Windows Update Tuesday - what a day.

[sam2004gp]

Microsoft released 13+ critical updates for XP today. There must be a major bug or attack they are scared of getting out in the wild.  Everybody go to windows update and update your XP and Vista boxes.  Make sure you have automatic updates turned on in your Security Center settings as well.

[Downlinerz2]

Sam,
    I have made sure I had automatic windows and McAfee updates since a friend got blind-sided a few years ago.  I have a couple family members who have only the most minimal protection.  When I got my first firewall and saw that it blocked something like 50 attempts to enter my computer I decided I was going to do whatever I could to keep my stuff clean.  So far so good. 

[sam2004gp]

Yep I have been updating faithfully ever since I got legal legitimate versions of XP a few years back.  I just got back from install 5 other software and hardware updates.  You can check with more detail what you may need by going to the windows update site.   windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

It does not always force hardware or low level software updates on you.  So I try to remember to check in once in awhile.

[W3DRM]

I just finished installing all of the new updates. Came to a total of 19 downloads in todays' update for me. I have four PC's and all updates went without incident.

[lddaly]

Just installed 10 updates (OS, Office, IE) on my Windows 7 box.   Just 1 on my Mac's - iMovie 8.0.5.

[lddaly]

Adobe Reader and Acrobat - Black Tuesday continues http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7348
It ain't just Microsoft ... while MS issued a deluge of patches today, Adobe pushes just one, but theirs addresses no less than 29!! gaping holes in one single update.  As we reported earlier, at least one of these 29 vulnerabilities is already being actively exploited. So if you are using Acrobat or Adobe Reader, no matter whether on Unix Windows or Mac, you definitely should take a close look at http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb09-15.html and start rolling the update. If we were in the habit of rating Adobe patches like Microsoft's, this one would be a "Critical"

[SlowModem]

Some of those update files are many megs.  My desktop will be downloading for days at 28.8kbs!  

[Anthony]

My computer downloaded the updates some time last night. The system had rebooted and was waiting on me to input the P/W so it could finish loading windows. So far, everything is running fine.

[sam2004gp]

I just double checked my primary Department-Email/Windows box here at work.   I had 32 updates, with some for Office 2007.

[SlowModem]

What I wonder is how long they're going to support XP with updates.  I know they make their money selling operating systems, but as long as my computers work, I can't see buying new stuff.   

Of course, I suppose people with ME and 2000 said the same thing.

Greg   

[sam2004gp]

What I wonder is how long they're going to support XP with updates.  I know they make their money selling operating systems, but as long as my computers work, I can't see buying new stuff.   

Of course, I suppose people with ME and 2000 said the same thing.

Greg   

Everything that I do currently works great in Windows XP.  So like you why change at this point.  If I try and upgrade to Windows 7 or Vista, then my machine will not have enough Graphic Card "Umph" to keep up anymore.  I would love to have a new machine, but since I am such a  "Power user", it will most likely cost me a good $1500 before I would be happy with what I got.   

So really I guess, I am teetering on the familiar fence of wanting a new box, but not being able to afford one.

[Downlinerz2]

What I wonder is how long they're going to support XP with updates.  I know they make their money selling operating systems, but as long as my computers work, I can't see buying new stuff.   
Of course, I suppose people with ME and 2000 said the same thing.
Greg   

Greg,
   I had ME and I said I was not going to update at all if I didn't have to.  Even after they stopped supporting ME, as long as I could do what I wanted to do, I was happy.
Then, I ran into a problem.  I called for support and there was nothing they could do to help.  That did it.  I bought a new computer. I kicked myself for not doing it sooner.

[sam2004gp]

A machine I could only dream about.  http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4776265&csid=ITD&body=MAIN#detailspecs

[DaculaWeather]

My laptop has Vista and it refuses to install SP2. I'm so sick of Microcrap I can't stand it.

Luckily. my weather computer is running XP and it pretty much stays updated.

[Garth Bock]

I have Auto Updates set to Download But Let Me Choose to Install Them. I have seen updates in the past that suddenly made applications unstable or caused other problems. Also I have had the weather computer knocked down by updates before. I would prefer to control the reboot of the computer in this case. I don't have StartWatch yet because of no quality weather time lately. There was a question about support for XP ... it ends in 2014. Having a dedicated weather computer is the best way to go when it comes to virus's and hackers. I have a separate computer for surfing and doing web pages. The weather computer is fully protected but the only place I surf to with it is the Ambient site to get the latest VWS version.

