagware, and not something else. Because I can imagine it already: "Ok, so now that Win7/Win8 users can no longer upgrade to Windows 10 I guess they won't be needing that update option anymore either...".
Microsoft has quietly excised Windows 10 free upgrade offers from Windows 7 and 8, aka the GWX.exe. PCs running Windows 7 or 8.x and Windows Update will silently delete the nagware, thanks to a new update dubbed KB3184143. “This update removes the Get Windows 10 app and other software related to the Windows 10 free upgrade …
I find Microsoft's refusal to publish useful update information annoying and deeply suspcious. However for the rollup update patch they do give information behind the first link in the knowledgebase article.
September's rollup update (3185278) includes these updates:
"This update includes quality improvements. No new operating system features are being introduced in this update. Key changes include:Improved support for the Disk Cleanup tool to free up space by removing older Windows Updates after they are superseded by newer updates.
Improved compatibility of certain software applications.
Removed the Copy Protection option when ripping CDs in Windows Media Audio (WMA) format from Windows Media Player.
Addressed issue that causes mmc.exe to consume 100% of the CPU on one processor when trying to close the Exchange 2010 Exchange Management Console (EMC), after installing KB3125574.
Addressed issue that causes the Generic Commands (GC) to fail upon attempting to install KB2919469 or KB2970228 on a device that already has KB3125574 installed."
I prefer this to having 6 updates. Of course there might be 'more' updates included within the pack they aren't talking about...
> Removed the Copy Protection option when ripping CDs in Windows Media Audio (WMA) format from Windows Media Player.
The cynical side of me now assumes that the behaviour of Windows Media Player is now to rip with copy protection and the option to disable this behaviour has been removed?
Thanks to Microsoft's pushiness with Windows 10, the only machines facing the internet in my home and at the office now are all running Linux Mint with Pale Moon, Thunderbird and Libre Office. Only the design-room machines are still running Windows 7, and none of those are internet-facing any longer.
It's become our office pastime lately to open with impunity the malicious attachments on the spam emails we get, just for the fun of watching the Cryptolocker payload fall flat on its face trying to run on a Linux box...
No, we don't miss Windows in our office, not one bit!
"The humility always shines through whenever the penguins are posting!"
Hmm, you're either one of those poor souls who have been nagged to death by Micro$oft, or one of those souls languishing in a fruity walled garden environment that requires you to pay £1,000+ for a new computer ever 2 years.
Do you need a hug? x
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fruity walled garden environment that requires you to pay £1,000+ for a new computer ever 2 years.
Hmm. My last Mac cost considerably less than £1,000, and I've had it for nearly four years now, so I know that you can't be talking about Apple. The Mac I purchased before that did cost more than £1,000, but it's been running for nearly six years now. I am planning to buy some 'new' Macs, to replace Windows-infested systems. Some of them may cost over £1,000. Most will be less. Hint: look up 'Mac mini'. Indeed, look up 'refurbished Mac mini from PowerMax'. You'll notice machines which can run the finest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, from before Apple went bonkers and started to make everything flat and grey and iOSified, and for prices ranging from $160 to $450 or so. Hell, no, I'm not buying new, iOSified, systems, any more than I'm buying new, Win 10-infested, systems.
Memo to Tim Cook: Cookie, ol' fruit, if I want to use an iPad I'll bloody well buy an iPad. Keep the iOS crap on iPads and iPhones and leave the Macs alone. And have someone sit on Jonny Ive, he's got way out of control.
"just for the fun of watching the Cryptolocker payload fall flat on its face trying to run on a Linux box"
I would not laugh too hard in case they go cross platform. In any case if you really treat security as a priority then all of you obvious user-writeable areas (such as /tmp, /var/tmp and /home) should be mounted with at least the 'noexec' option to help defeat users accidentally double-clicking on something malicious. For that and other tips you could do worse than checking this out:
https://www.cesg.gov.uk/guidance/end-user-devices-security-guidance-ubuntu-1404-lts
"all of you obvious user-writeable areas (such as /tmp, /var/tmp and /home) should be mounted with at least the 'noexec' "
Already done. Full-disk encryption, noexec and admin application whitelisting are all in place. I'm still looking at what other measures can be taken so that link you provided is very helpful, thanks for that.
