A big Patch Tuesday

October 2010

[bill]

I received the monthly security bulletin from Microsoft just a few hours ago. The list of patches was well beyond what I normally see, so I wasn't surprised to see 22 critical/important patches waiting for me at Windows Update. Several of these look quite ominous.

This is a large collection and will vary depending on your OS. I'm downloading them now...

[Brett_Tabke]

There are some for Win7, Vista, and XP. (71meg for win7).

I wonder what effect these updates have on overall internet bandwidth on tuesdays and wednesdays?

[bill]

and Server 2003 & 2008, in addition to several Microsoft Office products.

[tangor]

85mb for XP64, and went smoothly. 71mb for Vista. What hasn't been said, and should, is thanks MS for staying the course, and for Office products, too. I think we all forget from time to time, how complex the underlying code our "computers" has become, and this comment is for Linux guys and gals, too, which have similar problems. If we lived in a perfect world there would be no script kiddies attempting scams on "flaws" which were not flaws when first written, just poorly secured.

[jdMorgan]

Just a note that one or more of these patches takes a very long time to complete in the reboot shutdown phase, in the pre-OS-boot phase, and in the post-boot, pre-login phase. I had the to fight the suspicion that something had gone very wrong, and wait out a reboot process that took about five times longer than normal. This was on a fast Win7 machine with a normal power-on to completely-ready-to-use time of 35 seconds or so.

So whatever they did in there, they did a lot of it, and it takes time -- Go get a cup of coffee or something instead of sweating it out like I did...

Jim

[Robert Charlton]

Thanks for the reports of installation and reboot experience. These updates are always a slightly frightening situation.

[henry0]

Well, yesterday, at the beginning, I did not even noticed it!
Was alerted by system slightly slowing down while I was editing php with UE.
Went really well.
Wins7 64 quite powerful.

[HuskyPup]

My download last night was about 31mb for Win7 64 bit and went without any problems however I have very few MS programs, interestingly none of my Vista or XP machines have yet received the update message.

[idolw]

Hopefully this finally installs some 10 Win7 updates which couldn't get installed in the last few weeks on my PC.

[Seb7]

I review each one before I risk putting the updates through my server, mainly because I find many of them are not relevant to me. But now I find myself not updating because I cant seem to find out what the update is for. Information is getting so vague.

[BillyS]

Were these updates pushed out to machines already, or are they in the queue for next Tuesday? I don't remember seeing a big update on our XP machine. I need to look at the Windows 7 laptop tonight.

[jdMorgan]

These updates have already been pushed out. I posted a heads-up about a very slow post-update re-boot process above.

Jim

[Robert Charlton]

It's Wednesday morning where I am on the US west coast, and I've just been alerted that I have XP patches waiting to download. Here goes... in a few minutes. For the past several updates, at least, they've seemed to spread these over a couple of days... ie, Tues has become Wed for me. ;)

[tangor]

Tues has become Wed for me.

One can always be proactive and use Windows Update to grab (jump to the front of the line) the latest updates. And/Or, if Updates are turned OFF (why?) one won't be notified.

I do both (updates on, proactively look for) because these patches are, for the most part, more beneficial than not.

[Brett_Tabke]

HEADS up. Dunno what the deal is, but about an hour ago 4 machines decided that my MS Office Pro 2007 was no longer "genuine". All 4 machines were updated today. Office was purchased at Frys.

[BillyS]

Dunno what the deal is, but about an hour ago 4 machines decided that my MS Office Pro 2007 was no longer "genuine".

That's strange, running XP with Microsoft Office Small Business and didn't have a problem. How did you discover this? Did you get a warning of sorts?

[bill]

I've had copies of Office 2007 do something similar in previous updates. It asks you to reverify the copies online. It's a disconcerting message to receive, but in my case the solution was to simply click OK on a dialog box to reverify that my software was genuine with Microsoft.

[tangor]

Sufficient Registry entries change that a re-verification is required. But I agree with bill... it does sound scary!

[Rugles]

I had a month old machine using Win 7 go down after the update. Can not get Windows to boot all the way.

My local hardware guy (who we buy all our machines from) said he has several other customers with the exact same problem. It had to do with the Update we downloaded last week. He knows how to fix it. When he brings back the box, I will get details.