back to article Wailing Wednesday follows Patch Tuesday as versions of Windows 10 stop playing nicely with plugged-in printers

Windows 10 users woke up to borked printers following the monthly Microsoft bugfix party, Patch Tuesday. The issues appear connected to KB4557957 and KB4560960 for Windows 10 2004 and 1903/1909 respectively. "KB4560960" was "stopping users from printing to [the] locally attached Brother printer," according one Reg reader. The …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Borksoft

    I guess the one tester that MS employs was taking a break when it came to validating connected printers. This is the sort of thing that was bad back in the bad old days of Windows 98 but in 2020? Please... YAFGMFMS (Yet Another FootGun Moment For MicroSoft).

    1. simonlb Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Borksoft

      Yet another thing that has worked pretty well for 20-odd years gets broken by Microsoft with yet another update. FFS Microsoft, when will you sort your shit out, hire some competent developers and do some proper QA like you used to do?

      This all just reinforces my belief that the whole design of Windows from NT onwards has been fundamentally broken and just gets worse as time goes on.

      1. steviebuk Silver badge

        Re: Borksoft

        I think the issue is, Sat Navs insistence in moving everything to the cloud and possibly trying to make Windows software as service with a yearly fee (if they did that I think they'd slowly kill it as everyone would move to, god forbid, Apple and, better, Linux). And although I have a man crush on Mark Russinovich cause of his amazing sysinteral tools and his yearly (which he's sadly now stopped doing) talks on using the tools with real world examples, even he's pushing for cloud but then he is now the head of Azure.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Borksoft

        But they have a massive QA department - their entire customer base. Its free for them too. Lets face it, they will keep peddling crap whilst they know they have a captive user base....

    2. Blackjack Silver badge

      Re: Borksoft

      That's too long.

      Is a WBA moment.

      Aka Windows Borked Again.

      Or if you want to be motr detailed then is a W10BA moment.

      Windows 10 Borked Again.

  2. Terry 6 Silver badge

    I do wonder, in these situations, whether the testing is a most obvious/easiest case only. e.g. Reboot," Check printer.Yup, printer works. Next..." Rather than thinking about , say, bolting the USB printer that no one normally bothers with ( or just bought) onto the computer that's been in use all morning.

    1. P. Lee

      Two things:

      1. Even if the printer is next to your screen, plug it into the network.

      2. How did they foul this up?

      The whole point of software layers is that you insulate the layers above from the layers below. If this just borked printers, there must be something printer-specific and USB specific, which means you've broken the layering.

      More and more I'm of the opinion that office users should run their OS in a VM which is backed up locally before every patch run.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        "1. Even if the printer is next to your screen, plug it into the network."

        I wonder how many people are currently using cheap printers at home with only a USB interface?

  3. a_yank_lurker

    Rejects Strike Again

    Brother printers are not exactly rare and this would something that could be easily tested with a proper QA staff. Alas, the Rejects of Redmond are relying on the 'beta testers' to actually test something without proper procedures and often knowledge. Compound this the Rejects inability to read the reports and you have this mess.

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: Rejects Strike Again

      To be fair, as a test, for the Devilment* I just switched off my trusty little Brother HL-1110 laser printer. Rebooted and all was fine when I switched it back on.

      *I have a few recent restore points and images if I need to use them. And a Canon multifunction printer that's on wifi. But this little old USB Brother has done sterling work for printing everyday black print documents and drafts of stuff I'll print properly in colour later. For years.

  4. bombastic bob Silver badge
    Joke

    Fix one bug, grow two more

    "Windows 10 users woke up to borked printers following the monthly Microsoft bugfix party, Patch Tuesday."

    99 new bugs found in the code

    99 bugs in the code

    you take them down, patch it around

    127 new bugs found in the code

    (I saw something like that in a meme, thought it would be apprpriate)

    icon to prevent spilled coffee on keyboard

    NOTE: I appreciate the attempts at Micros~1 fixing bugs, especially the serious vulnerabilities, but they need to go back to having in-house testers when it comes to thorough testing before releasing them...

    (printer drivers, at least kernel drivers, are ALL submitted for signing now, so it's not like they don't have all of them handy, just run down the list and test 'em - tick, tick, tick, tick, *OOOPS*)

    1. sabroni Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      finally got a new keyboard then!

      Well done, all that capitalisation looked intentional!!

  5. HimInDoors

    Here we go again

    I have a Brother multi function device plugged into a Win10 desktop. The desktop knows it has a device connected but calls it 'Unspecified' rather than putting it in the printers section. A Win10 laptop can print over the network.

    I also have a Linux Mint laptop that used to be able to print over the network, using Samba, but now it cannot connect.

    Printer problems have become a regular issue after the six-monthly major updates.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @HimInDoors - Re: Here we go again

      That's why I love network connected printers. This means I have at least one computer in my house that is able to print.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yep, here we go again!

    Why in the bloody hell is Microsoft touching the code that is working just fine ? What possible new hot features does MS think we crave to see in USB printer connections ?

    1. GeekyDee

      Re: Yep, here we go again!

      Maybe in a pre-emptive protection attempt against CallStranger? https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/339275

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Yep, here we go again!

