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Exponential Algorithm In Windows Update Slowing XP Machines
jones_supa writes "An interesting bug regarding update dependency calculation has been found in Windows XP. By design, machines using Windows Update retrieve patch information from Microsoft's update servers (or possibly WSUS in a company setting). That patch information contains information about each patch: what software it applies to and, critically, what historic patch or patches the current patch supersedes. Unfortunately, the Windows Update client components used an algorithm with exponential scaling when processing these lists. Each additional superseded patch would double the time taken to process the list. With the operating system now very old, those lists have grown long, sometimes to 40 or more items. On a new machine, that processing appeared to be almost instantaneous. It is now very slow. After starting the system, svchost.exe is chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the machine will eventually return to normalcy. Microsoft thought that it had this problem fixed in November's Patch Tuesday update after it culled the supersedence lists. That update didn't appear to fix the problem. The company thought that its December update would also provide a solution, with even more aggressive culling. That didn't seem to help either. For one reason or another, Microsoft's test scenarios for the patches didn't reflect the experience of real Windows XP machines."
They should have been off Windows XP long ago.
This is clearly the right time for Microsoft to completely rewamp the update system in XP; and what could possibly be better than to just remove the whole thing and import an already working package system from Debian?
I have a Q9550 processor'd machine running at 3.4ghz and left it over night and it was still chewing on the list. Eventually I just killed the svchost process.
Does 2003 Server have the same problem since it uses the same update mechanisms as XP?
That's the best way to force users to upgrade that I can think of. They're already planning to end-of-life it. After EOL, they can simply start adding empty patches to the update system until it drives left-over XP users to upgrade. ;-)
I saw this during video playback, checked to see why the video was barfing and saw the svchost.exe chewing up 100% just like they say. It didn't happen on boot. I think it can happen whenever Windows Update scans for updates.
However, when I killed the svchost just to watch my video, I lost sound which made me think it had to be Media Player.
Well, maybe it was; but eventually I found out about this bug and realized I had to just sit through it.
The questions for me are "WTF does it do?", "Why does it have to walk this tree, and what is so bloody CPU intensive about it?" followed by, "Why does an update have to care what patches are superseded? As long as you're up to the latest patch level, it should be all good".
I think the whole thing is fundamentally broken. You have your current version of $Thing, it depends on N other things which must be of a given version. When you upgrade $Thing you just check to make sure the things it depends on are there and if they aren't, then you get them. The old stuff? You just check to see what depends on it, and if there is no longer anything depending on it you can quarantine it. If anything tries to access a quarantined dependancy, then your dependencies are broken and you need to patch the app that tried to do that.
I know I'm glossing over some things, and package management is not trivial; but there's no excuse I can see for exponentially growing scan algorithms.
How exactly does someone think a O(2â) algorithm is OK to check in?
I've noticed that this is an issue on Windows Server 2003 (I believe R2 included). I have noticed that this is less of an issue once IE8 is installed (this should have already been done by this point), but this is still definitely an issue. I will be glad when I am rid of this OS (soon!).
I'm really not sure if I would put it past MS or not to do this intentionally and leave it unfixed while reporting (lying) about trying to fix it in order to force the death of XP on schedule. It seems too obvious.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
film at 11
I have implemented a couple of component systems. The dependency calculcation algorithm easily becomes a Towers of Hanoi exercise unless a proper heuristic is applied. In fact, you can solve it easily the way you brute-force a Sudoku solution. IOW, cut off the recursion at the first opportunity, and you'll be ok.
Seriously, did anyone think this wasn't the case?
Microsoft wants to make sure that their users are motivated to buy a new OS, so they do whatever they can to make their old OSes look slow and decrepit. Making the patching procedure painfully tedious is simply another trick to make the new OS look like an improvement and make the user want to upgrade.
Patching my old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS install (3 versions behind!) is simple and quick. None of this "make it slow to abuse/exploit the user" crap.
Microsoft does it this way so they have long enough durations to compare different OEMs.
I just put XP on an old laptop to run some specialized automotive software. This svchost bug has been bothering me ever since. If you kill the process it also takes out other services (like wifi).
