ISSUE 17.7.1 • 2020-02-21

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ASKWOODY ALERT!
The February Win10 cumulative update is broken — make sure Pause updates is set!

Woody Leonhard By Woody Leonhard

We’ve known for ten days about a major bug in this month’s Win10 1903 and 1909 cumulative update, KB 4532693. Microsoft hasn’t fixed it — or even acknowledged it.

The second buggy February patch, the mysterious UEFI patch known as KB 4524244, was pulled this past Friday. If your machine got sandbagged by that update, you have my sympathies. But simply pausing updates would’ve kept you safe — at least long enough for Microsoft to recognize the error of its ways and pull the patch.

Cumulative update KB 4532693 has Win10 1903 and 1909 users scrambling to find lost desktop icons and files (more info). The bug doesn’t affect every Win10 machine, but I’ve seen hundreds of reports of zapped desktops and lost files.

Again, Microsoft hasn’t officially acknowledged the problem or fixed it. Presumably it’ll get pulled and fixed at some point — but as yet we don’t know when.

For now, if you’re running Win10 1903 or 1909, your best bet is to verify that you have updates paused for at least a couple more weeks. Maybe Microsoft will get its act together. Maybe. In the meantime, protecting your machine from YABU (Yet Another Buggy Update) is pretty straightforward. Anybody can do it — if you know what to do.

Step-by-step procedure in Computerworld. Free help on the AskWoody Lounge.

Publisher: AskWoody LLC (woody@askwoody.com); editor: Tracey Capen (editor@askwoody.com).

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