Patch Lady – so I don’t get it

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By now you’ve seen the headlines… we have three antivirus documented as being down for the count when it comes to Windows 7 and 8.1 (and correspondi
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Great Lake Bunyip, Elly, PKCano, Pepsiboy, Myst, woody, abbodi86, Mr. Natural

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At least they documented some of the known problems.

Only took ’em more than three days….

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All that’s left is documenting the unknown problems. Easy! Should be done tomorrow.

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That’s probably because their machines were running very slowly, Woody ;)!

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Seriously. We’re talking about a multibillion dollar company costing downtime and money to a myriad of businesses and end-users. I refuse to believe anyone testing their stuff did not come up with this mess before its release on Patch Tuesday. Or are they totally amateurs?

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lanceboil

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As I say in the Computerworld article, there are only two possibilities:

a) MS didn’t know about the problems

b) The person in charge knew about it but went ahead anyway

It’s hard for me to say which of those is worse.

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Elly

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It’s being discussed on the Avast! forums at the moment. They’re aware and have released an emergency update which shold be detected by the Emergency Update feature in Avast (provided it’s turned on).

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Great Lake Bunyip, woody

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With its OS market share Microsoft is a De Facto Public Utility on PCs/Laptops and we all know the problems that happen when the power goes out. But at least the Power Company is regulated to a greater degree than the folks in Redmond. Maybe some sort of Consumer Friendly regulations concerning OSs with larger numbers of end users and more stability required rather than making all consumer OS end users into Eternal BETA testers.

The enterprise and volume custoners are sure getting more options so why are the consumers not getting the same options, including the option to purchase extended windows 7 security updates until 2023. There are plenty of consumers that have older PC/Laptop hardware that works perfectly fine for their needs and that Older PC/Laptop hardware may only be properly vetted/certified for windows 7/8.1 and will not run stable with a newer OS with such a continous update cadence as windows 10.

Consumer end usres of Microsoft’s OS products deserve some longer term stable OS options also especially on older Laptop Hardware where the hardware can not be updated like on PCs.

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I sometimes wonder if the development team is spread too thin and they have a hard time to debug all versions of Windows. They have to maintain tens of versions of Windows 10 on about 5-10 devices, they have to also maintain Windows 7 and 8.1. And that assumes that they have to maintain one architecture for each. And have to release updates monthly. How can more QA help debug updates for all SKUs if there are too many in the first place? I know that the team is large, but there is a limit to everything. I think they should have streamlined the versions they maintain so they can focus on debugging them, otherwise, any QA testers added will provide marginal improvements. Having one “current” release and one “LTS” release (and maybe an ESR release for Volume License users that have really sensitive systems). Maybe have Win 7, 8.1 and 10 ESR on a separate Patch Tuesday as well.

Aside from this, the issue with AV programs breaking with kernel changes is rather absurd today. It’s still not addressed. Both Microsoft and the AV makers need to talk and figure out what’s needed. First, PatchGuard [edited] AV makers, then the under usage of ELAM and AMSI, now this? Now it’s getting ridiculous at this point.

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SkipH

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hi Susan & others.

Avast has recently pushed emergency software updates for their Avast software that now works with the April 2019 updates.

https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=226534.msg1501852#msg1501852

other antivirus vendors like Avira and Sophos have yet to do the same

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