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Here's a radical idea: why don't they fix the stupid exponential algorithm rather than papering it over by trimming the lists?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I spotted the XP logo on a screensaver during the 60 minutes episode.
How many Microsoft Engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None. They just redefine darkness as the new standard.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
These are the clowns who use some kind of insertion sort to sort the files in a folder window, so when you chamge the sort on a window with thousands of files, god help you. Hell, insertion sort would be faster. It's as if their algorithm is "add the next file name, then bubble sort the whole damned thing. Repeat with next name."
This is built into their display list widget. How shameful past the early 1980s.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Where can I find a complete set of all the updates they have so I can install those I like (not windows genuine disadvantage etc) without having to connect to microsofts update servers?
and not network connect the computer until I'm done
Wow, so I'm not crazy. I have to keep some old XP machines around for certain build tools. When I turned on my XP PC's recently for a sustaining engineering activity, the Windows update had them bogged down all night and all day. Was assuming a machine-specific problem, but this confirms it's a general problem. Thanks Slashdot for pointing this out, and thanks Microsoft for keeping IT interesting.
I would suspect this is not limited solely to XP because I've experienced horrible delays with recent updates on a Win7 machine, which is only 6-7 months old. It's a new laptop I got from my company to replace an older XP machine and I recall updates were very snappy at first, now getting progressively more greedy for processing time.
Have a Day!
I have a client that uses Windows XP. The client contacted me last month about lags in the application I provide for them. The client's office isn't open every day, and they turn off all the PCs when they're out of the office.
Last month, logs showed me that the problems were ONLY occurring in the first few hours after booting the PC for the first time following a "patch Tuesday." The problem appeared on four consecutive months, so I immediately suspected windows updates. I warned the client that it might happen again and suggested that they turn on the PC first thing when they arrive.
The lags happened again this past week, so I did some looking around and noticed that they were using an old version of Internet Explorer (which is required for Windows Updates), so I upgraded them to IE8. After two failed attempts at installing IE8 (it spent several hours doing nothing while supposedly downloading updates as part of the install process), it finally succeeded on the third try, and now the machine processes Windows Updates significantly faster (a couple of minutes instead of more than an hour).
p.s. Why the F*** wasn't IE8 considered a critical update for XP?
Of course Windows performance degrades over time.
How else would they ever get anyone to upgrade? Remove the Start button?
Ubuntu gave me a boatload of dependency questions the last time I upgraded the OS version of my kids computer. Paraphrased: "The following gajillion packages or services with funny names may not be compatible with your new upgrade request. Please checkmark those you wish to keep."
Yeah, I know, I was probably "doing something wrong" or didn't bother to RTFM for upgrades, but from a "consumer" standpoint, it was not "user friendly" and time-consuming. (True, it's only once every couple of years one has to do such. MS sends upgrades far more often, but at least it's the machine slaving away instead of the human.)
Table-ized A.I.
I miss Windiz Update....
Upgrading to Windows 7 or Windows 8 certainly fixes one issue, but it creates a whole new set of problems.
1.) There is guarantee that this won't be a problem in Win7 or Win8. This only showed up when there were *Lots* of updates to IE. In three or four years, Win7 could have a similar problem, or at least a problem with similar symptoms.
2.) Win7 did redesign the update process. (Actually Vista first showed up with it, but many people are skipping Vista altogether.) But in their great (for very, very small values of great) wisdom, they removed the ability to delete old, unneeded patches. In XP and 2003, you simply went to the Windows folder and deleted any of the old patches. You could no longer un-install the patch, but who needs to un-install a 7year-old patch? With Win 7, you cannot delete old patches. The winsxs folder grows exponentially, and since everything depends on everything else, deleting from that folder causes all kinds of problems. This leaves you with a winsxs folder that can be 20G or 30G with no way to trim it down. This is fine for a single system with a 500G hard drive, but is a BIG pain when dealing with VM's.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
"fundamentally" should be "deliberately"
And how exactly does Slashdot not have full Unicode support?
