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There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented on this site. |
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/04/12/microsoft-windows-10-warning-crashes-boot-internet-connection-slowdown-problems-upgrade-windows-10
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – seriously Gordon, Windows 10’s aren’t dropping like flies]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Amen and amen. The sky is not falling. I have drive images freshly created yesterday, three well-practiced, tried and true ways to get at restoring them should that ever become necessary after a Windows Update (never, so far), and I will be installing tomorrow’s patches as soon as they become available to me, since I have absolutely no good reason to postpone their installation.
Most tech journalists post something in their bio’s to lend credibility to their writing.
This one? Quote: “. . . switched to covering consumer technology as the iPod began to take off.”
That’s the single tech reference in his bio . . . and that’s all I need to know about his “expertise.”
Move along – literally nothing to see there.
~ Group "Weekend" ~
Seems like there is a lack of common sense these days.
I’m reasonably certain Forbes accepts comments, queries, or letters regarding their articles. Have any efforts been made to address this article’s statements directly?
In her post, Susan wrote:
Don’t use cccleaner. Registry cleaners do more harm than good especially on Windows 10.
I use CCleaner for easy-to-operate cookie management, among other things. I can understand the part about not using the registry cleaning function, but the program has other useful functions. Moreover, there are other registry cleaners out there and yet, unlike CCleaner, they don’t get singled out. How about avoiding the blanket statement against CCleaner and saying simply, “Don’t use registry cleaners. They do more harm than good, especially on Windows 10.” (BTW, why “especially” on Windows 10?)
I use Windows extended Cleanmgr.exe, have done so for a couple of decades, now. For about 5 years I did a running comparison between Ccleaner and the extended Disk Cleanup. I kept Ccleaner updated throughout this period.
I would run my extended Disk Cleanup, then run Ccleaner in its default setting. All Ccleaner ever found were temporary internet files, always between 450MB and 550MB. Unless one completely stays off the internet all together, those temporary internet files quickly build back up, so there’s no net gain.
I finally uninstalled Ccleaner, and have not used it since. That years long comparison was enough to convince me. YMMV.
I’ve read quite a few articles by “Gordon” over the last 6/7 months. The “Sky” is usually falling for windows and he has really been pushing Linux hard with a number of articles when he isn’t bashing W10. To each his own, I guess.
Don't take yourself so seriously, no one else does 🙂
All W10 Pro at 22H2,(2 Desktops, 1 Laptop).
If one looks at the links provided in his articles, the majority of them point to other Forbes articles – usually of his own writing. To me, this type of self-referential “documentation” raises at the least yellow flags for me — and an accompanying several large grains of salt. 😉
Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.
BTW, why “especially” on Windows 10?
I’ve created a new thread to (hopefully) answer your question instead of going off-topic with a lengthy post.
I’m curious why I’ve had posts mentioning him deleted with no explanation here, yet his articles (and him) keep being brought up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
while SOME people will have issues the vast majority of us will be fine and see absolutely no side effects whatsoever.
Some of the SOME people are small businesses with $tens of millions in damages and SOME are corporate with $Billion in damages after the havoc created by Microsoft updates.
I don’t see Microsoft, who declares full ownership of their installed OS, jumping to compensate them for damages.
You often pull big numbers out of thin air to make a point. How about backing those claims up with verifiable articles and sources?
--Joe
Where EULAs do not conflict with federal and state laws they are enforceable but there was that woman whose business was affected by GWX messing up her business computer/computers that won damages.
Huh?
Susan is doing what any good professional office IT admin does — keep spares.
Yes, SSD failure rates are low, especially the newer ones from Samsung and the like. But the failure rate isn’t zero. SSDs and HDDs are the components with the longest recovery times since you can’t just swap in a new unit like you would with a power supply, motherboard, monitor, or whatever. Having an extra on-hand saves valuable hours (or days) and gets the user back up and running sooner.
Dear Anon:
I’ve had several SSD’s fail spontaneously over the years. Some old, some new, some in workstations, some in server arrays.
