Newsletter Archives

• MS-DEFCON 5: Get patched up, and go ahead with Windows 7 Service Pack 1

  Posted on June 5, 2011 at 22:09 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  It looks like the Black Tuesday patches for May 2011 aren’t causing many problems.

  The one exception: if you use Master Plans in PowerPoint 2007, and you have a Plan with multiple Masters, you may have problems with PowerPoint freezing. Master Plans were a new feature with PowerPoint 2007. Chances are good you don’t use them or, if you do, you don’t have any plans with multiple masters.

  I suggest you go into Windows Update and install all outstanding patches.

  I’m also following Susan Bradley’s recommendation in this week’s Windows Secrets Newsletter: it’s time to go ahead and install Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Susan has a lot of experience installing SP1 on many different systems. She recommends that you NOT use Windows Update.

  Susan suggests that you start by going to the Microsoft Technet page that deals with SP1 updates, and follow the Windows Servicing Guy’s recommendations. She further recommends that you download the whole SP1 update – don’t use Windows Update – and install the whole enchilada. (See the warning below! Also, see the Comments for a number of important warnings and recommendations.)

  This is one of those rare times when it appears as if all outstanding Microsoft patches are reasonably safe. (Okay, I’ll still bellyache about the .NET patches, but you’re better off rolling the dice with them now than a week from now.) Accordingly, I’m moving us down to  MS-DEFCON 5: All’s clear. Patch while it’s safe.

  WARNING!!! A good, old friend of mine wrote with this cautionary tale. There’s good reason to apply all of your updates through Windows Update, except for Service Pack 1. Get updated with all of the patches except SP1, then do as Susan says, download SP1 and apply it manually. Here’s Brett’s tale:

  My wife’s computer went dead after she ran Windows Update to bring everything up to date on it. She couldn’t get it to boot until I looked the problem up on the Web and manually applied a fix.

  Turns out that if you run Window Update on a Windows 7 machine that doesn’t have SP1 installed yet, you will usually get a whole list of “important” updates to apply, including SP1. If you do what the site suggests — which is, of course, to install all of the updates– it can be fatal to your machine. Your system will crank away — downloading and updating — and then tell you that it needs to reboot. But thereafter, it will crash on reboot with a message that says, “Fatal error C000003A applying update”. The machine is useless after that unless you take some measures which are definitely not for the non-computer-savvy.

  This happens, as it turns out, because SP1 has to be installed separately from all other updates. But Windows Update doesn’t prompt you to do that. Instead, it leads you right into the fatal error by giving you a list of all the recommended updates, which includes SP1 plus others, and suggesting that you install them all at once!

  Microsoft admits to the problem in KB 975484 and provides a vbs script that you can run to “repair” the system. But you must put the script onto a thumb drive, or burn it onto a CD, on another machine to get things fixed.

  I suspect that a lot of people are going to be hit by this. There are already quite a few anguished complaints on the Web (search for “Fatal error C000003A”).

  Windows Patches/Security Error C000003A, May 2011 Black Tuesday, MS-DEFCON 5, Windows 7 Service Pack 1

• What you need to know about Windows 7 Service Pack 1

  Posted on March 16, 2011 at 23:35 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.

  Windows Patches/Security Win7 SP1, Windows 7 Service Pack 1

• Minor problems installing Win7 Service Pack 1

  Posted on February 26, 2011 at 09:45 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Again, for emphasis, I do NOT recommend that you install Win7 SP1 yet. There isn’t enough meat to it to justify installing it yet.

  That said, Ed Bott has a good overview of some (apparently infrequent) glitches with the SP1 installer.

  Windows Patches/Security Win7 SP1, Windows 7 Service Pack 1