July updates come with a few warts

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PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley This month’s Windows and Office updates are settling in without raising any major alarms. But it’s still early, and cauti
[See the full post at: July updates come with a few warts]

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Chessie, OscarCP, woody, abbodi86

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For those of us that don’t like change, the July 9th Office 365 update has some major GUI changes. Icons are different and I had to reboot to get Word to see my files as they all showed up with a generic icon. When starting Word, it opens up to a whole new looking page.

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What about the telemetry that, according recent posts, was apparently incorporated into the “security” patch?

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You can read about the telemetry addition to the Security-only Update for Win7 here.

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Thanks, Susan. I appreciate your clarification concerning the telemetry added with the July patches and hope you are right. Also hope that these do not mark the start of endless offers to upgrade to Windows 10 and of endless patches meant to make my transition a taste of upgrading Nirvana that I will keep squishing into the “hidden” group.

MS telemetry per se has never really bothered me in terms of the safety of my personal information that, as you explain, it does not collect. But MS has never been really good at making things, both hardware and software, as we all have learned by now, and well might, totally unintentionally, create undesirable things such as, using some imagination here, trap doors for malefactors to exploit…

As to the new format of your (now bi)monthly updates of the Master Patch List, I must confess that I liked somewhat better the old format (one of a few reasons: I did not need to launch a different application to look at it, when it was all in one Web page) but I imagine that you have your good reasons for doing it now this way, if nothing else, maybe to simplify your life a bit.

Thanks for your always helpful advice over the months since you joined Woody’s.

Group B, Windows 7 Pro, SP1, x64, plus Mac+Linux (Mint)

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Chessie

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Not sure I’m in the right place, but I want to offer a question on Susan’s new Master Patch List format. I like it, but am still trying to completely understand the content. I specifically noted a potential problem with the release dates in the spreadsheet when compared to the dates in the Microsoft Windows Update Catalog. This seems important in determining if an update was or was not issued on Patch Tuesday signifying whether or not it is a “preview.”

Patch #           Release Date per List    Release Date per Catalog (last updated)

4509095        7/9/19                               7/5/19

4506998       7/9/19                               7/8/19

4506990       7/9/19                               7/8/19

4507469       7/9/19                               7/5/19

4501371        6/18/19                             6/18/19 (matches)

4504369      6/11/19                              6/9/19

4503308     6/11/19                               6/9/19

4503327     6/11/19                                6/9/19

4499728     5/14/19                               5/14/19 (matches)

4497934     5/21/19                               5/20/19.

These are just the first ten items from the list. It is quite possible that I am misinterpreting what I’m seeing here. Please clarify.

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The date that they finish the updates is sometimes the date in the catalog.  I use the date of the official release – second Tuesday – which is also typically in the name of the KB (in the case of Office updates).

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Hi Susan,

If I defer Windows 10 updates, then I don’t get the security (Windows Defender definitions) updates unless I click the forbidden “Check for updates” button.

I’m currently running version 1903, but this problem existed in earlier versions, too.

How do I defer updates without losing those daily virus definitions updates, as well?

TIA,

Richard

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How exactly are you pausing updates? If you use the defer quality updates setting in the group policy, this won’t impact defender updates.  Also you can right click on defender and check for updates in it’s GUI which is not the same as the Windows update one.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Funny thing with the 1809 cumulative. I’m trying to install that on one system and…

It says it installs successfully but then doesn’t show up in installed updates, update history, winver.exe or “cmd.exe /c ver” – as if I never even tried. Do have latest the SSU installed. Reboot is very quick on this hardware, says it’s finalizing updates (no mention of reverting) and then login screen.

Event viewer has for each attempt, “Installation Successful: Windows successfully installed the following update: 2019-07 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1809 for x64-based Systems (KB4507469)” … yes, 5 of those by now.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

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[E Pericoloso Sporgersi]

On 10 July 2019 (Belgium is +9 hours later than Seattle) I conjured Windows Update through “Check for updates”.

Version 1903’s (in my case actually version 1906) patches installed fine without issues, except for the fact that, in Classic Shell -now named Open Shell-, I had to adjust the colours of characters and background in the taskbar; which was trivial of course.

Again this proves that my computer is the vanilla variety.

(Though I do have back-ups, just in case.)

1 Desktop Win 11
1 Laptop Win 10
Both tweaked to look, behave and feel like Windows 95
(except for the marine blue desktop, rgb(0, 3, 98)

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by E Pericoloso Sporgersi.

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[EP]

well woody & susan that KB4493132 EOL notification update for Windows 7 has made a comeback on Tue. July 23 as born has reported here:

https://borncity.com/win/2019/07/24/windows-7-new-notification-update-kb4493132-july-2019/

I did a WU search on my family’s Dell computer with Windows 7 ultimate edition and a newer revision of the KB4493132 update (2019-07) was offered. I’ve hidden this newly revised update

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by EP.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by EP.

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For what it’s worth here’s a WIN 7 report on installing July updates. I decided to go ahead and patch even though DEFCON is still at 2.

Three machines, one with WIN 7 starter, 32 bit, and the other two with WIN 7 Pro SP1, 64 bit, all patched “group B” style current through June before applying the July updates.

The installations and restarts all went fairly quickly with no drama. No part of the installations or restarts hung for anything more than 3 minutes (very typical for the 3 machines). I installed the Security only, and both IE11 updates in order with a restart after each (KB4507456, 4507434, and 4510979)

Of more interest might be the following:

1) Windows Media player needed to be reset on all 3 machines (happens about 50% of the time on my machines)

2) Somewhere along the way on the 32 bit machine the screen saver stopped working. I don’t know which update caused it. The other 2 machines don’t have a screen saver. The 32 bit machine still had all the correct info about the screen saver in Control Panel, it just didn’t work. I resaved the details in Control Panel and reset the time for screen Saver to activate and that fixed the problem.

3) In a half hearted attempt to reduce telemetry I checked to be sure some of the tasks in Task Scheduler were disabled before installing the SO patch (each machine had 3 under Microsoft\Windows\Application)Experience), and sure enough all three came back as enabled after the restart!

Anyway, everything seems OK with all three machines.

Hope this helps.

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SueW

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I wonder if you read this thread before you went ahead and installed the July Security-only patch?

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walker

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Yep, I did. I did not mean to not give credit to abbodi86 methods, but I’ve had the tasks I mentioned disabled for a few years. As for the script, I’ve just decided that since I’m gone from windows after Win 7 next January, that it’s just not worth the trouble anymore. I’ve got nothing much to hide and if MS succeeds in taking over my computer, well then, they do, and said computer gets trashed and it’s goodbye to MS just that much sooner – not a bad thing in my opinion. Either way, they’ll have a dead end on info they get from me.

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OscarCP

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DrBonzo,

Did you disabled again those telemetry services that came back to life after rebooting, and are these still disabled, after doing that — at last for the time being?

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Yes, I disabled them again after the SO update, and they have remained disabled on all 3 machines after an additional 3 cold starts. The fact that they have so far remained disabled is encouraging as I believe that eliminates much of the telemetry (although probably not all).

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OscarCP

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This is a request to have KB4474419 add to the Windows 7 / Server 2008 updates. It is already in the Server 2008 SP2 section / worksheet for July 15.

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