Windows Update – Absoblogginlutely!

Microsoft Edge guide in Creators update is a nice tutorial

By Andy on Saturday, April 8, 2017

Thank you for upgrading dialog box after upgrading to latest Windows 10 version I downloaded the Creators Update last night and did an in place upgrade on my Surface last night and the upgrade went nice and smoothly.

I especially liked the tutorial that pops up with the different features that come with this edition of the Edge browser. As the upgrade isn’t available via Windows Update just yet, you can get a sneak peak at the extra features by looking at the tutorial here.I like the ability to pin and save pages for later and the drop down preview for finding a tab is pretty handy – but it will be interesting to see how well this works when you have tons of tabs open. The combination of Tabman Tabs Manager and OneTab work well for this in Chrome with the former allowing you to get a drop down list of all the tabs open (but no preview) and the latter instantly closing all open tabs and saving them into a html page for later reference – both highly recommended for keeping all those tabs you might read later and reducing the memory footprint for Chrome.

Note you can do a manual install now by going to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 and selecting the option to update now. A small stub file will download, you run this, confirm you really do want to upgrade to the latest version and it downloads in the background. Once downloaded it will automatically install 30 minutes later with several reboots but you can pause or run it now as required.

Fixed – Windows 2008 Server continually boots into safe mode.

By Andy on Thursday, March 10, 2011

We had a weird issue this morning after applying windows updates to a server and found that the server had rebooted into safe mode. We tried various methods of forcing the server back to normal mode through the F8 prompt, even attempting a Windows Repair from cd but nothing seemed to work.
In the end we ran “bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot” from the command prompt, rebooted the server and it came back up in normal mode. There was a long, very dramatic pause, whilst the server reverted changes to the windows updates but we were eventually able to log back into the server. We then took a snapshot and installed the windows updates 50% at a time – and of course, this time every patch installed successfully.
I suspected that the server was reading the bcd and booting into safe mode, but I’d have thought that pressing F8 and selecting normal mode would have overwritten this selection – obviously I was wrong.
I really long for the good old boot.ini days.
The Technet article “Restart the domain controller in Directory Services Restore Mode Remotely” gave us the bcdedit commands to run. It was amazing how many google hits there are for failing to restart a server in safe mode (oops – here’s another one), but not many on how to stop a Windows 2008 Server from starting in safe mode.

Bugs Hotfixes Microsoft Remote desktop control Windows Update Windows XP windows7 Work

Unable to rdp to Windows2008 SBS server from XP client after KB969084 installed

By Andy on Wednesday, December 23, 2009

We had an issue when all of a sudden we were not able to remote desktop to a clients SBS 2008 server using the rdp client and the TSGateway functionality. Remote Web Workplace would work fine and so would Windows7 clients.
After proving this patch was the culprit by removing the patch and finding my saved rdp session would work, I went back and read the kbarticle 969084 on this patch. I hadn’t initially read this (in common with a lot of other people) and also because the patch was pushed down via wsus. It turns out that XP does not turn on CredSSP by default and this is needed to work with the new RDP client. I followed the instructions at kb951608 and after a reboot, going to the control box/About I got the message that Network Level Authentication was supported and I was then able to connect succesfully.

To summarize you need todo the following.

Click Start , click Run , type regedit , and then press ENTER.
In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
In the details pane, right-click Security Packages , and then click Modify .
In the Value data box, type tspkg . Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK .
In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders
In the details pane, right-click SecurityProviders, and then click Modify .
In the Value data box, type credssp.dll . Leave any data that is specific to other SSPs, and then click OK .
Exit Registry Editor.
Restart the computer.

Bugs Hotfixes Internet Explorer Microsoft Windows Update

Imagemaps (navigation) broken in IE8 – fix

By Andy on Tuesday, November 24, 2009

We rolled out IE8 to a customer earlier this week and promptly found their company website didn’t work in ie8 (despite some users having had IE8 for several months). An imagemap that they use for navigation did not show up in IE8 on internal computers. The weirdest thing is that all the computers at their office had the problem yet none of our computers or some other computers we tried could reproduce the problem.

