windows

Last night we were treated to new versions of the badly banged-up March Win7 patches. It looks like the new ones are the same as the old ones, but the internal handling instructions (the metadata) now force installation of a “Total Meltdown” fix-up patch prior to installing the old patch.

Of course, none of this is documented anywhere.

Starting with Günter Born’s report, and checking the Microsoft Update Catalog, I can see modified versions of:

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As many of us were getting ready for the holiday weekend, after the surprise announcement about Windows being torn into three pieces, Microsoft shoveled yet another load of patches out the Automatic Update chute. Think of it as the software equivalent of a Friday night news dump.

A destructive fix for Total Meltdown

KB 4100480 kicked off the two days from patching purgatory with a Windows 7/Server 2008R2 kernel update for CVE-2018-1038, the “Total Meltdown” bug Microsoft introduced in Win7 back in January. Total Meltdown, you may recall, is a huge security hole implemented by all of these Microsoft security patches:

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An enormous number of patches spewed out of Microsoft this month, with two ponderous cumulative updates for each version of Windows 10, a third “bonus” bug fix for Win10 Fall Creators Update (version 1709), and a just-described bug in Windows 7 that’ll leave you begging for a Win7 patch that works.

There’s also a bit of comic relief with a patch for Win10 1709, KB 4094276, that “makes improvements to ease the upgrade experience to Windows 10 Version 1709.” That’s a wonderful example of a self-referential fix.

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“Hey, Cortana.” (Pause.) “Is my PC working yet?”

It’s getting to the point that patches come flying out of Microsoft on any odd day. On most odd days, for that matter. Yesterday, Thursday, was no exception. On March 22 we saw all of these new patches:

Cumulative Updates for Win10

All three of the active versions of Win10 got cumulative updates — the second set in the past two weeks:

• KB 4089848 brings 1709 (Win10 Fall Creators Update) up to Build 16299.334 – seems to have fixed the problem with the January Delta update
• KB 4088891 brings 1703 (Win10 Creators Update) up to build 15063.994
• KB 4088889 brings 1607 (Win10 Anniversary Update) up to build 14393.2155 – this one’s a bit surprising because 1607 is due to go off life support in a couple of weeks.

We also got Servicing Stack Updates for two of the three active versions of Win10:

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