Slashdot used to have at least some level of Unicode support. Then vandals discovered directionality override characters and used them to break the layout and spoof moderation. The admins responded by instituting a strict code point whitelist to prevent the use of directionality overrides and the use of characters that are more useful for Unicode art (the successor to ASCII art) than for English text.
I'd noticed this on one of two lingering Windows XP machines last month. Good to know I'm not nuts.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Because there aren't enough months of Windows XP's extended support left for it to be worth fixing. Microsoft refused to fix a few bugs near the end of Windows 98's service life as well; see this story from June 2006.
You're like the Windows XP version of APK aren't you?
Where can I find a complete set of all the updates they have [...] without having to connect to microsofts update servers?
If you don't want to connect to Microsoft servers, why did you choose to use a Microsoft operating system? But if you insist, start your research with the words slipstreamed updates.
I run a small computer store and this issue has been driving me crazy the last few weeks, we have had a few XP machines come back because customers are complaining they are so slow! When we refurbished them before these patches they were fine! I have had to disable Windows update to fix the issue, not the best solution at all. 100% CPU from svchost.exe for hours, how can Microsoft mess up so bad..!
I'll upgrade XP to a different MS-OS the day MS can deliver something as small and efficient as XP. If they can't I have to look elsewhere
Is everybody stupid. XP is fast. Faster than all the current consumer grade PC OSes
I think that is what this patch... Sorry... BUG is supposed to fix.
No. In my case, it's trying to apply the .NET updates that completely murders my system. Apparently MS wants a gigabyte or so of free disk space on C:\ (and nowhere else) or the update will fail miserably. As it happens, my system partition has about 200MB free space, so the update disappears down a rabbit hole and never completes.
I used to think it was because it needed a bunch of temporary disk space, so last night I changed the TMP and TEMP environment variables to point to a volume with tons of free space, rebooted (because, you know, it's Windows), set just one of the several .NET updates running, then went off to see The Hobbit. When I returned some three hours later, the update had hung, the disk was idle, C:\ had zero bytes free, and the system log was corrupted.
Honestly, I don't know why anyone continues to be surprised by Redmond's rank incompetence...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
They actually just fixed the SxS bloat with a patch a month or two ago. Link : here.
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
So you'll buy win7 just make XP unusable...to keep people from strapping it together for another decade.
This has been happening on and off for more than a year. I found the last couple of times that it was helped if I manually fetched and installed the latest "Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer" for version 8 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-088 at time of writing). Never understood why; perhaps it allows a serious chunk of the search tree to be pruned quickly avoiding the exponential stupidity.
If you need to stop the 100% CPU while you fetch this then Start -> Run, "Services.msc", locate and stop "Automatic Updates".
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
This quote tells you ALL you need to know about Microsoft. To Microsoft, a list of merely 40 items is 'long', and thus Microsoft algorithms are allowed to run as slowly as molasses in the Arctic if the user dares to 'stress' their system to this 'degree'.
Now the usual vile shills will step in at this point, and try to tell the naive (apparently most of the readers here) that there are all kinds of valid reasons why a list of just 40 items should be disastrous for a modern OS (and be in no doubt, XP is most certainly a modern OS). These shills think you so moronic, that you'll have no knowledge of the mainframes that used to process the records of millions of customers in the 1960s, using software and hardware resources that are the tiniest fraction of any PC running XP. In the 1950s, algorithms were invented that allowed astonishing processing of large datasets using tiny working amounts of main RAM, and primary storage.
However, anyone using Windows knows that you better not dare having more than a few hundred files in any given folder, before performance of Windows starts to collapse if you do anything working with that list of files. Beyond cramming NSA back-doors into every product they build, and ensuring that Visual Studio is a fairly decent product, there is no quality control or use of decent Computer Science skills at Microsoft.
Indeed, for the longest time, Microsoft, together with partner Intel, has relied on a PC having a useful lifetime of just THREE years, before the user feels OBLIGED to update to the latest version of Windows, and the latest Intel chip, to get back the responsiveness the previous computer had when it was new.
