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Woody Leonhard of Infoworld summarizes the current state of Microsoft KB 2919355, the ambiguously-titled 'Windows 8.1 Update' (not to be confused with the update _to_ Windows 8.1).
In short: Microsoft has frozen two discussion threads on KB2919355 issues (after 103 and 116 pages of comments), and updated the Knowledge Base article with workarounds for seven major errors... some of which don't work.
In last week's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft changed their deadline for this Update until June (formerly they were requiring all Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 systems worldwide to have installed the Update in order to receive new patches).
Meanwhile, if you run a WSUS server, you may notice that the package for KB291355 (last reissued for the third time on 6 May) was apparently silently reissued over the weekend with a new release date of '15 May 2014', but there's no indication of any software updates in the KB article. The article revision number, however, now stands at '21.0'. Yes, twenty-one revisions. With no changelog.
Anyone else with interesting stories about your deployment issues with this Update?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Monday May 19 2014, @02:05PM
Is there any essential software that can't run on WinXP? or even Win7?
How does one get Win7?
And if the software has a BSD or Linux version. Microsoft is redundant.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Monday May 19 2014, @02:19PM
Hmm. Well, the header files in all of my projects that compile on MS Windows explicitly target XP. That way they run on XP and Win7 and Win8.
heh, no "Where's Vista". Protip: W8 is the new Vista.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 19 2014, @02:35PM
How do you handle the Microsoft EOL on WinXP ..?
How low version can one target and still have decent functionality on Win 8.1? ie Win3.11, W95, W98, Win2000 etc..?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 20 2014, @12:31AM
XP Compatibility mode still exists in Win8.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Monday May 19 2014, @03:20PM
I've installed both Vista and 8.1 recently, and had no issues with either. (Well, other than the general UI madness in 8.1)
I suspect the worst parts of Vista have been Windows Update'd away over the years - it runs fine now on my old desktop machine.
(I never touched Vista back when it was new, so I can't really compare.)
(Score: 1) by bootsy on Monday May 19 2014, @04:58PM
Your thoughts echo my experiences. Vista was appalling but service pack 2 makes it stable and usable. It's basically Win 7 with a slightly older GUI at that point although it still needs slightly more memory than Win 7.
I found the one Vista machine I had wouldn't take the SP 1 upgrade and I needed to download and run the Microsoft Upgrade diagnosis tool which sorts out any corruption or duff updates that may have occurred on the machine.
The updates take ages and it would be quicker to just install a Linux distro from scratch, but if you have Vista and you paid for it with your machine you may as well get it working well.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Monday May 19 2014, @02:33PM
There isn't any.
TW 8.1 is for two groups of people...
- Fanboys that want the latest and greatest,
- People that buy new computers and have no idea what they are doing.
There is no compelling reason to move to 8.1
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 19 2014, @02:49PM
Any tip for what to do with computers that are only offered with Win8 ..?
Even if one has clue, if there's a choice of Win8 with 3GHz or Win8 with 3.1GHz. It will still be Win8..
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday May 19 2014, @02:55PM
Yes - don't buy them.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 19 2014, @04:18PM
So if your stuck with Win8 laptop. What do you do then?
(I know Linux is a possibility or BSD. But in some cases windows is what one has to deal with.)
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Monday May 19 2014, @11:53PM
Classic shell. Do not depend on Linux or even Windows 7 working with the BIOS on a Windows 8 computer. Secure Boot and short (or entirely missing) time windows to press "alternate start" keys can be your undoing. Windows 7 stops shipping in October on OEM machines; I'm desperately hoping to have a decent job outside that support market by then.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Monday May 19 2014, @03:04PM
System76 [system76.com] or similar. You could also buy a Mac, but that's funding a different flavour of the same sort of abuse. I have a System76 laptop and will be buying another shortly.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by number6x on Monday May 19 2014, @03:35PM
I bought a new laptop last week. It came with Windows. Windows 8.1 I think.
I never booted Windows. My first boot was with a USB stick that had Clonezilla [clonezilla.org] on it. I copied the contents of the SSD to a USB drive.
Then I booted Linux Mint 17 RC1 off of a USB drive and installed it. It's been working smooth. I'll try a few more distros before settling on whichever one plays nicest with the hardware. (Fedora 20, Debian Wheezy, OpenSuse 13.1, Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, Arch, manjaro...). It's still not hard to find a Windows 7 machine. You may have to check the business or professional sections of retailers offerings.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by cubancigar11 on Monday May 19 2014, @03:33PM
Hey hey. You obviously don't own a SSD otherwise you would run to buy Windows 8.1
I don't know how it was when it was launched because I avoided it like plague, but the current version is actually better than Windows 7. If I ever see the dreaded squares, it is may be once a day when I accidently press windows key. Then I immideately press it again and forget that it exists.
Already a bunch of people have told 'use linux' and 'use mac'. It is easy for those who have never tried Windows 8.1 to that. To them, I dual boot into Gentoo for driver development and Ubuntu for normal development (self-learning).
Also, if you play games, Windows 8 will give +3 to +5 fps gain. On my shitty card I was able to use enb for Skyrim only after I upgraded to Windows 8.
NOTE:
Modders, let us try to improve the discussion here than turning it into a circle jerk that slashdot has become.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19 2014, @04:42PM
An SSD? A solid state drive? Why would I want Windows 8.1 just because I have an SSD?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday May 19 2014, @07:08PM
So it's almost back up to XP levels?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday May 20 2014, @07:59AM
XP doesn't support 64 bit. Check-mate.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 20 2014, @02:24PM
Windows XP x64 Edition [wikipedia.org]
Granted, everybody I've heard from say it sucks, and technically no version of XP is supported anymore, but hey.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday May 21 2014, @08:40AM
I knew about that version :) I tried it once, it sucked so hard I consider that bringing that in an argument as unfair :P (try finding drivers for it, for example).