I'm sure that the goofing around with email attachments will stop once the novelty wears off. It's just that we in the office have spent so many years being paranoid about never opening attachments, never clicking on links in emails, constantly updating antivirus (and never being sure that said AV can even catch them all) and generally living in fear, that the safety and security of Linux feels strangely liberating. I've encouraged it because it eases the transition for the staff and and creates a sense of camaraderie and fun that helps them cope with the stresses of the changeover. In addition it helps me to locate and plug any potential security holes. But once things settle down properly be assured we'll be as vigilant to threats as we've always been.
@Paul Crawford
upvoted for truth and providing a useful link... I wouldn't recommend anyone baits the virus's on any production machine no matter how safe they think they are... especially not if you've not read and UNDERSTOOD all of the link Paul provided and this one, even if its a bit old...
https://www.maketecheasier.com/secure-newly-installed-ubuntu/
.... that I made the effort to get the Win 10 update early this year and the Anniversary Edition update last week.
Every time I plug that SSD in and boot from it, I'm reminded of why I switched to Linux three years ago. (If you haven't worked your way through the Win 10 Anniversary Edition update process then you haven't died.)
I didn't notice this patch in the September updates for my Windows 7 partition. Is this update out of band?
I did notice that the update to check compatibility with Windows 10 was still there though, so that still got 'hidden'. Thank god we're past all that nagging, at least for now.
On the BBC News website, they're reporting that Which? have condemned Windows 10: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37431343
On my Windows 7 box KB3179930 - the rollup with the .NET stuff in it - has come up as an optional update, despite the description mentioning that it corrects security issues.
Whereas an update to correct time zone information in Novosibirsk is listed as important despite me being in the UK.
Go figure, I suppose.
Well, it is a lovely place. Great weather, lots of trees, wonderful fishing and hunting, and the people are quite nice (certainly much nicer than in Moscow). You should really drop by for a visit - and now, thanks to Microsoft, you won't miss your return flight on the way back home.
What's not to like?
"On the BBC News website, they're reporting that Which? have condemned Windows 10: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37431343"
I liked the quote at the end: "On the whole, Windows 10 has been received well, and was a notable step up from the previous Windows 8, which did not go down well with many users." I'd call that damning with faint praise.
Several of my machines have got themselves into a state where the updater can't do anything, while fully using an entire CPU core. Fixing it is a dark art. It's hard to believe how badly they fuck up something so simple, the whole thing must be built on a mesh of bad kludges.
Right! I mean, this is MicroSoft we are talking about, the small software outfit run from Paul Allen's shed. It is not like they could afford, say 10,000 differently configured computers and a team of 100 people to test installation on all of them.
Ironically the standard fix for this issue is to install an update...
You can manually download the individual update from MS however.
Tip: temporarily stop the windows update service before installing it or you have to compete with the locked up background update scanner.
http://superuser.com/questions/951960/windows-7-sp1-windows-update-stuck-checking-for-updates
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"none of my Linux machines have ever locked up when patching without so much as an error message."
Oh, mine did, regularly, on a kernel update. Granted, it promptly unlocked itself and continued booting without a hitch FOURTY minutes later, once it concluded I don't actually have a floppy drive connected, but to be fair I DID have to figure out first that I should just not touch the computer at all for almost an hour even though it positively looks dead as a doornail...
I mean, what could be easier than robustly updating 3 different operating systems on any PC configuration you can think of? Fucking Idiots!!!
You're right, it's really difficult… so difficult in fact that Debian have been doing it across 3 revisions simultaneously for i386, alpha, amd64, mips, mipsel, sparc, ppc, parisc, armel, armhf, m68k… most of those since the late 90s. i386 and amd64 being just as varied as you'd see on Windows including some that cannot run Windows (e.g. Cobalt Qube3/4). Gentoo have been supporting nearly as many, yours truly used to help out with their MIPS port.
Microsoft have been doing it for i386 and amd64. Pretty much all being descendants of the IBM PC compatible. Nowhere near as varied as what Debian supports. Historically they've supported MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha and a few others, but these days, i386 and amd64 are their main ports with some dabbling in ARM. They also have far more economic resources to throw at the problem, and they charge customers for their product.
So yes, I expect them to do better. Much better.
"I think the MS install base is a little larger than the Debian one, and also has less consumer users."