Oh if you are here and notice there is no data in my banner, power supply died in my new Mini-ATX Atom that has been running the station since late summer (is that word still useable ?). The Atom box was the size of a shoe box and used half the power of a standard desktop. The only problem was even though it was dual core I was running XP 32bit which didnt take full advantage of it and I noticed too much lag in the FTP. Funny I bought a Dell GX620 and it is due in today. Guess the Atom heard about its replacement and killed itself.

[DaculaWeather]

Yes, I hate auto updates.

I managed Novell networks for 25 years and by far, the most problems I've ever had were not my servers, it was always my Windows workstations.

[sam2004gp]

Yep same here at my work.  I over see about 32 Non-internet connected Window boxes, 4 internet connected Windows Boxes, a dozen MACs, and two Unix Servers.  We are a printing company for for the Washington DC metro market.

[JOE]

No auto updates for me either.

Don't like to come home and see that it's been waiting 23 hours for a single keystroke to finish re-booting.

[SlowModem]

No auto updates for me either.

Don't like to come home and see that it's been waiting 23 hours for a single keystroke to finish re-booting.

Exactly right!   

[gsownsby]

All of today's Microsoft updates went into place on my VWS-equiped PC.  No problems so far.

Since I have a Windows Home Server, I can always rollback my VWS PC if I have to...WHS has saved my bacon several times.   

[gwwilk]

 
I had a half hour to kill before a brass group rehearsal last evening, so I decided to install the MS updates on several of my computers.  Unfortunately that included my old Win2K Athlon machine that hosted my weather website and also ran all of my weather-related programs including VWS, WD, Weatherlink, VirtualVP, Startwatch, VPLive, ImageSalsa, MovieSalsa, along with Cerebus FTP Server so my webcam pics can get pushed into the /wamp/www directory.  Rebooting after the upgrade gave a blue screen of death and a nonspecific 0x0000001E error message.  Nothing I did would revive the old beast including a complete restore from a weekold full Acronis backup.  Tried replacing the memory and pulling PCI cards, and used the original Win2K CD-ROM in order to recover, all to no avail. 

I suspected this old machine was on its way out last summer when I built an Athlon II x64 dual core with 4 GB of RAM and 650 GB HD and a Motherboard with a serial port on which I had installed the release candidate Win7.  Windows 7 RTM x64 took until about 5 this AM to to a fresh install with all of my 'shortcuts' that wasted lots of time.

I can confirm that VirtualVP doesn't function in Win7 x64 and that the Virtual PC function of Win 7 doesn't allow it to run either.  Virtual PC is set up with a default XP Pro 32 bit image that runs within Win7, and I thought I might be able to get that to work.  VWS didn't see Com1, and Wamp's Apache couldn't access port 80, despite firewall settings to the contrary.

So I currently am limping along with my Win7 x64 installation that almost works well enough to keep.  For some reason my VWS jpeg's aren't being written at all, but it's good enough after 22 straight hours of fiddling, diddling, and cursing quite liberally at times.  After a good night's sleep, I think I'll install Win7 32 bit and just forego the extra GB of RAM that won't be used by that version.  I was able to mount my Acronis backup image on my Win7 install (via Acronis, of course) so I could recover all of my data files and installation parameters.  I wouldn't want to have to try to recreate a lot of that stuff like the ImageSalsa data.

Backups are worth their weight in gold!

[SlowModem]

To top off the day, the phone lines (voice line and data line), which were working great, decided to stop working.  I suspect the lines are wet somewhere.  It'll be between now and Monday when they get around to looking at it.  They ran a test that showed that it wasn't a phone pole knocked down or anything like that.  And we've only lived here about 4 years, so the phone lines are not old.  So Slow Modem will be No Modem until Ma Bell gets out here to look at things.  Luckily, the wireless laptop modem still works (although it's disconnected twice while I've been typing this     )

[Weather Display]

there was a link somewhere to a 64 bit driver for vvp I think?

[SlowModem]

To top off the day, the phone lines (voice line and data line), which were working great, decided to stop working.  I suspect the lines are wet somewhere.  It'll be between now and Monday when they get around to looking at it.  They ran a test that showed that it wasn't a phone pole knocked down or anything like that.  And we've only lived here about 4 years, so the phone lines are not old.  So Slow Modem will be No Modem until Ma Bell gets out here to look at things.  Luckily, the wireless laptop modem still works (although it's disconnected twice while I've been typing this     )

Well, either Mother Nature or Ma Bell is in a good mood this evening.  For some reason the phone lines just started working again.  It's definitely not boring living out in the country!  (even if it seems the phone is two tin cans and a string!).

[DanS]

Well, either Mother Nature or Ma Bell is in a good mood this evening.  For some reason the phone lines just started working again.  It's definitely not boring living out in the country!  (even if it seems the phone is two tin cans and a string!).

Well guess the string dried out and became taught enough again to restore comms.