Born, Brinkmann: Microsoft’s hotfix service is no longer available

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I’d have a hard time extrapolating to all hotfixes in all situations, but Martin Brinkmann has hit upon a very disturbing trend: System administrators
[See the full post at: Born, Brinkmann: Microsoft’s hotfix service is no longer available]

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Elly, wdburt1, satrow, Fred

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I am not very informed on this, what exactly is the Microsoft hotfix service and how does it affect Windows 7 users?

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I’m guessing that this is the service where they offered fixes for very specific issues but advised that they weren’t fully tested and to only install it if you were experiencing the problem described in the KB article. You could request the hotfix via a web form and they’d send you a download link via e-mail.

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Great Lake Bunyip, woody

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Windows 7 is definitely in Microsoft cross-hairs. End of Life is all about discontinuing maintenance, so starting with the hot fix service is an obvious warning message. They are turning the screws.

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Kranium

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Relying on custom hotfixes has always been a risky proposition for us as customers.  This has been the case for 20 years, and Microsoft has been desperate to move away from the practice.

I have personally gone through the whole process of having a hotfix created for a bug in Windows XP, only to have that fix not be present in a critical security update that updated the same file.  Microsoft wouldn’t ship my fix with the security update because it was a security htofix.  Fair enough…… but it meant I lost the hotfix.

It sucks.  The Cumulative Update model with its combined security + quality fixes has its problems, but it is completely suitable as a replacement for the broken hotfix model.

This isn’t a Windows-specific problem either. Linux distributions have been dealing with this for 20 years.  Any given release of RHEL or whatever shipped with a specific version of the Linux kernel, which they didn’t upgrade in order to avoid major behaviour changes….. but they still needed to backport security and bug fixes.  RHEL provides 10+ years of support, just like Microsoft, so you can imagine how much harder this gets over time.

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Great Lake Bunyip, sldc88

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I have not used a fixit in a long time now. In fact, I have not had a problem I needed a fix for on a Windows 7 system in 18 months now. That’s across 130 Win7 systems. 18 months ago, I stopped all Microsoft updates of any kind on all Win7 systems. They rarely have a problem. In fact, the last problem was a complete mobo failure. These systems just run, day in, day out. No problem. In fact, Microsoft could disappear tomorrow and none of us would care or be affected.

CT

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walker, Elly, FakeNinja, wdburt1, sldc88, The Surfing Pensioner

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Since it doesn’t work anymore , should we remove it?

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Already noticed Fixits disappearing yesterday. Thankfully there was still the link to the registry equivalent that worked, but yes, the Microsoft article, which is supposed to host an SMB security policy Fixit is still there, but no actual Fixit on the page any more.

No matter where you go, there you are.

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Microsoft Fixits stopped working for me on Win 7 Pro x64bit as far back as about 2014. Not only was I unable to search for them and find any, I would get an announcement from either Microsoft or Windows that a Fixit was no longer available if I tried to use one that I already had downloaded. Searches would land me on a Microsoft page telling me the same thing (ie:, “Fixits are discontinued”). So … your post is startling to me. I thought Fixits had been discontinued long ago. Hm-m. Thanks for your post.

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Almost all hotfixes were specific to hardware and software configuration and never meant to be used without consulting Microsoft support. It’s amazing that people do not trust Microsoft, but install patches on their own (maybe because some ‘expert’ refered to) without having a clue whether a patch was targeting their hardware/software configuration. Well! Silly people do because they can…

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Surprisingly, most users were avoiding hotfixes, and treat them like nuclear devices
although, all problems were coming from important security updates, not hotfixes
so, i’m not sure why this is concerning for them? 😀

Hotfix model was the fun part of Windows 7 and 8.1, not like the boring Rollup model

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Microfix

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You lost all fun. LDR is dead. 🙂

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On the contrary, LDR won the battle and prevailed, but already lost the war 😀

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I was under the impression that there was a nice try to merge GDR and LDR under the same umbrella which was supposed to be LDR when KB3125774 – Convenience rollup update for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 was released, but that it was abandoned in favour of the regular updates which are more or less GDR.
For those who might be confused by the acronyms:
GDR – General Distribution Release – more or less all public releases for mass consumption
LDR – Limited Distribution Release – more or less private hotfixes, rarely on Windows Update, generally bundled with other updates as prerequisites and installed silently when on Windows Update and they are those affected by the current issue discussed here.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvistanow/2008/03/11/what-is-the-difference-between-general-distribution-and-limited-distribution-releases/

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mrsnrub/2009/05/14/gdr-qfe-ldr-wth/

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geekdom

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Funny, just a week ago I was using the hotfix service to get updates for Windows 98! (Yes, they still hosted hotfixes all the way until Windows 95). It’s a shame they discontinued the service. The only way to get those hotfixes now is if you either backed them up (as I did) or use the hotfix-share website.

Now Windows 7 users won’t be able to get the hotfixes to enable NVMe and TPM 2.0 support. Almost as if Microsoft doesn’t want people to make Windows 7 usable on modern systems…

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walker

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VirusTotal
URL:     http://thehotfixshare.net/board/index.php?
Detection ratio:     0 / 67
Analysis date:     2018-11-06 15:37:05 UTC ( 0 minutes ago )

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