The moral of this story – don’t install optional updates. Period.

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Microsoft Recommends People Uninstall Optional Windows 11 Update – ExtremeTech

The moral of this story – don’t install optional updates.  Period.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady

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Mr. Austin, Mele20, Alex5723, Cybertooth, Fred

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🙂

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/windows-11-kb5012643-preview-may-crash-net-3-5-framework/

To mitigate this issue, you can uninstall this update. To do this, select the Start button and type, Windows Update Settings, and select it. On the Windows Update settings window, select View Update History then select Uninstall Update. Find KB5012643 in the list and select it, then select Uninstall.

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Yup.

Finance, social and tech founder. Managing director of new crowd sourced games in pre-release development. Director on a new consortium to bring fractional ownership of heritage antiquities to the blockchain. My planet-wide talk show for people craving new stories by which to live is Casual Saints.

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“FUD” as I read one of the comments from that ExtremeTech site:

This article is pure FUD. Microsoft doesn’t “recommend” that users uninstall any updates, and the update didn’t “break Safe Mode”. In limited circumstances, there may be some issues with these updates, but it’ll be fine for most people. In the KB article you listed, it says “To mitigate this issue, you can uninstall this update.” That’s not a RECOMMENDATION, that’s an optional mitigation strategy.

This is an awful article. Do better.

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The article accurately describes issues with an optional patch, so not FUD.

cheers, Paul

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I would say it is a reminder that a bad update can happen to any of us, and that we should have a plan in place to undo the bad update and get things working again. If an optional update that was insufficiently tested to detect a certain bug made it out the door, it could just as easily have been an important one. If you have the ability to hit “undo” on a bat update, you don’t have to be so afraid.

I am not a Windows user anymore, but when I was, I often did install optional updates. I looked at the issues they were supposed to fix, and if I thought the issue might one day hit me, I’d install it. I vetted every update in this manner, from the beginnings of Windows update to the “patchocalypse” (as Woody called it) when Windows 7 and 8 no longer received individual updates and instead got the Windows 10-style rollups. I never had an update break my system(s) in all my years of using Windows, from 1990 to 2015.

That doesn’t mean it could not have happened, and now that I use Linux, I recognize that it could still happen. I use Timeshift for my day to day backups of the OS itself, and Veeam (an imaging backup program) for creating complete system images, including personal data. While I never had a mishap caused by a bad update, I have had lots of mishaps caused by other things, including failing hardware, theft of a laptop, and often my own willingness to find out “what will happen if I do [x]?”. The only reason I am so willing to go down that path is that I know I have recourse if I mess things up beyond my ability (or desire) to repair them– and I have done that on numerous occasions. You learn a lot that way, though, and lots of the things that had me going for my backups are trivial to repair now.

I am not aware of a direct equivalent of Timeshift on Windows… it’s kind of like System Restore, but much more robust (it can be used to roll back full version upgrades from one version of Linux to a previous one, for example). As far as imaging backup programs, there are a ton of them in Windows, and many of them have free versions that work well. Macrium Reflect gets my vote, though its interface is more confusing than it needs to be for newbies. It’s been the most reliable of the Windows backup programs I have used.

If you would like to discuss this further, there’s a forum for this very topic!

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Cybertooth, oldfry

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