Just updated Windows 7? Can't access network shares? It isn't just you Microsoft has doubled down on efforts to persuade users to migrate to Windows 10 by breaking Windows 7 networking for some. Windows Server 2008 R2 is also affected. While the last few monthly updates for the soon-to-be-obsolete OSes featured a known issue affecting an "unknown" number of "problematic configurations" that …
Updates this AM (just now) and noticed windows explorer kept stopping and restarting making the machine unusable. Removed the (KB4480970) and bingo back up and running. Updated some 64 bit Windows 7 systems and had no issues. Be AWARE. Is the OS sabotage I ask ?
Well, it wouldn't be the first time they pulled something underhanded to get everyone on the shiny Win10 would it? I've taken to ignore all updates except security for Win7 of late. I'm still waiting a week in case they pull some BS and slip a Win7 killer into a "security' update. Nothing surprises me any more.
Not at first. Going from 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 was a series of speed increases in the UI that made my Acer D255 netbook more and more usable. But Microsoft managed to slow it down to unworkably slower than any previous OS with the first two semiannual updates...
Raspberry Pi Desktop has fixed it though.
But Microsoft managed to slow it down to unworkably slower than any previous OS with the first two semiannual updates...
Exactly!
$LATEST_WIN10_RELEASE is nearly always slower, on every laptop my tentacles touched (desktops unaffected for some odd reason).
It depends, how many WIndows 7 machines have you set up for her, where she accesses files on them from her PC and she is an administrator on the Windows 7 hosting the files?
I would hope, to keep things simple, you had installed a NAS or similar, if she needs to store files on the network at all.
My mum is on Win 7 x64. The GWX shitshow saw her go from technophobe to a "pro" (in the parental sense of the word) in terms of reviewing the offered updates and excluding the ones I tell her to skip or permanently bar.
There's limited positivity for MS right now, but educating the parental units on the merits of checking updates is one of them, even if it wasn't intended by MS!
Oddly enough, it's reasons like these why I prefer not to install updates the moment Redmond says they're released, but to wait a few days first before installing them (for the issues to surface). It's also a reason why I still run Windows 7 as this is trivial to do with 7, not so easy on 10.
I wish to refer my fellow contributors to this here link.
I await the Speaker's ruling and a suitable admonishment.
Well I'm a Brit living in Britain, and I've never heard the term 'lappy' out in the wild. Indeed I've never heard the IT mob use it either and I expect I'd be despatched forthwith if I were to do so.
So I guess I'm not seeing your point, if there is indeed one? Bollocks to the El Reg article of old?
My point was I heard that saying from family over in the UK when they had laptops in the early 2000's. I have heard it from friends all over the UK so I would have thought it was common usage.I have on laptop and one netbook. The rest are all desktops.
"Well I'm a Brit living in Britain, and I've never heard the term 'lappy' out in the wild. Indeed I've never heard the IT mob use it either and I expect I'd be despatched forthwith if I were to do so."
I've heard it used in the UK. Usually by people have laptops but don't use computers at work. I think it might be a "Facebook friends" type of shorthand thing. I'd not be surprised if it's used commonly in places like Mumsnet.
Sorry. It's used. It might not be elegant, but it's quick and easy to say, so people do. Rarely, but definitely I've even said it myself.
People do tend to use the shortest terms with the shortest sound transitions possible. Lappy has 1 and a half syllables compared to lap tops's full two. And the p-t-p transition isn't a good one; lip-roof of mouth-lip. It's similar to how people say "probly" or "proberly" instead of probably to shorten the utterance and remove the o to a vowel transition and one of the plosive b sounds.
Did you switch everything to IPv6 because IPv4 is as much as old? Oh well, even IPv6 is quite old now, ditch it too....
While SMB2 and SMB3 are quite an improvement over the original IBM protocol, and its version 1 modifications by MS.
It has 4Gb of ram and a dual core core 2 CPU and an SSD. I use it rarely but expect it to work. I could run 64 bit windows on it but 32 bit is leaner and faster.
I am still on the fence on upgrading all my machines and the wife's to Windows 10. More likely to use Linux Mint and use a VM of 7 and keep a couple of Windows 7 machines off-line for games.
32bit is leaner and faster? I take it you have statistical evidence to back up that wild claim?
I spend nearly all my time benchmarking desktop, laptop and tablet hardware, new and old, across all our corporate builds, win7 32, win7 64 and win 10.
I can safely tell you that across our testing suites, win7 32 is miles behind both win7 64 and win10. On average the 32bit OS has 70% of the performance of the 64bit OS's, in some cases it is over 100% worse and in some cases there is no difference, but overall the difference between 32bit and 64bit on the same hardware is night and day.
I know that I. I have ISO files of all of Windows OS back to 95. 64 bit on the machine would make it slower. It works better with a 32 bit OS. That is how it came from Toshiba with 2 GB of ram and a 200gb rust spinner. I also have an ePcee with 2 Gb ram and an SSD but with 7 32 bit it is slow as molasses.