After trying many technical solutions I passed it to our web developer who very quickly came up with a bug in ie8 and content produced by Publisher

“Publisher HTML output uses some very large numbers for object coordinates. This behavior has worked in the past. However, Internet Explorer 8 does not support such large coordinates. This is because some precision was moved from the most significant end to the least significant end of the coordinate variables to allow for sub-pixel layouts. Therefore, when large coordinate values in Publisher HTML output are run through Microsoft Dynamic HTML, the values are truncated. This behavior causes significant problems when Publisher HTML is rendered in Internet Explorer 8.”

Sure enough – saving the files within Publisher 2007 sp2 fixed the issue.

Microsoft Patches Security Windows 2000 Windows 2003 Windows Update Windows XP Work WSUS XPSP2

Windows 958644 direct download locations.

By Andy on Friday, October 24, 2008

I have spent all day patching servers, workstations and trying to find a direct download for the 958644 patch that got released last night. I was amazed when Microsoft even called us to join in a webconference for Microsoft partners about this patch – that is something new.
I was not so pleased when I called PSS to ask for a direct download to the patch as kb958644 does not have direct links, windows update services was timing out and the catalog website is badly broken. PSS informed me that as it was not a hotfix they could not provide me with the file and there was an 8-12 hour delay on callback from the server team. So instead I’ve been configuring wsus for servers (that were not already configured), approving patches and downloading by visiting windows updates – a VERY time consuming.
Anyway, without wasting more time – here are the download locations – I’d grab them before the server falls over too.

Thanks to Larry and Derek for the help in finding these.

Windows Update

Slow machine since Wednesday?

By Andy on Friday, October 26, 2007

According to several sources, it appears that Windows Desktop Search may have got pushed out to a lot of machines on Wednesday…Interesting that one of my SQL Servers has been very slow since Wednesday – I’m off to take a look at this today! Thanks to neowin

Windows Update

svchost crash with 0x745f2780

By Andy on Wednesday, April 4, 2007

One of my client pc’s kept crashing about 1 minute after login with “The instruction at 0x745f2780 referenced memory at 0x00000000. The memory could not be read”. I installed the hotfix at kb927891 but before it could finish it crashed again, but this time it prompted me to send data to microsoft and I did – that then came back with a message to install the patch that I’d just applied (although I hadn’t rebooted). Nice going with patch management Microsoft! Bearing in mind this happened on a pc which is up to date as of yesterday with windows patches via windows updates, you’d have though this sort of thing should not happen. I am not sure why it happened this morning when the initial patch came out some time last year – very strange.

Windows Update

Time for confusion?

By Andy on Thursday, February 1, 2007

So how have you prepared for the upcoming change in Daylight Savings Time? There are quite a few pages on the Microsoft site which seem to cause more confusion than explain things and I know that end users are just not going to understand what they need to do and when. Microsoft do have some documentation on the changes which seems to be best for the system administrator. However I think the easiest thing is to tell everyone to ensure that all appointments have the expected date and time in the subject line.
A snippet of the changes is in the extended entry – personally I’m not happy as I lose an hour of sleep on my birthday and then have to deal with the hassles.

Microsoft Patches Windows 2000 Windows Update

ms06-049 could cause corruption.

By Andy on Saturday, September 16, 2006

MS06-049 has issues with Windows 2000 and compressed files which could lead to compression. Make sure you read this discussion and the original patch article.

Ghost Ubuntu Vista Windows Update

Upgrade time

By Andy on Saturday, July 29, 2006

I’ve been busy this morning. I re-ghosted my windows xp partition and then reloaded it back onto my secondary disk. The performance still stays about the same so I’ll be wiping the secondary disk back to HP’s recovery cd and reloading all of the applications again *shudder*. As this is a fairly long post there is more in the extended entry.