The other Woody returns

From the official release:

Woody has always been confident about his place in the world and that his priority is taking care of his kind, whether that’s Andy or Bonnie. But when Bonnie adds a reluctant new toy called “Forky” to her room, a road trip adventure alongside old and new friends will show Woody how big the world can be for a toy

Hard to believe that Toy Story will be 24 years old next summer.

MS-DEFCON 2: Turn off automatic updates, adjust Win10 Pro if you have it, and let’s see what surprises this month’s patching will bring

Tomorrow’s Patch Tuesday, and you know what joy that will bring.

I have a full description of my new recommendations for Win10 Pro update deferrals, and a refresher course on metered connections for Win10 Home, in Computerworld Woody on Windows.

We’re at MS-DEFCON 2: Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don’t do it.

Patch Lady – this makes me mad

Today on Twitter, the @microsofthelps  posted up a kindly and helpful post with five different reasons why a Windows user might get a notification that their Windows machine is not activated.

They kindly point out the five reasons…. a different product key was used during repair, hardware changes, counterfeit software, or one copy of Windows installed on multiple PCs.

Except as @AngryBatVoice points out they failed to point out one more very good reason that you might be having Windows 10 activation problems:

Microsoft themselves.

I join with Woody and Ed Bott in saying enough is enough.  Having the official @Microsofthelps twitter account make it seem like the activation problem is not their fault just makes me mad.

Also it’s about near impossible to keep track of bugs in 1809 and where they are at in the phase of being fixed (obviously a key reason that we are nearly midway through November and 1809 hasn’t been unpaused).

So here’s what I want in Windows 10:

1. A console to track issues and get the current condition of resolutions
2. Every version of Windows should be able to defer and pause updates

Enough is enough Microsoft, your customers deserve better than this.

Report: The October Win7 Monthly rollup, KB 4462923, forces TLS 1.0

Just got a report from reader MB:

I’m not sure what others are experiencing but, at my place of employment, KB4462923 appears to have changed the system default crypto security protocol type to TLS 1.0 even when TLS 1.0 is disabled both client-side and server-side in the system registry.  Since we have TLS 1.0 disabled on all of our production servers (Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1), KB4462923 was responsible for a plethora of application failures from basic database mail delivery failures to application connectivity failures with Microsoft Azure cloud solutions; most definitely a showstopping bug for our business.

Can anybody replicate or explain?

Ed Bott unloads on the horrendous state of Windows as a, uh, “service”

If you only read one article today, read this one from Ed Bott on ZDNet:

If Microsoft wants to treat Windows 10 as a service, it has a responsibility to its customers to provide accurate information about problems with that service. Over the last month, the company has failed miserably in that regard.

Of course, I’d argue that MS has failed miserably for much more than a month, but that’s just me.

Read it.

Microsoft officially acknowledges the ‘broken file association’ bug in Win10 versions 1809 and 1803

Chris Hoffman in Howtogeek explained the bug on Monday:

Windows 10 won’t let you make Adobe Photoshop or Notepad++ a default application for images or text files. But you can make other applications, like IrfanView, VLC, or Google Chrome, your defaults…

our theory is that this stopped working properly when Microsoft released the KB4462919 update on October 9. But we really don’t know.

PowerShell maven Emin published a nifty 100-line PowerShell program that solves the problems sometimes.

Sometime last night, Microsoft acknowledged the bug. The descriptions for the latest versions of Win10 1809 (version 17763.55, released Oct 9)and 1803 (versions 17134.345 and 17134.376, released Oct 9 and Oct 24) now include this admonition:

After installing this update, some users cannot set Win32 program defaults for certain app and file type combinations using the Open with… command or Settings > Apps > Default apps.

In some cases, Microsoft Notepad or other Win32 programs cannot be set as the default.

In some cases, attempting to set application defaults again will succeed.

Microsoft is working on a resolution and estimates a solution will be available in late November 2018.

… which seems to indicate that we won’t get a fix next Tuesday, November’s Patch Tuesday.

Excellent sleuthing by Chris Hoffman.

Microsoft fixes the Win10 activation problem

My version 1809 test machine was throwing the Activation Error I talked about this morning.

I followed the updated troubleshooting steps posted by João Carrasqueira on Neowin and, bada-boom bada-bang, it’s all activated now. The Steps:

1. Click Start > Settings > Update & Security
2. On the left choose Activation
3. Under the top section, click Troubleshoot

Takes all of ten seconds.

Those of you who paid for a Home license – I suggest you get in touch with Microsoft and yell real loud. They not only owe you a refund, they should pay for the time you wasted fixing their problem.

If you have any luck with that approach, leave a note here, please. I won’t hold my breath.

Thx to @EP and Mary Jo Foley

A complex solution to the ‘broken file associations’ problem in Win10 1803

Remember the bug publicized by Chris Hoffman in Howtogeek on Monday?

Windows 10 won’t let you make Adobe Photoshop or Notepad++ a default application for images or text files. But you can make other applications, like IrfanView, VLC, or Google Chrome, your defaults…

our theory is that this stopped working properly when Microsoft released the KB4462919 update on October 9. But we really don’t know.

PowerShell guru and Admin’s admin Emin has come up with a solution.

All I did actually is remove anything under the UserChoice, create my own ProgId under the OpenWithProgids key and create its related value under the OpenWithList list.

… from which springs more than a hundred lines of PowerShell code. (Admittedly, that includes comments. 🙂 )

P.S. Don’t be put off by “de parvis grandis acervus erit.” The phrase has a fascinating history.