So users should update from XP because too many of Microsoft's NSA back-doors are now in the wild, compromising the 'security' of XP computers? That is it? That is the reason Microsoft and its army of vile shills screams at XP users. Oh, without a doubt, NT version whatever (the product the sheeple know as Vista/Win7/Win8) is better in some regards than NT version 5 (XP), but it is still just a version of NT under the hood. The 'new' driver model that came with Vista onwards is crap. The support for multi-core processing is still crap (and is it any co-incidence that Intel has a BIG single threaded lead over AMD). People need real-time OS functions from Windows, and they are still crap.
The point is one uses Windows for the convenience, and the astonishing world of Windows compatible applications. The s**tty bells-and-whistles of XP onwards are badly coded rubbish any sane user disables when first configuring the install. After all, with Microsoft, even the basic stuff barely works.
Vista onward brought only ONE useful thing in the common case- the near universally deployed 64-bit version of modern NT. XP was the last 32-bit OS Windows, in effect. Vista/Win7/Win8 should be used as the first general 64-bit Windows OS, solving some of Microsoft's god awful memory management issues.
When everyone is finally forced to move from XP, hopefully Desktop Android will be deployed and available, so we can say "goodbye" to Microsoft for good.
According to the article the problem only happens at start-up for about an hour and then stops. So, if you never restart, only shutting down the PC via hibernation you will never see the problem.
To fix this problem just run the latest Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer - for December this is KB2898785. Once you've run the update, reboot and then the updates will work.
I've had to do this for October, November and December.
This article has some more info about it - read the comments.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/windows-xp-update-locks-machines-svchost-redlined-100-fix-it-kb-2879017-230733#disqus_thread/
I, unfortunately, maintain a Windows XP virtual machine for some backwards compatibility testing. I recently started fresh from a SP3 install and I spent about an hour checking for the latest updates. This kind of confirms what I have been noticing over the years, that the checking for updates part keeps taking long and longer.
I buy used Dell's from Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale.
http://www.weirdstuff.com/
I have a few projects that require a windows OS and can't run under wine. By buying a Dell from weird stuff, the OS is licensed to the machine. So it's little more than a convenience thing for me.
I run several Win XP. Why? Because they work! Upgrading would mean buying new hardware, which my non-profit can't afford now.
Very fast machines came to a terrible sluggishness at around the end of 2011, beggining of 2012. And I mean gamer-spec computers (some years ago). After tweaking a lot without result I reinstalled Win XP, upgraded all the way to SP-2, and turned off updates completly. Problem solved.
They are triple firewalled, very limited net access, and antivirus equiped.
Why should I upgrade? This is not an ideologic situation, but a very practical and economical one. Upgrade to Win 8? Have you ever tried to explain an over-60 user how it works? Win XP is perfect and solves my every need, I won' go into the expense and time waste it requires to upgrade, when I will get nothing in return (silly expense).
So, out of interest, how are you securing this unpatched XP machine? I can understand that if it's firewalled, with no open ports, it may be resistant to direct connections from outside but that's not enough for a typical machine doing useful work. If the machine makes network requests, or works on data from removable media, it is way more than likely to be vulnerable to some buffer overflow type response that can be fed to it. You know, the type of vulnerabilities that turn up every few weeks or so and (hopefully) get patched.
Come on Microsoft, Release XP SP4 and solve it.
Grab the Internet Explorer rollup patch available for download. Apply it, reboot, and it should be fixed. You may have to shut off automatic downloads first, then turn that back on at the end.
A simple Google search found this information. So stop the fucking hand wringing Slashdorks.
Come on, folks. Are we certain this wasn't done by design?
Have gnu, will travel.
Probably didn't work as expected because virtually every XP machine has malware on it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This brings back memories of an old version of MS Flight Simulator (2000?). Whenever you would choose an item from a main list (maybe it was US state), the secondary drop-down list of airports within that category was oddly slow, and exponentially related to the number of items in the list. I just chalked it up to a programming WTF, and something Microsoft never noticed during QA because they were testing on high end machines.
Download yourself a real database.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
also happened back in 2007
http://blogs.technet.com/b/asiasupp/archive/2007/05/29/automatic-update-causes-svchost-exe-high-cpu.aspx
It's not really needed anymore. Just make sure you run MSE or something similar.
how can Microsoft mess up so bad..!