      The patch looks to have fixed some security issues in the USB stack. Evidently the fixes broke something.

  7. Mark 85

    Still waiting for Win 10 to "stable".

    Didn't happen this month again... I'll just crunch along with Win 7 and continue to be patient.

    1. Tromos

      Re: Still waiting for Win 10 to "stable".

      If by "stable" you mean "somewhere full of horse-shit", I think it's got there.

  8. jvf

    no updates for me

    I'm running 1803 with updates turned off. Everything works. I'm terrified of trying anything newer until microshaft grows a brain.

    1. HKmk23

      Re: no updates for me

      absolutley same here, more likely that someone will write a win 7 or 10 look alike that will run windows software. I hope......

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @HKmk23 - Re: no updates for me

        My Windows 7 machines are running just fine, thank you very much. It's true I've stopped updating them 18 months before EOL so Microsoft didn't have the change to preemptively bork them.

        I was also happy with Windows XP (virtual machines of course for hardware support reasons) until about one year ago but I had to quit though it is still working just fine. What really killed it is not Microsoft but Firefox and anti-virus vendors that stopped supporting it.

  9. redpawn

    A Letter to Yourself

    Send yourself a Love PDF letter and print it with your favorite non Micros~t distro.

  10. chivo243 Silver badge

    Weird things lately... I've had to reinstall network printers on a few Win10 installs, also Edge keeps becoming the default pdf viewer. Not all users experienced the issues.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wrong news.

    Windows 10 works with printers?

    It working would be news, it breaking is expected/the norm.

  12. This post has been deleted by its author

  13. Danny 2

    HP laptop keyboard borked

    2nd time this has happened after a Windows update 1st time was fixed by the next update, not this time though, random unrelated keys. I'll be fetching my Lenovo and installing Linux on this brick.

    If I want an update I am perfectly capable of choosing it. Three unwanted and damaging updates in a fortnight is corporate malfeasance.

    1. Dave K

      Re: HP laptop keyboard borked

      My approach with updates is always to wait a couple of weeks after the update is released before installing it. I figure that I'm far more likely to be negatively affected by a bug in the update than by an unpatched exploit during those two weeks. Usually after a couple of weeks, any major issues have been reported and I can then decide if they're an issue for me.

      Of course for Windows 10, it involves either 3rd party tools, or manipulating the Windows Update service to gain this level of control (my main PC is still on Windows 7, so less of an issue). Still, it's a sad state of affairs when I consider that damage to the functionality of my PC is far more likely to come from Microsoft than 3rd party malware...

      1. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: HP laptop keyboard borked

        I prefer to run updates on family PC as soon as I can - when I'm sat in front of it and have the time to sort out the issues.

        And rely on reimaging for any really nasty nasties.

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: HP laptop keyboard borked

      I wonder whether this update has anything to do with a Win10(1909) HP desktop which this week has decided to not see the USB ports, no printer attached but it only supports USB keyboard and mouse...

  14. Blackjack Silver badge

    Windows 10 borked again

    Just had to bork yet again

    What an inglorious feeling

    I am really unhappy again!

  15. JohnHMorris

    Brother Network Printer Fail Too . . .

    Field Report: MS update for Windows 10 two days ago (now 14th June, 2020) took out a Brother MFC-5460CN inkjet printer, which uses standard MS built-in driver. Configured as a network printer on a LAN. Removing the new KB fixed the problem. Well ovver two hours of time from discovery, thru diagnosis, to fix. Including unnecessary reboots of multiple machines etc. etc.. For the record we use Exchange for email and web services. Encourage the vendor to be forthcoming about issues.

  16. ovation1357

    My experience of printing in Windows 10 has been that is was pretty shit to start with... I ended up wasting hours a few months back because serval laptops in an office couldn't print PDFs to any printer... As is customary with all Microsoft software the error message amounted to 'something isn't working'...

    As is also customary with Microsoft software a search for the error message led me to a Microsoft forum containing months' worth of people reporting the same error but no answers.

    I followed a few ideas posted by helpful, well-meaning contributors and ended up deleting a load of files to supposedly reset the Windows printing subsystem. Half a day later, after a fresh install of the printer drivers i found myself back at square one, at which point I gave up trying to fix it!

    The problem was that anything that was a Windows "app", such as the built in PDF viewer could not print, whilst traditional programs could print just fine. So as the only printing requirement was for PDFs I just found a suitable non-microsoft viewer and installed that instead.

    My temptation at that point was to install Ubuntu because although CUPS isn't perfect, it is pretty damn good and is fairly easy to debug if it's not working. Given the business in question relies primarily on Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a web browser there's a strong argument for ditching Win10.

    Am I surprised by this latest borkage? Not at all! I just wish there was a way to persuade people to vote with their feet and switch to the alternatives (I'm a big Linux fan but wouldn't want to discredit macOS or ChromeOS as also being good alternatives)

  17. Colonel Mad

    Ah

    That explains it, thanks! (Canon MG4250)

  18. x 7

    sounds like an old problem first seen in Office 2010

    sounds like history repeating itself - this was a problem in Office 2010, especially with the virtualised starter edition

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-suite-issues/prevent-office-from-disabling-printers

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