Don’t patch while traveling

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PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley Recently, a Plus member asked whether they should patch before leaving for vacation or could patch while on vacation. The
[See the full post at: Don’t patch while traveling]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

8 users thanked author for this post.

Norio, fisher75, windbg, TechTango, lmacri, AWRon, DLivesInTexas, abbodi86

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Does System Restore work to roll back to the status prior to the installation of a patch?

Or does Microsoft make an exception for anything related to Windows Update, so you can only rely upon a full image backup?

— AWRon

 

 

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I prefer to uninstall updates if I need to roll back.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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AWRon wrote:

Does System Restore work to roll back to the status prior to the installation of a patch?

Yes.

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I have personally seen it where system restore doesn’t fully pull back all parts of a patch.  Granted this was in the Windows 7 era, but I don’t use it as a rule so I can’t tell you if it still isn’t up to my liking.

Furthermore sometimes I just want to uninstall the patch and nothing else.  So I don’t want to roll back and possibly lose other application updates, I JUST want the Windows patch and nothing else.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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But aren’t there some updates that cannot be uninstalled?   Or was that only in the old days?

And, if an update cannot be uninstalled, will a Restore Point effectively uninstall it?

And what about updates to Office?

— AWRon

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Only SSU or servicing stack updates (the Windows update core files) can’t be uninstalled. Windows updates can be uninstalled these days.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Hi Susan:

In your experience, have there ever been real problems with SSUs such that one wishes they could have been uninstalled?

(And then of course do we know if rolling back to a Restore Point uninstalls them?)

I should state that I create a Restore Point before installing ANYTHING in Windows, and try to only install one thing at a time, so poor is installation testing by software developers these days (or so prohibitively expensive is it because of the complexity of Windows and/or the incompetence of Microsoft.)

— AWRon

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I’ve not seen an SSU cause an issue.  I’ve seen where machines can’t get an SSU installed and thus a repair install is needed.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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AWRon wrote:

Or does Microsoft make an exception for anything related to Windows Update, so you can only rely upon a full image backup?

Image backups are the absolute gold standard.  You’ll never stress about a windows update gone bad.  Minor inconvenience.

Desktop Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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Yes, but with a 1 TB drive, an image backup will take longer than creating a Restore Point.

My question really is, are Restore Points still good, or has Microsoft deprecated them?

— AWRon

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Restore Points have nothing to do with your data. They do not preserve/change any of that.
Restore points snapshot changes in the system and in some cases program installation.

Full disk images backup the entire contents of the drive, including all the partitions. You can also make an image of a single partition. In both cases, all the contents of the target  (system and data) are backed up.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Will Fastie

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Also bear in mind, unlike “cloning a drive, an “image backup” only stores the used parts of a drive not the entire drive so they may not take as long as you might think.

I.e., an image backup of my ½ TB drive (512 GB) only takes ~10 mins since all the programs on it only use ~66 GB.

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Yeah…………..

I’m traveling, I live in the USA but I’m on a motorcycle in Belize.

I have the permanent license of Office 2021 32-bit running on the current version of Win10

I have automatic updates suspended, and have had it that way since before the June patches dropped.

Should I do the “click-to-run” patch listed on the CVE page and wait on the rest,

install all,

or do nothing except have another cold adult beverage? 

Thanks,

Jim

 

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Are you connecting to wifi spots along the way?

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Hi Susan!

Thanks for your time!

Yes, connecting to “hotel” wifi most every night but I do use a VPN.

Sorry to have left that out … I could not tell from the announcement if the VPN offered protection or not  :-/

again, THANKS!

Jim

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It does not offer protection.  Now at this time I do not see active attacks of this vulnerability.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Susan:

Do you mean Fences by Stardock, or is this another addition to Windows by Microsoft?

Thanks.

Mark

 

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Fences by Stardock.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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