Happy 30th birthday, Windows!

First of a two-part series, looking at the amazing innovations and triumphs over the years.

A trip down 64K memory lane.

InfoWorld

What happened to the October patches?

Just got this from EG

Hi Woody,

The last “relevant” post to ask this question in is 3 pages deep now and I’m sure many others have the same question too.

I realize November’s updates are still being scrutinized but what’s the scoop with the October updates?

They’re still in Defcon 2 as far as I can see so there’s a BUNCH of “Important” updates sitting in my pending list.

Any chance you can start a new thread with the status of October’s updates… if nothing else just to let us know they’re not forgotten?

Thanks Woody!

On November 5, I opened the gates for October patches. See https://www.askwoody.com/2015/msdefcon-3-windows-office-patched-aware-consequences/

I’m still very skeptical of the November patches. We’ve already seen two of them re-issued, one that was bricking Outlook on some systems. There aren’t any killer security holes so, as long as you’re not using Internet Explorer, I say hold tight.

Problems with Excel 2007 Security Update KB3101554?

Just got this from JR –

Hi Woody

I’ve found that Excel 2007 Security Update KB3101554 breaks the bar charts in some of my Excel 2007 SP3 spreadsheets. They go blank when you scroll the spreadsheet.

The problem was rectified by a simple uninstall of the KB without even the need for a restart.

Has anyone else found this?

Best regards and many thanks for all that I’ve learned from your website and Dummies books over the years.

I haven’t seen it yet. Have you?

Barry Simon to receive AMS Steele Lifetime Achievement award

Those of you who remember the “Mother of all Windows” and “Mother of All PCs” books might be tickled to discover that Barry Simon – Mom’s co-author and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met – has just been announced as this year’s American Mathematical Society Steele award winner, for lifetime achievement.

Barry’s an amazing guy. I “met” him when I posted a complaint about the mathematics behind a PC Magazine article. (The author of the article implied that a solution to an optimization problem in integers is passably close to a non-integer solution. Nevermind.) Barry disagreed with me. And if you’ve ever disagreed with Barry Simon, lemme tell ya, it’s an education unto itself. Like arguing with an encyclopedia. Barry won — although I still maintain my position was tenable — and we struck up a conversation that lasted through five enormous books.

Although he’s probably best known, even now, as the co-author of “Methods of Modern Mathematical Physics” (no, his first name isn’t “Reed”), he’s about to release a new five-volume set “A Comprehensive Course in Analysis.” 

Whenever I hear the term “smart,” I think “Barry.”

It was a real honor and privilege to work with him and Mom.

Wonder what Barry’s going to do for an encore? 

Upgrading a tiny PC to Win10 v 1511

How about that. I wasn’t expecting this. From CJ:

I have a small  Kangaroo PC that came with WIN 10 Home (very small, the size of a cell phone, you should check it out). I use it to stream video to my television from Amazon, NetFlix, etc.

When I logged on today, it tried to update to the new version (1511, 10586) but I immediately got an “error” which I clicked on and it said to “ Install the next version of windows”.  I had previously pulled out the SD card (used for expanded storage) based on your article indicating that the SD card had caused some systems to hang.  I re-inserted the SD card, rebooted and checked for updates again.  It found the WIN 10 update again and this time downloaded it and installed with no issues.  The only complaint I have is that it took 1.5hrs on my slow processor.  Once it rebooted there was a noticeable delay while it finished the installation and hung the screen up with a message indicating it had installed a new version.  

I would really have preferred a little more information on what is going on during the installation process, but maybe that is just me.

Win10 1511 big problems with Universal apps

Just got this from CH:

Now after the 1511 upgrade which finally arrived few hours ago with the .3 patch installed without any incident, I am experiencing failure of many Windows Apps, including Store App.

This is exactly what happened on the other laptop which was on the Insider track.

While I fixed that laptop and now I know how to do it by changing permissions in the relevant protected folders – the best way to do this is to enable the built-in administrator and use that one as it bypasses UAC – and running PowerShell scripts, I am wondering if this is a common issue with built 1511 and if it will fix itself at some stage.

The actual problem:

–          Some apps are not working at all, having some weird ‘@’ character in the name which was not there before. Things like People app and Calculator App and few others

–          Most apps look normal, but would not launch. The Event Log show lack of permissions – access denied.

The way I fixed this in the past, was to change permissions in 3 places, under Program Files\WindowsApps, Windows\SystemApps and ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository.

Probably deleting all that is under ProgramData folder is the actual fix which is not mentioned anywhere else as far as I know as this deletes older versions of the current applications, or at least their representations in the user context. There is also a location under the user’s own profile. After that the PowerShell commands as documented by Microsoft should do the rest.

Is this a known problem?

I hit similar problems in earlier beta builds, but they worked themselves out after a day or two. It’s as if Microsoft rolled the improved versions of the apps out through the Windows Store, and they were installed automatically.

I haven’t heard of this happening with v 1511, however. Anybody out there seen something similar?

Is Win10 v 1511 breaking Hyper-V?

An interesting note from reader AR:

This “upgrade” seems to destroy existing Hyper-V setups.

My rather simple setup include a virtual switch to the physical Ethernet port on my machine, which makes the host connect through a Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter. It doesn’t work after the upgrade to 10586, but even worse, I don’t seem to be able to uninstall it either!

When I try to remove the external switch in Hyper-V I get the error “Can’t remove internal miniport … Invalid parameter: (0x80041008)” [translated from Swedish].

It seems like the Hyper-V upgrade to allow nested virtualization is broken somewhere.

If you know a solution, please tell me!

I found a similar complaint on a Chinese language forum.

Anybody hit this one?

Windows 10 v 1511 very slow login

Has anybody else seen this?

I got a message from WG:

I let 1511 install on one of my devel machines today. Local user login went from 2 seconds to consistently over 30 seconds. (This is on logins after the original “hi there” sequence.)

Restored pre-1511 with Acronis. 1-2 second login 100% of the time.

Installed 1511 again via Windows update: 30+ second login in about 50% of 75 total logins, using two different local ID’s (one standard, one admin), both existing at time of upgrade. Other 50% under 5 seconds. No pattern…i.e. 6 longs followed by a couple shorts, long, short, etc. All done via sign-out/login. No difference in performance between standard and admin ID’s.

I then created a new standard ID. Login attempts with that ID always 1-2 seconds (30 attempts). It’s almost as if the existing user profiles do not get upgraded cleanly, while new ID’s are ok (anecdotal guess).

Maybe this problem is an odd one-off, but there is nothing particularly unusual about this machine (Norton Internet Security, Acronis, MS Office 2010, Visual Studio 2015, Arduino compiler, Python , that’s about all). M.2 SSD, 16G RAM.

BTW, each upgrade now creates a 450MB “recovery (ID=27) partition” (I therefore have two so far). And Edge became default PDF app again, changed from Adobe Reader.

Anybody else seeing really slow logins? I wonder if it could be Windows Hello related?