I, for one, stopped updating my home W7 box around the time when W10 was forced down on its users. I reckon in the event of an exploit it would take me less time to reinstall and restore, compared to the time lost with updates, reboots, loss of performance, loss of functionality etc. However, I am slightly cautious about what sites I visit, I mostly block JS etc. I am aware that this approach is not an option for company/work computers, or for computers used by less cautios people.
I do have a Linux machine that I use for most activities besides gaming and what little win32 development I still do. But I know from experience that Linux is still not yet ready for "the masses". And I'm afraid that when/if it will be, it might also be approaching Windows levels of un-usability. (Firefox is a good example of this tendency)
It seems to me that quite a lot of software - and Windows is a good example but far from the only one - tends to become increasingly user-hostile. Recently, when configuring a new (w10) computer for a friend I lost count of the number of hoops I had to jump through to avoid cortana, spying, edge etc. Not to mention additional hoops to uninstall the shovelware from both the manufacturer and MS.
Took all my important stuff off the net with a stable Win7 pro build ages ago and have every intention of staying that way. We always said "If it ain't broke don't fix it" rather than "fix it 'till it's broke"
Win 10 is a dumb piece of crap and that is all there is to it.
I used to have an offline Windows 7 box - after a few months of not talking to Microsoft it would declare the legitimate version of Windows to be a counterfeit copy and replace the wallpaper with a counterfeit label until it connected to Microsoft to realise it was a real version.
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On a Dell box today - just one out of 150+ machines. Uninstalled updates, no love. System restore, no love. New drivers from Dell, no love. Ended up sharing by IP, which worked fine.
Had planned on wiping box tomorrow, thinking something bad, really deep that wasn't being obvious. Nope, just Microsoft.
To be fair, Microsoft have done a great job of getting people to migrate to a new OS, I just snapped with the nonsense that is Windows 10 and bunged Linux Mint onto my laptop a couple of days ago... So I'll not be seeing that annoying sideways sad face with the 'windows has encountered an error' message or Cortana driving me nuts, even though I turned it off on install, every time I try to search for something... No more stupid Minecraft or the other games I don't want but can't seem to get rid of... Bliss.
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Left this Win 7 PC on overnight. Had noticed yesterday it wanted to be shut down for installing Win updates.
But this morning I find I was logged out of Windows, had to log back in. That's not usual.
Time for another coffee, and then see whether anything else has gone wonky.
This particular issue seems to only happen if local accounts are being used for shares - those accessed using domain accounts should be fine.
As I understand it, this patch is to mitigate pass the hash vulnerabilities and is likely working as intended - so I wouldn't expect an official fix.
There is a registry key (LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy), that can be added to revert to the unpatched behaviour.
Interestingly, I found this article from 2017 by a red teamer that goes very in depth into this vulnerability and the potential risks associated with setting this registry key:
https://www.harmj0y.net/blog/redteaming/pass-the-hash-is-dead-long-live-localaccounttokenfilterpolicy/
I expect mostly because 'it just works'. Except now, it used to just work unless you deploy a registry key change.
This is more likely to be a problem in small workgroup environments where everyone is configured as an admin and all the credentials are the same on every machine/server.
This sort of shop generally won't have a managed patch system or test environment either so will get the patches immediately, and it's broken everything.
I see both sides of this argument, Microsoft has plugged a security hole, but it's broken something that used to work. Weird as it is, I'm kind of on Microsofts side with this one.
It happens because many people put their local account into the local Administrators group (i.e. to install software and the like) - especially in small setups (SOHO...) that may not have domain controllers and Active Directory.
Then you may also have a NAS or something alike where the same user/password are defined and given permissions to shares. In this case access is not handled through Kerberos, but using NTLM.
Previously it worked, now it won't.
Some people routinely have to do things with administrator permission. One of the products I work on, for example, must load a number of its assemblies from the Global Assembly Cache. Updating the GAC requires elevated privilege (thank goodness); so whenever I build that product, I have to do so as an admin.
Using domain admin for local development tasks would be idiotic, thus it's a local-admin account.
Windows is still (!) terrible at switching accounts1 for command-line and GUI applications. So-called "Fast User Switching" is not nearly fast enough and far too cumbersome to be useful in this context. The closest thing Windows provides to hybrid limited-privilege and elevated-privilege operation within a session is strong UAC (i.e. require explicit elevation with credential prompt on the secure desktop). UAC isn't a security boundary but with the strong SecPol setting the split token does close most of the straightforward vulnerabilities.
I haven't checked whether LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy applies to UAC-downgraded tokens as well. It'll be interesting to find out. The point, though, is that Windows continues to encourage abuse of the Local Administrators group, not so much because of failings in the base OS, but because Microsoft refuses to try to get the user interaction model and user experience correct for people who actually need routine privilege elevation. Hell, Richie did a better job in this area just by inventing setuid and su, and that was in, what, 1971?
1Thread security tokens, to be more precise.
