Windows Patch Leaves Many XP Users With Blue Screens

CWmike writes "Tuesday's security updates from Microsoft have crippled Windows XP PCs with the notorious Blue Screen of Death, users have reported on the company's support forum. Complaints began early yesterday, and gained momentum throughout the day. 'I updated 11 Windows XP updates today and restarted my PC like it asked me to,' said a user identified as 'tansenroy' who kicked off a growing support thread: 'From then on, Windows cannot restart again! It is stopping at the blue screen with the following message: 'A problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.' Others joined in with similar reports. Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by 'maxyimus' was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens."

Comments

Re:ha ha suckers!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get is why people don't bother backing up important things like that.

Re:Remove automatic updates from your slipstream

[Savage-Rabbit]

Here is a list of Microsoft stuff to remove from your XP slipstream:

Automatic Updates (for reasons related to the article)
Windows media player (including 6.4) because it downloads codecs at will.
Accessibility Options (unless you need them)
ClipBook Viewer (useless)
Games
Internet Games ...

Long list, wouldn't it be simpler to just remove Windows XP in it's entirety from your PC and replace it with something else?

Re:Need confirmation

[russotto]

There is a world of difference between an 'infected' Windows machine that has some annoying pop-ups showing up every 15 minutes, but is otherwise functional, and a Windows machine that won't boot because of a recently installed patch.

Yeah. The owner of the machine would rather have the former... while everyone else on the Internet would rather they had the latter, as the former is probably sending out spam and trying to infect every other machine it can find as well.

Re:ha ha suckers!!!

[Pentium100]

Microsoft Windows is not a new product. If you don't know that it can't be counted on to work like a normal computer, that doesn't just mean you're not technical. It means you have been living under a rock for 20 years.

Strange, under my rock, Windows XP/2003 work well, I rarely have to restart my computers and when I do it is usually because of a hardware problem, long power outage (long enough to discharge UPS batteries) or because I am installing some software that needs a reboot. I get bluescreens very rarely.

for example:

Current System Uptime: 28 day(s), 3 hour(s), 27 minute(s), 48 second(s)
 
Since 2009.03.27:
 
          System Availability: 99.9270%
                  Total Uptime: 321d 11h:16m:42s
                Total Downtime: 0d 5h:38m:22s
                Total Reboots: 11
    Mean Time Between Reboots: 29.25 days
            Total Bluescreens: 0

Those 5 hours? Most of them were spent when I added more RAM, but had either a bad module or a bad slot, so I took that long to finally give up and disable 4 modules from BIOS, leaving 3GB (instead of 5GB what I wanted and 1GB of what was before). That was ~28 days ago. Then there were a few power outages and this PC was connected to a smaller UPS. IIRC only one of those 11 reboots was because the PC froze for some reason.

OS: 2003