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posted by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @09:45PM   Printer-friendly

Microsoft's first cumulative update for Windows 10 - KB3081424 - is causing havoc for some users. How do I know this? Because I spent a good part of my Sunday morning dealing with it, that's how.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the update puts affected systems into an endless crash loop. The update tries to install, gets to a certain point, fails, and then displays the unhelpful "We couldn't complete the updates, undoing the changes."

If it stopped there things wouldn't be too bad, but because Microsoft now forces updates onto Windows 10 users, the OS kept trying - and failing - to install the update, which in turn placed the system into a periodic crash/reboot loop that put quite a dent in my productivity.

To make matters worse, the tool that Microsoft released to hide or block toxic Windows 10 updates (as reported by my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott) didn't allow me to prevent this update from attempting to install. So I was forced to either abandon the machine until a fix was made available or try to fix it myself.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-cumulative-update-causes-reboot-loop-havoc-for-some-users/


Original Submission

Submitted from IRC.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @11:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @11:23PM (#220974)

    Remember back in July 2014 when Microsoft laid off about 12,500 employees? http://www.zdnet.com/article/beyond-12500-former-nokia-employees-who-else-is-microsoft-laying-off/ [zdnet.com]

    Among those were "dedicated testers" in the Windows group. You're welcome.

    Also, consider the previous release dates for the previous major consumer versions of Windows (via Wikipedia):

    Windows 7: Release To Manufacturing: July 22, 2009. General Availability: October 22, 2009.
    Windows 8: Release To Manufacturing: August 1, 2012. General Availabilty: October 26, 2012.

    Normally, "Release to Manufacturing" is a code freeze where Microsoft ships a gold master to the PC OEMs (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) so they can then perform their own hardware testing and qualifications, which takes about 2 months. In the interest of a misguided attempt at "agile development" ( http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-the-21st-century/ [arstechnica.com] ), Microsoft decided to make some ultra-aggressive changes:

    1. Change the release schedule to make Windows 10 available to the public on RTM release.
    2. Offer the "Free upgrade for a year" program to jump-start the adoption of the newer OS and counter another Vista malaise (so far it's working; StatCounter is measuring Windows 10 browse activity at 3.5%: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/09/windows_10_climbs_to_355_per_cent_market_share_win_81_dips/ [theregister.co.uk] ).
    3. Make security updates mandatory (except for Professional and Enterprise customers) and constant (i.e.: no more "Patch Tuesday", just a constant flood of half-broken updates).
    4. Make driver updates mandatory and automatic, overriding administrator discretion, and fighting with vendor-supplied update mechanisms (there's already been an ugly situation with NVidia driver updaters being preempted by Windows 10's updater).

    This is all a giant burning runaway train of a situation, and the press isn't going to provide adequate coverage until it starts setting other things on fire. This reboot loop is the first, and is frankly an amateurish failure of testing (Windows should be able to handle unresolvable SIDs, as they occur all the time in Active Directory domains when old users are deleted). This is almost as bad as last August's patch that triggered a Blue Screen of Death if there were shortcuts in the Fonts folder ( http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/blue-screen-stop-0x50-after-applying-update/6da4d264-02d8-458e-89e2-a78fe68766fd?auth=1 [microsoft.com] ).

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @11:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @11:44PM (#220983)

    Well, they did appoint someone to CEO that looks like a hipster that's impersonating Steve Jobs. So no surprises there at all.