Often when Microsoft support sites fail to address my problem with a useful suggestion, I leave a comment about their proficiency. "Try herding goats, programming is not your thing."
They can have my command prompt when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
That was my go to program for seeing what is wrong. It won't show what is running inside that svchost instance.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Creating code that grows this slow processing only 40 items clearly indicates that M$ couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag.
Why do the fanbois love the shit that M$ shoves down their throats on a daily basis?
The problem is that the windows update service expects to find a patch that isn't there on a standard XP installation.
If you have installed from a vanilla XP SP3 CD you have IE6, if you have embedded patches you may have IE7 or IE8. Verify your IE version and download the appropriate patch. Install it immediately after completing the XP Setup and you are set.
IE6: WindowsXP-KB2879017-x86-ENU.exe
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40612
IE7: IE7-WindowsXP-KB2879017-x86-ENU.exe
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40519
IE8: IE8-WindowsXP-KB2879017-x86-ENU.exe
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40390
This whole article is interesting, but so not news.
I'm surprised that Microsoft is spending *any* time trying to fix this issue, given that the whole windows update process will be replaced in 4 months with the following:
if( operatingSystemVersion 6)
return(-1);
else
return(do_updates());
Sounds like yet another of Ubuntu's consumer-unfriendly "quirks" that don't show up outside the *buntu family -- try another distro/family, overwhelming chances are it won't show up with them.
If a process is allowed to grab 100 percent of CPU time then the operating system itself is fundamentally broken and no amount of fixing the app that grabs that amount of CPU is going to fix the problem. That being said....
Turn off automatic updates. If you can.
You can kill the offending svchost that is running wuauctl that is bogging your system down (sometimes this can take as much as 10 minutes or more on a slower machine) but it will just rerun at some later time putting you right back where you started. Sometimes the task manager will allow you to set the priority of the offending svchost to a lower amount most times it won't it's a crap shoot.
Rebooting will not help you because as soon as you reboot windows will run wuauctl under an svchost and your right back to square one.
or if your paranoid and want those updates
Since the task manager won't even list wuauctl as the culprit as that runs under svchost. Trust me wuauctl is the culprit here.
Get Process Explorer it will show all the running sub process's of a running svchost and will allow you to reset the priority to a lower amount. So....
Get process explorer if you can and set the offending wuauctl process priority to as low as you can set it.
That should net you about 15 to 20 percent of the CPU for the desktop and other apps. About enough
to surf the web but not enough to play a game or do anything else requiring all that much cpu.
Then sit back and enjoy your outdated buggy OS as it updates slowly.
A buy-once-support-forever offering would be wildly expensive, since the upfront QA costs would be astronomical. Such businesses exist, and their only clients are large governments, because nobody else can afford them.
You want an OS for less than twenty grand? Expect a few bugs, and an eventual end of life.
Or just go open source, where you get the benefits of bugs that other people pay to have fixed.
"Tried" several times to patch an error but "couldn't". "Coincidence" that it is planning to retire the platform. Smells a lot like planned obsolescence. Helps sell more junk products that become useless faster. Buy a new one!
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The winsxs folder grows exponentially, and since everything depends on everything else, deleting from that folder causes all kinds of problems.
Sort of no longer true (as of SP1): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2795190
On my primary Windows 7 computer, it is down to 10.5GB.
How about that update that never happened?
Some of you have probably had this happen. You run "Check for Updates" inside the security center. IE opens up to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com./ It check to see if you have the latest version of Windows Update. Awesome! You have it! Now are are presented with a choice, you can roll the dice and click "Express" and let Microsoft install everything Bing on your computer. Or, you can go pro and click "Custom" where you can select to install everything but the Bing crap. Ha! Jokes on you, no matter which one you click it will just sit on "Checking for updates" indefinitely. You search Google, you find the Mr. Fixit on the Microsoft Knowledge base and run it. It finds everything wrong, it fixes it, you are the champion, you reboot, you try again and the same thing. The green bar mocking you as it checks and checks and checks. You restart the Automatic Update Server, it doesn't help. You go pro again and hit Start -> Run and type "notepad.exe %windir%\WindowsUpdate.log" You are mocked! There are no errors, no warnings, nothing of value! You grab the tower, you give it a DDT, then you expel the foul beast from the office window into the parking lot 5 stories below. You return to your desk the victor, problem solved, life is good.
