It’s a few days before Windows 10 is officially slated to drop, and still, confusion abounds. Worse, many fallacies regarding Microsoft’s plans around upgrades and support for Win10 remain in circulation, despite efforts to dispel them.
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(Insider Story)With Windows 10 out but customized hardware only starting to appear, there may never be a better time to buy a discounted Windows 8.1 machine -- whether you intend to keep Win 8.1 or upgrade for free to Windows 10. With an eye toward making the upgrade, I put six of the best and most popular 13-inch laptops through my extensive, real-world, “can I really live and work with them” test.
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(Insider Story)With Microsoft saying that 110 million PCs run Windows 10, you’ve no doubt encountered a problem or two or three, either with your upgrades or with those of your colleagues, family, or friends. Of course, we’ll never see statistics on the number of folks who were coerced into installing Windows 10, which happens when Windows Update won’t work because it’s frozen on the Win10 payload. We’ll never know the number of systems that were upgraded and rolled back. But even if a tiny percentage of those 100 million machines hit hiccups, the total number of problems is enormous.
I’ve bumped into many different problems, and I bet you have, too.
Here’s my attempt to address the most frequent Windows 10 installation problems, including initial setup problems. Hopefully the advice and pointers will help ease the pain, should you find yourself trapped between the offal and the impeller.
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Three months into Microsoft’s “Windows as a Service” strategy, many of us expected to see significant progress in plugging the many holes in the “RTM” July 29 build 10240 release of Windows 10. Unfortunately, Windows 10 version 1511 -- aka Threshold 2, Fall Update, build 10586 -- takes only tiny steps in that direction.
On the positive side, one flagrant problem with activation has been solved, and several apps -- Skype, Edge, Mail, Phone, and the media apps -- are distinctly better. There’s better support for high-resolution monitors. And Win10 version 1511 is certainly more stable than the July 29 RTM version. Win10 version 1511 has better drivers across the board, and the installation and upgrade routines aren’t as insistent on yanking out manually installed drivers.
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If you’re having problems with Windows 10’s forced updates, you’re not alone. Thankfully, with 11 cumulative updates behind us, we’ve accumulated some coping experience.
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(Insider Story)Microsoft desperately needs to simplify its patching process, but the latest change to how it rolls out updates for Windows 10 adds little to the mix except more confusion.
Earlier this week Microsoft patching honcho Michael Niehaus published details of new update options for Windows 10, version 1703. His article left me scratching my head—I didn’t see much, if anything, that was new.
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Microsoft’s charge to modernize its products can be described as lethargic, at best. April saw tiny gains in Windows 10 usage, while Edge flatlined. The bigger news is that since overtaking Windows in popularity last month, Android has since increased its lead.
Depending on whose numbers you trust, on the desktop Windows 7 still has half the market, Windows 10 has about a quarter, and Microsoft's heavily marketed Edge browser registers as little more than a rounding-off error.
NetMarketshare—which counts unique monthly visitors to its sites, and weighs scores to adjust for country variations—says that Windows 10 usage worldwide nudged up less than a percentage point last month, from 25.36 percent in March to 26.28 percent in April.
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For those of you who follow the inner workings at Microsoft, the news this morning will come as a shock. Julie Larson-Green, the sole senior Windows executive to survive when Steve Sinofsky exited the company, will step down from her current duties leading the Office user interface design effort.
Todd Bishop at GeekWire reports that Larson-Green is recovering from spinal surgery:
She’s expected to make a full recovery. However, based on discussions with her doctor, she decided a change was needed to focus more fully on her recovery and physical therapy.
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The fact that you can put a VBScript program inside an Outlook Form and have it execute—even if Outlook has been told not to run macros—has been raising red flags this week. But in spite of what you may have read, that questionable behavior isn’t readily exploited. There’s no gaping security hole to see here. Move along.
Yesterday, Richard Chirgwin at The Register wrote how a Pen-tester was able to get past Microsoft VB macro barriers. The article points to research published late last week by etienne at Sensepost. To make a long story short, yes it’s possible to write a VBScript program, attach it to an Outlook Form, and have the script do nearly anything on a PC (“within the context of the logged-on user”) when the Form is used.
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It looks like we have another bad nonsecurity patch.
As best I can tell, the patch—KB 3128031 for Office 2010—is still available on the Microsoft Catalog, but direct links on the KB page return a “This site can’t be reached” or a 404 “Sorry, this download is no longer available” page.
A few hours ago, an anonymous poster on the AskWoody Lounge raised the alarm:
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Microsoft’s getting better at rolling out new versions of Windows 10, with a decrease in the initial patching rate and far fewer showstopping bugs. But we’re still a long way from Creators Update stability, and there’s still very little reason to upgrade from the Anniversary Update to the Creators Update manually.
One month ago, Microsoft rolled out Windows 10 Creators Update, version 1703, build 15063.13. Since then there have been two patches: build 15062.138 on April 11 and 15063.250 on April 25. You can expect another patch next Tuesday, May 9, for a total of three cumulative updates in a little more than a month.
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Microsoft is slowly rolling out Windows 10 Creators Update, but has switched into high gear with changes to the telemetry system that helps it detect when a PC is ready to be upgraded. The branding of those recent patches, however, is confusing to many Windows customers.
On April 24, Microsoft issued a new version—the 10th revision in the past year—of the KB 3150513 snooping patch for computers running Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and Windows 10 builds 1511 and 1607. Billed as the “latest compatibility definition update for Windows,” KB 3150513’s description says:
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Tomorrow, Microsoft will likely issue another bunch of security and nonsecurity patches for all versions of Windows and Office. If May's Patch Tuesday plays out like April's did, we're going to see a lot of problems.
Now's a good time to check and make sure you aren't installing Windows or Office updates automatically. Wait a week or two and see what ghosts appear.
Speaking of ghosts, many of you are seeing an old Internet Explorer patch, KB 3008923, MS 14-080, which was the cumulative update for IE on Dec. 9, 2014. Poster abbodi86 on the AskWoody Lounge says it's a mistake and you shouldn't install it:
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It’s like Pepsi declaring that Coke won a taste test: Google Project Zero security researchers discovered a security hole in Microsoft’s Malware Protection Engine, and two days later the Microsoft Security Response Center not only fixed the bug but also rolled out the update through the usual Windows Defender update mechanism.
The bug in the main Windows Defender program was described in Security Advisory 4022344. Chances are good your Windows computer got the fix last night.
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Patch Tuesday has hit with a vengeance. Microsoft's Official Security Update Guide lists 243 Windows patches, 81 of which are critical. If you click on the Details button to show individually identified security problems (typically CVE numbers), the list swells to 997 entries. Be of good cheer. You can download the whole list into an Excel spreadsheet with a click on the Download button.
Microsoft has also published its list of May patches for Office: 36 security updates and 28 nonsecurity updates.
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Today, while Microsoft extols the virtues of Windows 10 S and HoloLens at the Build keynote, many who have an HP machine will be dealing with a new, unexpected tech problem.
Swiss security firm modzero AG released a white paper (PDF) that contains details about a keylogger in certain HP audio drivers. The keylogger stores records of all of your keystrokes in a file located in the public folder C:\Users\Public\MicTray.log.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to check to see if the MicTray keylogger is on your machine and, if so, to get rid of it.
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