Well if MS want to shift everyone to cloud services and sell subscription based Azure, the easiest way I suppose, is to throw a spanner in the works of locally hosted network shares or am I missing something?
There is history here. A fresh install of Windows 7 SP1 was borked when MS updated the Win7 Servicing stack. Windows Update stopped working (or took forever) with endless 'Checking for updates..., just a Windows 10 was released.
Rectified properly almost a year later, just as the 'free' Windows 10 updates officially ended.
A single copy of Windows 7SP1 to fully updated, still takes several hours, even with an SSD.
Linux Mint 19.1? Less than 10 minutes from Live ISO boot, to install and fully update. And to think, the powers that be have paid MS to roll out Windows 10 sausage machine conveyor belt throughout the NHS. {facepalm}.
If that was you (either sealing the W10 bid or working on behalf of Theresa May's Government), though I doubt you're reading these comments, you're an utter shit for doing such a deal, with no morals whatsoever.
they deliberately throttled it the bastards. after a few days of tearing my hair out, (i run a PC repair shop amongst other things) thats when i found this
http://www.wsusoffline.net/
still the quickest way to do updates for any win os. you can set it to auto reboot among other things.
I deployed the fix detailed here... on a pc that got crippled by the update and it worked for me:
https://borncity.com/win/2019/01/09/netzwerk-issues-with-updates-kb4480970-and-kb4480960/
Which is a simple adjustment to the LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy flag
And shazam the system could connect back to the smb share again.
It's not just Windows 7. Tuesday night when I went to shut down my Windows 10 workstation for the night, it asked me to update/restart or update/shutdown. I had some stuff I was working on, so instead, I just locked the workstation and figured I'd sign in again Wednesday morning. When I turned on the monitor, it was at a bluescreen saying SYSTEM LICENSE VIOLATION. I tried running the repair, but it didn't work. The two system restore points I had didn't work either. They both failed with errors. Contacted Microsoft and the only option was a complete reinstall. First time I've been hit with an update bricking that couldn't be repaired. Thanks for the loss of an entire day's work, MS. Really appreciate it.
SR has proved very useful on occasions when I've tinkered one step too many. I do have a habit of thinking, "I wonder what would happen if.." then finding out.
However, any time I've used it in anger, because something has genuinely gone wrong it has come back as "System Restore was unable to.....". Interestingly, and mysteriously it has still sometimes sorted out problems, after supposedly not making any changes. It's a truly weird piece of sh*t.
CommanderGalaxian,
I have always asked 'WTF does System Restore Do' !!!
Whenever I have been advised to use it it has 'broken' something at a low level that has been impossible to rectify.
System Restore is MS deciding what will & will not be reverted ..... without telling you the basis for the decisions made !!!
Restoring from a 'Full backup' tends to work.
Personally, I use Macrium Reflect that works very well (just ensure you keep the s/w up to date.)
Just waiting for the 'official' comment:
"Microsoft is aware of this issue and a fix will be released in a future update"
Just like last year when one of their Windows 7 Meltdown/Spectre patch attempts caused blue screens with any processor that didn't support SSE2.
After 3 months of faffing around with comments like "a fix is on the way" they finally decided to go with "nah, stuff it - we can't be bothered trying to fix it".
Same thing will happen here, I reckon. Anything to kill off Windows 7 and get everyone onto 10.
Why they haven't been heavily fined for all this BS (especially GWX except for a couple of individual cases) is still beyond me...
"The company whose court imposed penalty which was pretty much equivalent to a slap on the bum with a rolled up newspaper?"
"Yes."
"And by Newspaper I mean PART of a newspaper - something like the 'Culture' section of "The Sun", the non-boring bits of "The Financial Times" or the non-fiction portion of a vendor's Benchmarking specs handbook?".
- The BOFH replying to the Boss,
BOFH 2002 Episode 3, 02/18/2002.
The only reason Windows 10 replaced Windows 7 on my desktop is because a windows update completely broke audio output device registration for existing and new devices, a reinstall fixed the issue, a restore from backup fixed the issue however, as soon as i allow windows updates i lose audio again.
If i could do without audio or without certain updates i would still be using 7, no question - I despise using Windows 10 and am actively considering a change of employment as I'm currently a dev writing windows software.
Having my arm round a dirty toilet U-bend is more attractive than the mess that is windows 10.
Yes i'm opinionated and yes you may like windows 10 but I would like an OS that works for me not against me, I'm odd like that.
I'm getting something similar, but with 2012R2. I've got a 2012R2 VM which is not a member of a domain, and which I log in as a local admin. There are shared folders on a 2012R2 domain that the account can access by dint of there being a domain account with the same username/password as that local admin, and passthrough authentication makes it all transparent. Since applying the most recent updates and rebooting last week, the mapped drives work for about 20 hours, and then I lose them, with a "local device name is already in use" message. Attempting to map/remap to the resource then gives a "device is not authorized to log in from this station" message. I have to log out or reboot to restore the connections.
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