The article is pretty light on details, but what dependency resolution algorithm has exponential scaling? Topological sorts are usually O(V + E).
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
So they're trying to fix the problem of the processing time doubling with each patch, by trying out solutions in separately installed patches. You have to appreciate the irony of that!
windows embedded system that are based on XP have a few years left before updates end.
- Make XP slow
- blame it on a "bug".
- Drop hints to the user. Windows 8 doesn't have this issue, because, its newer!
- Maybe fix it before April 8, 2014, maybe not.
They have been trying to kill XP for years. Force the user to upgrade.
Intentional or not, Microsoft are loving this. We all know it.
Microsoft could fix this by releasing one last roll-up service pack, XP SP4. That would set a new baseline with all known patches applied. Since they are not going to release any new patches after April 14th, they'll never hit this issue anymore.
I'm pretty certain that MS will never do this because XP SP4 would make a huge negative dent on their Win8.x forecast.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I have been to some medical labs, large ones, owned by hospitals and pharma corps.
Many of their lab machines are still running Win XP, all updated to SP3.
I did ask (several times, in fact) why they didn't "upgrade" their software to Win 7 or later.
Answer ... there's no upgrade path.
Mind you, those medical test equipment are very costly, 6 to 7 figures a piece is not that uncommon. To tell them to "chuck off" all the equipment that are still running XP is impractical.
This is intentional because they don't want people to keep on using Windows XP, therefore they add crippling code, and just throw up their hands and say it is a bug they can't fix.
I have been to some medical labs, large ones, owned by hospitals and pharma corps.
Many of their lab machines are still running Win XP, all updated to SP3.
I did ask (several times, in fact) why they didn't "upgrade" their software to Win 7 or later.
Answer ... there's no upgrade path.
Mind you, those medical test equipment are very costly, 6 to 7 figures a piece is not that uncommon. To tell them to "chuck off" all the equipment that are still running XP is impractical.
But if you are so desperate, you can try emptying your cartridge into those medical equipment that are still running WinXP
MS should replace that bubble sort call in svchost.exe. :o
I remember same "problem" with DOS computer controlling CNC machine.
It started years ago on company's Novel Network, then it became non-networked station (with designs brought on diskettes), in the mid 2000's when working diskettes and drives become rarity, I've added secondary Linux machine, and ftp client on DOS computer (to facilitate data transfer from pendrives).
Maybe this is the route you should take with your friend's computer? A dedicated machine interfacing with much more valuable hardware?
"Win XP, all updated to SP3"
That new?
I work for a chemistry department at a major state university. We still are using a fair number of analytical machines with controllers running DOS on 486s, let alone the large numbers running XP.
The only upgrade path is whichever company bought out the original manufacturer telling you they'd be happy to sell you a new one. But the machine would be half a million to replace (X-ray diffraction system).
Not everybody has uber grants from Howard Hughes Medical, or the like to pay that. So, you keep on working with what you've got.
I chuckle when these "It's XP. Running a system that old is immoral" posts come up on Slashdot. The choice is often running the old system, or not being able to do your job.
Oh, and if you choose not doing your job, the state's in a budget crisis and they've been eliminating positions.
That's a pretty big game of roulette to play with being able to support your family just because the OS is too old to suit you. ;)
Other options listed, such as deleting from the Software Distribution/Downloads folder or the disk cleanup tool, reclaim between 8K and 50M from a 12G winsxs folder.
Thank you for the link, but it doesn't fix the problem. At best it only delays it. And if they never release a SP2, that folder can only grow.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Thank you for the link. It is good to know that there is some work being done with it. We have applied that patch but did not know that it fixed the issue. Now if they would only allow that patch to work with Win2008R2 ...