The scale effect might come into play with download speeds and to some extent the speed of checking for updates. But as Stuart said, the installed base is very diverse: from the Raspberry Pi upwards to larger server installations. I think we can reasonably conclude that scale wouldn't shake out many if any hidden quality problems. And having installed updates on both Windows and Linux I know from experience that the latter are still faster even if you disregard the download speeds.
I think the MS install base is a little larger than the Debian one, and also has less consumer users.
Yet Microsoft for all their experience in making it flawless, seem to achieve anything but. Windows Update is all but broken on a fresh out-of-the-box Windows 7 install, or any Windows 7 installation that has been left alone (not-updated) in months.
I'm sorry, but an out-of-the-box just-performed installation of Windows 7 from clean OEM media should JustWork, with regards to Windows Update. This has nothing to do with the number or skill of the users.
Get back to me in the year of the Linux desktop and we'll see whether they can maintain that under scale.
Yep, well we're still waiting for the Year of the Microsoft web server too.
"Fixing it is a dark art."
When I had to do this some week ago it seemed to consist of finding various interweb postings saying apply KB$Number and then finding a chain of MS support pages saying KB$Number-you-were-looking-for has been replaced by KBAnother-number-to-look-for.
If it wasn't a dark art it was certainly an Adventure.
I'm waiting on 177 updates to install in Win7Pro on a dual-boot machine that was last updated roughly 3 years ago and has been running a screensaver in the other boot option since then because that's its purpose. Don't ask.
So what about KB3125574 bundle that's supposed to help? I downloaded and ran it, and hours later had to decide to leave it overnight as it kept looking over things. This morning, it said the update was not applicable to this system or something.
My only consolation is that it automatically finished checking for regular updates in the background and downloaded most of them in the meantime, so I've only been waiting just over an hour so far today.
insufferable nonsense...
>So what about KB3125574 bundle that's supposed to help?
It does! However, if you are starting from Win7 or Win7-SP1 then you have some preparatory tasks to perform...
This article gives a good overview to get your build up to May 2016:
http://www.howtogeek.com/255435/how-to-update-windows-7-all-at-once-with-microsofts-convenience-rollup/
However, I would take the advice given in the "recommendation suggestions" section of this post:
http://windows-update-checker.com/FAQ/ConvenienceRollupKB3125574-Issues.htm
and install any of the listed components, to save yourself work later...
But yes I agree MS have lost something in recent years, with NT, W2K, XP you only needed the SP's to get a new install reasonably uptodate...
Thanks for the link.
I eventually found out from the MS page that it required the April 2015 Servicing Stack update, which of course it didn't have-- and it's my own fault for not noticing & preparing in the first place. But my beef remains, in that it took [unknown? at least 2] hours to figure out that it wasn't going to happen. I'm a Funtoo user so I could almost not care if things to take a ridiculously long while but my machine always spends *mere minutes* deciding what to do. And now there's no need, that machine's done. I installed said KB anyway afterwards, so maybe next year if it gets rebooted again, things will be less awful. And I'll read the article because I still have a few other Win7 machines to deal with, though none now that had been left for that long.
Microsoft's article says, advising that no action other than a restart will be required to do the deed.
Howver, I accidentially discovered on a system (Win7 x64) that both GWX Control Panel and CCleanup seemed happy with, Disk Cleanup identified a further circa 2.5GB of updates etc. that could safely be removed...
So I would suggest having installed this update it is worth running Disk Cleanup - whilst 2~3GB isn't much space on a TB drive, on a limited SSD...
>because Microsoft's previously said it won't reveal much about what's in its patches.
Anybody find me an article where a Microsoft patch is dissected by Mircrosoft, any. You'll find none ... bloody canned statements since day 1.
I like my debian, can go look up which lines were changed in the patch without too much hassle, if I so wish ... popcorn's ready for the next MS Update debacle :D
As for free beers ? Have they removed the telemetry, yet ? no, thought not ... so don't rejoice, more's acomin'! Then again, the tramp on the Windows icon is drinking beer ... maybe that was meant ?
My farther in law had a result against Microsoft. He decided to install Win 10, didn't like it so rolled back. Somewhere along the line, be it in Win7 or 10 his desktop became the 'cloud' desktop and sync'd everything to his cloud account.
Problem was he'd just backed up his 64GB iPhone to his desktop and this got copied over, resulting in a nice bill from BT for going over this usage.