Unlike spinning rust, they don’t always give much warning before going splat. (Some brands are better at warning in advance, some not. All assume that we actually monitor them with tools that can see SMART errors before the OS does.)
Also unlike spinners, when an SSD dies it’s frequently impossible to recover useful data from them. They often brick, where HDD’s usually allow quite a lot of usable data to be extracted after losing – say – their boot or MBR sector. My track record of recovering data from HDD’s is pretty good, not so good for SSD’s even with the most advanced recovery software and tools.
So two things:
1) Always have backups and know how to restore them (corollary: test restore processes) . . . and . . .
2) Be like Susan and have spares on hand unless you fancy waiting for shipping or have a reliable local store with the ones you want in stock . . . (those are getting rare.)
~ Group "Weekend" ~
But they have you to deal with the patching impact. My comment was more for the crowd that I feel Gordon is going after – the ones without a Windows safety net.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
I get the feeling, after reading Gordon’s article, that he has never troubleshot or repaired a computer; he merely quotes what others say.
Nothing is said in his article about the age of the computers which got bricked from Windows updates – those computers could be years old, which would make them more susceptible to problems with updates. Nor does he state the amount of memory or hard drive space of those computers which went to 100% memory or hard drive utilization – for all we know, those computers could be the woefully underpowered cheap laptops that are sold in department stores such as Walmart.
The fact that Gordon gets paid to write this trash is an embarrassment to the whole tech journalism industry.
Lucky you! Gordon’s been on the scene for a long time… at least 15 years by this point. The thing is, he has a Literature degree — not journalism, not science, not engineering — and has spent pretty much the whole time writing about tech, instead of actually…. y’know… being responsible for it.
Contrast this with someone like Tom Warren from the Verge, who has actually walked the walk in the IT world before years before taking up writing about it at WinRumors. Or Mary Jo Foley, who has had her share of controversial statements over the years but has always been grounded in journalistic practice — and the degree to prove it.
And you have guys like Woody, who has written a huge stack of technical and “for Dummies” books in his career, which requires a vast amount of research, dedication, and deep understanding. That counts for a lot, too, when it comes to knowing who to trust to give you good information.
You often pull big numbers out of thin air to make a point. How about backing those claims up with verifiable articles and sources?
I will tell you from my experience.
Years ago while working at a big bank our servers were hit by a c*** Windows update and all ~5000 servers crashed.
It was on Thursday. The bank had to close all its branches to customers and its online banking web site, and we worked through Saturday night to bring all servers on again.
The damage was in $tens of Millions stopping all customers and bank’s activities.
This is happening now to other businesses every patch Tuesday.
I’ve begun to see his articles as click-bait. Been burned (wasting time researching a supposed major issue) by his breathless emergency take on issues too many times. He/Forbes clearly have Google News fooled. Sad.
I know Microsoft has bugs in their Windows updates, pretty much every one, but only some are severe. Best course of action has become to follow a middle of the road path, delay the updates a little for the cannon fodder to test, unless there is a genuine critical update needed.
And yes, follow the general advice from Susan Bradley listed in her post.
I’ll admit it’s a bit nerve wracking to be caught between hackers and Microsoft’s poorly tested “Quality” & Security updates.
After reading Susan’s article, I thought to create a System Restore point.
I do not recall ever having read “Cannot detect” in this spot: 
Unlike spinning rust, they don’t always give much warning before going splat.
Danke je for that. I’ve only been running SSDs since 2018. So your observation makes me happy that I have my data stored in four additional locations besides my SSD system drives. Two copies in the cloud. Two local copies on spinning drives.
I can confirm SSDs sometime fail without warning. I had one fail during a scheduled backup. The failure email tipped me off. The next morning, the user called me, the machine had crashed during the night, and wouldn’t boot after being reset.
Got another one, restored the most recent system image, then restored the newer data backup, and off it goes! (I update the data backup twice a day, and update the system image every night. Both night backups, data and system, had failed.)