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Huh? Are you talking about the unnecessary/removed packages list? I go through them every time, but every single time I notice I could just have clicked "ok" without reading.
This is WAD. Microsoft wants you to upgrade so - like their registry garbage - they purposefully design things to degrade performance over time.
I guess when people think that showing kids how to write a program for a few minutes equals computer science: this is the result.
Even a clean install updates are whacked.
A netstat just after clicking "Express" or "Custom" returns ZERO active connections.
Just cut the power. The magnetic locks that I have seen open with no power. Found this out when the building lost power from a storm and the door was open.
It's always been a problem for MS to get people to move over to the latest and greatest version. Why not just make the computer slower over time. There is a life cycle for computer hardware and if your computer is slowly gettng slower then blame it on the old hardware. The customer buys a new computer and gets the latest Windows OS. It's a win-win solution for both hardware manufacturers and MS. Naturally, all of your MS programs won't work properly with the latest version so you have to upgrade or purchase new software.
In reality, the computers of last year work perfectly fine, the software today is so bloated with options (that 99% of us don't need) that they run slow. Back in the day (IBM PC), I had a word processor running on 64 kBytes of memory. Today you are looking at 100s of MBytes - why? Bloated coding.
If you are experiencing the problem, you can simply change the priority of the svchost or the wuauclt to the lowest level in either the Task Manager or Process Explorer. The update eventually processes, but you can get on with other tasks with only a minor performance penalty. Why a background update process defaults to a medium priority is beyond me.
You do know that's confgurable right? I mean, yeah it comes that way out of the box and that's kind of annoying, but you can set the shutdown behavior of your laptop any which way you want. Don't want to install updates? Disable the install updates on shutdown feature. Here first Google result for "disable update on shutdown windows 7" (minus quotes).
No doubt in april, someone will bundle all non-anoying patches together and release it as an unofficial XP SP4.
"I've seen silly bugs last for almost a decade."
MySQL?
Not sure I understand this, but my XP machine works well, no reboots required, runs fast. Until I get a notice that updates are available. Then it slows down, and starts giving me errors. I have to stop what I am working on, do a reboot, which installs the updates, takes a long time. After the reboot, the machine works fine. I have suspected MS sets a switch in XP forcing my machine to misbehave, so I will be forced to install the updates. I understand the need for updates, but I want to do them at a time convenient for me, say at the end of the day.
1. Turn automatic updates off.
2. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/security/dn481339, download as needed
XP will be around for a very long time, just as NT 4.x was. Hell I still have a client running DOS apps. Oh he has a Windows replacement but he much prefers the older apps. XP hasn't been phased out in a lot of small business environments because because the perceived cost/benefit isn't advantageous enough, even though the reality is a bit different (how much does DDR and DDR2 RAM cost now? Hard drive failures require format/install/hours of installing updates/reinstall apps all to end up with the same slow system). NT4 still exists in some embedded systems (heidelberg printing presses for example; why replace a $2.5million printing press that still works, except for the embedded PC that died? One of my friends stockpiled DEC alpha motherboards (AT form factor!) for his ripping workstation and the embedded controller because Heidelberg's fix is either a new-old-stock motherboard for $15K or a whole new press for $2.5m to $2.8m). Same for OS/2 - OS/2 Warp was what, a 1995 release, and it was dominant in banking workstations, ATM and other kiosk solutions until very recently.
I do not see XP dying for a long time to come.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I ran into a similar problem with a recent clean re-install of XP SP3. Everything went smooth until I started updating then SVCHOST pegged the CPU at 100%. It seems that Windows Update relies on DLLs from IE. The 1st thing it updated was Windows Update itself which relies on UPDATED DLLs from IE. I killed Automatic Updates and installed IE8 and the related updates (KB2618444) and it worked again. It's like they deliberately sabotaged it to make XP harder to install.
I assume Windows 7 and 8 use a different algorithm in the update mechanism? Otherwise they will be affected just as well.
The painters algorithm is alive and well at Microsoft.
Here is the patch that fixed it for me in December 2013:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-097
Great thanks!
Mandatory Knuth / Dijkstra link: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/papers/dancing-color.ps.gz