Wednesday, June 12, 2013

WARNING - latest Windows update may cause problems


Obviously, one swallow doesn't make a summer, and one user's experience doesn't indicate a trend:  but I installed the latest Windows updates this evening, and my computer went bonkers!  Ultra-slow, buggy, stumbling . . . very bad news.  I tried three or four fixes before giving up and restoring to a pre-update version of the operating system.  I'm currently running Spybot, Ad-Aware and a few other utilities to make sure I didn't pick up anything nasty from somewhere else, but they're clean so far.

Just a word of caution to those of you who haven't yet installed the latest Windows updates;  they may cause problems.  Make sure you create a system restore point before you update!

I won't put more blog posts up tonight, until the update/re-update/system-check process is complete.  Check back for more tomorrow morning.

Peter

12 comments:

Rev. Paul said...

Mine are working okay, so far - but they haven't rebooted since the update process was complete. Thanks for the heads-up.

Toejam said...

Was the update that's causing your computer problems listed as:

"critical",

or just

"important"?

When I get an update notification I only run the "critical" ones.

Old NFO said...

Oh lovely, and I'm leaving on a road trip this morning...

Billll said...

Mine started doing all t5hat when I last updated Avast. Just installed the Windows updates, and it seems to be working fine.

perlhaqr said...

Is that Windows 7 or 8?

Borepatch said...

That's not good news, because the Internet Explorer fix in that update is pretty important. If you drop back to a restore point, don't use IE.

PMain said...

IF you think it's Malware/Spyware related. I would suggest downloading & running Combofix from Bleeping Computers. Afterwards, MalwareByte's anti-malware & Spyware Terminator - both free & downloadable from download.com.

Kansas Scout said...

The reboot following the restart following the update was unsuccessful and ominous but a retry was successful. I had me going for a bit this morning.

jwontheriver said...

I TRIED THAT "COMBOFIX". IT DESTROYED MY LAPTOP...

The Great and Powerful Oz said...

Install Linux.

Anonymous said...

Thanks OZ you beat me to it. I spend 8-12 hours a day as a EE on a windows box where I day-dream about my company switching to Linux. My Linux computers at home are FAST, clean, no annoying Microsoft updates. I do all the security updates though of course. With so many distros available, you'll find one with a setup that works for you or better yet build one yourself. Having to use the command line so much can occasionally be frustrating, but its usually quite liberating. I could go on and on, but I'm sure you've played with it before at some point. I think you'd really like using a GNU system like Trisquel. Windows seems to be a dying OS to me. When your CEO has to give millions upon millions to foreign nations to try to keep them from adopting the free/superior alternative, you know you're fighting a losing battle (Turkey and Pardus OS).

Cheers!

Linda said...

I started the latest Win 7 update at 11 p.m. last night. As of 6:30 a.m. it shows 8 of 12 updates done. This seems to be an excessively long time. It's apparently the computer, or the updates, as I'm on the laptop, using the wi-fi, so the HSI seems to be OK. If it's locked up, or something, what are my options?

Thanks!