(Score: 1) by goody on Tuesday May 20 2014, @02:53AM
So buying an SSD makes you want a lousy dysfunctional user interface? I guess I'm glad I don't own one.
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday May 20 2014, @07:53AM
If by lousy dysfunctional user interface you mean Windows 7, then to each on your own.
You surely didn't miss the part where I said that the dreaded squares (I don't remember its marketing term, tiles is it?) aren't actually forced on you?
The only and the only problem one will encounter is the lack of start menu, which is supposed to be fixed by the latest update. But the only people who needed that were average users, not power users who I thought this portal consists off. Press Windows-S and use it. Or pin down the most used applications.
You will chew those words in future, so I am not worried.
(Score: 2) by crutchy on Tuesday May 20 2014, @08:47AM
you seem to be implying that windows 8.1 requires an SSD to be usable
i doubt your microsoft handlers would approve of that :-P
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday May 20 2014, @10:27AM
That is why I installed it.
> i doubt your microsoft handlers would approve of that :-P :D We aren't THAT famous yet.
(Score: 1) by goody on Wednesday May 21 2014, @12:57AM
Windows 7 had a dandy interface. Windows 8 screwed it all up, that's pretty much what most users are saying, especially power users. However, there are plenty of other problems beyond the lack of a start menu.
I lied. Actually I do own an SSD. It's in my Macbook Pro. I didn't buy it because it had an SSD, I bought it because the whole package is a joy to use. Most people will end up using Windows 8, but not by choice. They'll run it because Microsoft end-of-lifed Windows 7 and they need Windows to run applications they've been using for years. With Windows 8, Microsoft has an OS that people will run not because they want to, but because they have to. I own a Windows 8 license. I bought a Lenovo laptop last year which came with Windows 8 but is running Linux Mint. This business model of forced upgrades and breaking the product in order to further an ideology (i.e. one OS on all devices, optimized for tablets) may work in the short term, but long term it's going to kill Microsoft.
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday May 21 2014, @09:03AM
People have been saying that since 2002, when I first started reading slashdot. M$ will die because of this or that. Meanwhile their cash reserves keep increasing and they have survived a moronic CEO for such a long time that it in itself is legendary. You see, it is not just Microsoft that will fail, it will be the whole ecosystem - companies selling software to industries in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals etc. where a single license costs more than a million - they all will have to find alternatives. They will all have to throw away the COM and OLE and what not and rewrite everything for another OS with altogether different UIs. They are the ones keeping Microsoft alive. They are the ones who have to port everything because Excel 2013 API is totally different than Excel 2010 API. And they will do that because it is still cheaper than rewriting everything for OpenOffice.org (or libre office).
And THAT is getting repeated since Windows 98. Still, I agree with you. But that doesn't make Windows 8 as sucky as you are painting it to be. I repeat, Windows 7 interface is still their - except the start menu. There are alternatives [extremetech.com] but I almost never used to use 'All programs' in Windows 7 start menu so I never had this problem.
But anyway, what are the other problems with Windows 8? So far I haven't found a single problem that is not UI related so I am genuinely interested.
(Score: 1) by goody on Saturday May 24 2014, @01:05PM
"The Windows interface is still there, except the start menu" is like saying "the new car dashboard is just like the old one, except we removed the steering wheel." I'm not going to enumerate the issues with the Win 8 UI. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have documented the issues in forums, on Youtube, and other places. Corporate IT isn't adopting 8. In fact, they're doing everything they can to avoid rollouts. If you think at this point that there's no issue with Windows 8, nothing I write here will convince you there is a problem.
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Sunday May 25 2014, @03:25AM
I explicitly wrote about non-UI related issue. Your reply with "Hundreds, perhaps thousands" of UI issues.
Okay.
(Score: 1) by goody on Monday May 26 2014, @12:21PM
No, read my post again. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of *people* have written about issues with Windows8, not hundreds or thousands of UI issues. Perhaps it wasn't apparent in a quick reading of the post, but the subject of the sentence was "people". There are a handful of UI issues, but they're big ones. Regardless if you were writing about a non-UI related issue, your original premise of those people with SSDs will want Windows 8 is... strange, for a lack of a better term. Saying the only problem one will encounter is the lack of a start menu is glossing over several other bad UI issues, like how you get the Charm Bar to come out, how there's no way to know how to exit a full screen Metro app, control panel and search weirdness...
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday May 27 2014, @05:01AM
There is a cross button on top of metro apps, that you can click to quit. They are handled differently so they might appear in task manager. But they will be killed if a process requests the ownership of the common resource, kind of like android. In either case, if you are using metro app you are surely not complaining about desktop experience, isn't it. There are literally 0 apps I have ever used in my last 3 months of usage.
(Score: 1) by DMS on Monday May 19 2014, @04:01PM
People working at companies with a business model that involves a Windows-only software ecosystem and a mandate to have equipment that's under warranty. As far as slapping Windows 7 on a machine fresh off the assembly line and getting all the drivers you need, that's viable minutely less than 100% of the time and only destined to fall. *nix for all your computing needs? Nice setup if you can pay all your bills and make no compromises.
(Score: 3, Funny) by lennier on Monday May 19 2014, @09:49PM
Well, there's Not Getting Pwned 2014, for one. It's very popular with users, but no longer available for XP.
Delenda est Beta