He's argued this with MS and got a cheque for £100 off them to cover the bill (£52) and his time!
GWX Control Panel can do that through the "Delete Windows 10 Download Folders" and "Delete Windows 10 Programs" buttons.
As you obviously don't have it installed, just download and use the standalone version.
See: http://blog.ultimateoutsider.com/2015/08/using-gwx-stopper-to-permanently-remove.html
I'm sure others here will provide details of equivalent tools and how to guides if you want full manual control.
It's about time I mentioned the excellent job GWX Control Panel has done and continues to do for me on my 3 WIN7 PCs, after I installed it following a recommendation elsewhere on El Reg. (Like several earlier commenters, I don't think we've seen the last of this issue from MS.) I thoroughly endorse the suggestion made by Roland6. pxd
Yup, my machine 'updated' itself... the result half of everything didn't work, the settings were all destroyed, went back to foreign language and wrong keyboard etc etc
And as for the latest versions of office... FFKS what do Microsoft not understand about I opened a word document so I can edit it, print it, read it... WHY OH WHY OH WHY do I now need to find different options in a pile of different places, click on 2 dozen different banners in order to do what I obviously wanted to do in the first place!!!!
An opportunity for linux etc. to take over... if only that weren't just as bad
Except it isn't is it?
If microsoft think this will restore their reputation they are going to be disappointed.
The whole win 10 fiasco destroyed what trust remained in the microsoft brand.
It really isn't good for business if your customers :
a) Don't trust your brand.
b) Think your brand ignores their needs.
c) Use your products under sufferance.
It leads to :
d) Your products are only chosen as a last resort in the absence of a viable alternative.
Of course, it will take a while but as with the once mighty IBM I think microsoft is destined to dwindle from industry giant to industry also-ran.
Try this simple test of usability...
Linux Mint: Press the Winkey and start typing "update", it will take you to the software update utility. The utility will tell you what each update will do.
Windows 8: Do whatever you like, you won't find the update utility! Resort to Google, then find that the update utility just says "1.2 GB to download", won't tell you any other information and then also fails to download anything.
Having failed years ago to install Linux on an old laptop - never could find a driver to enable the external CD drive, or figure out how to mount the bloody device in the first place - I recently followed a suggestion in another comment here on El Reg, and installed Mint 18 Sarah plus MATE on an old WINXP desktop I was about to recycle. It was ludicrously easy; within an hour or so, I had a fully functional desktop running considerably faster than it did with XP, all drivers present and correct, fully updated; and I was off to look at the vast number of open software packages available for use. Mystic Megabyte's statement about Updates is spot on - updating the Mint PC was trivially easy, and fully explained; at the same time I was trying to take a former WIN8 PC back to WIN7, and spent hours and hours over a 2 week period, trying to crack the WIN Update issues described in other posts on this thread. After reading about a million posts from others with the same problem, I found that I could sneak up on the problem by only selecting 10 or fewer updates per session, but I tried all the other tips mentioned here and elsewhere, before finally succeeding. Now my only problem is deciding what to do with the no-longer-obsolete desktop. pxd
I can no longer trust any of the updates coming from Windows Update after this debacle.
I haven't installed any of the monthly rollup updates as I don't trust them to not have all of the telemetry crap.
I now only install the security related updates and only if I feel they're absolutely necessary after reading the KB page. If I didn't use my PC for gaming I'd probably be on Mint or something else by now.
The problem isn't that Windows is shit (it is) and Linux is great (it is) - The problem is that Linux doesn't run every game out there so kids cannot see why Linux is so much better.
This is changing but really who cares? Grown-Ups (Businesses) have voted with their investment in infrastructure and Linux is dominant without any doubt!
Leave school now and start working in IT as a Microsoft "Engineer" and you may as well as chosen steam engine manufacturer as a career choice instead.
The world really has moved on - thankfully!
I finally tried Linux Mint as dual boot on my home desktop - then promptly wiped 2 windows laptops and installed it on them as well.
Now, I only boot to Windows (7) when I need to use work related software, yes, you have to pay me to use it.
There isn't a game enjoyable enough to compensate for the aggravation of microsofts poisoned system.
This news will probably lead me to booting windows again and trying to get the update to happen, because at present, windows is a non-operating system.