Looking forward to the end of Tuesday? You've patched this month's 37 Microsoft bugs, right? True to its word, Microsoft released nine security patches this month, two of which are rated as critical. The company said that the August edition of Patch Tuesday addresses a total of 37 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities. Most of the flaws will be addressed by the cumulative Internet Explorer security update. The browser …
If Adobe Reader was JUST a PDF view and print application WITHOUT any form of scripting then it would be far safer (and smaller). (The same also applies to Flash - a version with no scripting would be far safer.) The scripting versions of these programs are needed only infrequently but the UNWANTED presence of the scripting capability increases the hazards in Web browsing for very little gain.
By the same logic scripting should be removed from ms Office ..
It probably should.
However macros do have their places in spreadsheets. As they do to some extent in word processors (or we could go back to WordStar and MailMerge).
And of course nothing is ever enough. You start with some simple scripting capabilities. There are always some functionality that need to be added, and then some more. Vicious circle.
Once again a Windows Update prevented me from booting up last month - professional help was needed. Please can anyone provide the address of a site which collects accurate data about updates which are potentially damaging? Surely someone is running some tests somewhere or maybe collating data from early victims.
Usually updates create a restore point, and if the machine can't boot you can get back to it. If you often end up in troubles like that (but did you identify the root cause? Was it an update flaw, or your configuratin has issues, i.e. a badly written driver?), you should update first a test system and validate updates for your site. Or if you don't have a test syste, wait a few days to install updates - maybe just some of them, for example those patching the kernel - and check if anybody signal troubles for them, knowing your machine(s) could be at risk until fully patched.
Issues should be reported to Microsoft, you can find info on several sites, but the official source is MS support site.
yep windows update should make you a restore point before the update installs, you can then boot up in to recovery and restore to that point if you need too. Also like LDS says wait for a week or so to find out if any reports of updates fecking up windows come to light. We also run some VM's which pretty much match our production boxes and we test updates on these first
Tens of millions of Windows machines manage to apply Windows updates without any drama every month. If you've been unlucky enough to encounter problems more than once, it would suggest that there's something out of the ordinary with your system. That's not much consolation for you when you're dealing with the hassle of recovering from this kind of problem, but you might have better success in fending off these issues by focusing on what's different about your machine, rather than focusing entirely on the inevitable updates.
Waiting a week to see what breaks for other people won't help you much if nobody else encounters the problems that you're encountering, and I don't recall any widespread complaints about recent Patch Tuesday updates.
Last night patch Tuesday hit my main Win7 machine - 14 discrete patches/updates applied along with a mandatory reboot which was paused whilst 45486 update operations were actioned...
Would be interested to know why MS changed from simply reporting the installation of whole patch/updates (ie. 14) with the discrete update actions spawned from them.
Thanks muchly for all the advice - I'll just briefly answer a few of the points.
I appreciate that "tens of millions of Windows machines manage to apply Windows updates without any drama every month". That's true - I'm usually part of the club. But, along with too many others, I 'regularly' get caught out!
I will say that it's an unrewarding and time-consuming task to navigate the official M$ site (will avoid ranting at this point).
I had created various restore points before Windows Updating but, on boot up, it proved impossible to use this option (I won't bore you with details).
As I indicated before the IT engineer made it very clear to me that the problem was with the Windows Update service - rather than "badly written drivers" etc.
IMHO it is M$ themselves should be doing the testing beforehand - not us.
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