That NAS paid for itself more than once!
Martin
My choice is https://www.hdsentinel.com/
It works with SMART and the newer NVMe metrics and can trigger emergency actions on failing hard disks. The author is responsive, the software great. I have paid licenses for my family machines so I can check the disk health and be warned of failure.
But sometimes, disks give no warning!
Martin
P.S. Wasn’t there a newsletter with a list of SMART tools lately?
For small critical systems I also like HDSentinel!
For servers, we try to buy RAID controllers that allow us to natively monitor and alert via email on all partial and full disk failures.
In defense of SSD’s (lest folks think I am being too critical of them from my earlier post) over the last several years I have observed fewer SSD failures than spinners overall. It’s just the nature of those failures – when they happen – that’s different.
~ Group "Weekend" ~
P.S. Wasn’t there a newsletter with a list of SMART tools lately?
Yes there is!
ISSUE 17.5.0 – 2020-02-03
Tools for monitoring drive health
By Lance Whitney
“Today’s PC storage media — traditional disk-based drives and newer solid-state models — are remarkably reliable.”
https://www.askwoody.com/newsletter/tools-for-monitoring-drive-health/
~ Group "Weekend" ~
@Anonymous- Since you’ve been using CCleaner for years, how were you affected by the malware that was delivered in 2017? Yes, it wasn’t the ‘fault’ of CCleaner, but due to a hack, it came through the official channel… people who delay updating, just a little, find out about others experiencing these issues, and are able to avoid them…
I’m always glad to hear that there are people that aren’t having update issues… but after being severely burned by W10 upgrades that BSOD’d previously well working, but low end computers that my friends and family brought to me to fix, I’d never be cavalier about any kind of updating again, and avoid automatic updates like the plague that they can be.
Amazingly, Microsoft still allows hardware manufacturers to put W10 on low end equipment that is not suited to the kind of cumulative updating that W10 does, creating disposable computers when the non-techy owners find them failing updates and falling out of support. These are the people that didn’t have money for the higher spec equipment to begin with, are so happy to have finally bought themselves (or their kids, for school) a computer, only to have it fail in a relatively short time. Buyer beware is a thing… but Microsoft and hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be taking advantage of people that don’t have a lot of money to begin with. They didn’t learn, despite all the telemetry, how not to put those people in jeopardy. The digital divide is real, and when one has finally ‘conquered’ it, only to have its value disintegrated because of updating failures… well, that is beyond sad. Too many people I know were kicked back to the ‘not have’ side of the digital divide because of Microsoft… so bless you, @Anonymous, that you’ve never had the hardware that could not tolerate W10… and can blithely accept whatever may come. Would all of us be so lucky.
I do follow Woody and Susan’s advice. It has allowed me to keep all of those machines, unloved by Microsoft, going (most not on Windows any more)… and my current W10 Pro desktop purring along.
I’m grateful that Woody and Susan do make recommendations. Notice that they address different areas of the PC market, with different kinds of users, and have slightly different recommendations. It is important to understand who you are getting advice from, and what situations they are addressing.
I’m thinking that Susan’s advice not to use CCleaner is based on the numbers of people who have messed up their machines by ‘cleaning’ the registry, and that doing so does not really improve anything on modern hardware.
CCleaner does have other functions, having become much more than a registry cleaner, but that app, and others, could be a vector for mal-ware. Its been proven. Updates do cause problems for end users. Its been proven. Saying otherwise is kind of like calling those of us that have had those issues, liars… blaming the victims. Gordon, and the others who point out the problems, would not have an audience, otherwise. I’m hoping Susan is right, and things aren’t as bad as they are being made out to be… and that I won’t have to do recovery on any more machines.
(I hate that I’m a sucker for being looked at sadly, as a computer is passed my way, and I’m told that it isn’t working right since it tried to reboot from that last update… but 2020 has been a good year for the hardware… and my family and friends now ask me about the specs before they buy, and I encourage them to look at processor speed and memory, and make sure there is more than enough)
Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter
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