[LMB] OT: Windows 10 has been particularly prolific this week.

Katrina Knight kknight at fastmail.fm
Tue Dec 10 00:22:30 GMT 2019

At 11:11 AM 12/9/2019 Marc Wilson wrote:
>On Sat, 7 Dec 2019 11:38:35 -0700, Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org> 
> >Windows 10 updates have never removed anything I've needed to 
> use.
>I've had an update disable my networking completely. I had to 
>revert it and disable that "feature" update for 365 days.

Network adapter and printer drivers are the most common issues 
with Windows 10 feature updates in my experience. (The % of 
users involved is relatively small for any given update, but a 
small percentage can still be a huge number of individuals.) The 
fix is generally to find the correct driver and install it. 
That's easier said then done for most people when they can't get 
connected to the internet because their network adapter is 
non-fuctional, but it generally isn't hard to do apart from 

> >The worst I've seen it do to other people is break the 
> antivirus software that they shouldn't have been using anyway.
>Harsh. MS have dramatically improved their AV offering, but 
>it's not foolproof.

In my experience, up-to-date AV software rarely breaks during 
Windows updates. Old, out-of-date AV software is problematic, 
and for more reasons than just getting broken by updates. There 
were significant problems with some current AV software after 
one of the relatively recent feature updates, but the problems 
mostly happened to people who intentionally requested the update 
rather than people for whom it got installed automatically. None 
of my clients contacted me about any problems of that sort.

> >Any AV software that thinks it knows how Windows works better 
> than Microsoft does is mistaken, wrong, and *should be* 
> disabled.

Who's claiming that AV software companies know more than MS 
about how Windows works? I haven't heard any claims of that 
sort. They may well know more about how malicious software works 
and how to stop it though.

Katrina Knight
kknight at fastmail.fm

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