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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: 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.