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Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft indicated this week that it has fixed a Windows XP resource-hog problem associated with the system's SVCHOST.EXE processes. Windows XP users affected by this problem typically found that the operating system was using up system resources for 15 minutes to an hour after startup, making it difficult to use the machine during that period. The Microsoft Update team had vowed last month to spend the holiday break tackling the issue, which has plagued some users for years. The fix involved stopping the system from perpetually checking Internet Explorer updates. Microsoft indicated that the fix was rolled out on Tuesday."
Bye bye Windows 8 hello xp
Windows XP has been out for 12 years and they just started to look into the problem last month?
What next: Are they going to tackle the memory leaks in the Commodore 64 Operating System?
windows embedded systems based on XP still get updates for some time and firms can buy more update for XP as well.
The performance issue was a constant check for updates.. for another program notorious for performance issues....
This is why I really wish that Microsoft was *truly* forced to allow IE to be ripped out of their operating system completely.
At this point, just give it up guys. You had over 10 years trying to make a browser. Let it go....
Suppose if they didn't get it over the holiday and it wasn't done by April 8th, they could have perhaps saved themselves all the bother and turned off all update checks
Windows Server 2003 is supported longer than Windows XP despite using the same update mechanism and nearly the same kernel. Extended support for Windows Server 2003 ends on 7/14/2015, and this problem will only get worse for servers over the last two and a half years of extended support. So there's a benefit for making a fix for Windows Server 2003. And if the same fix applies to Windows XP, it doesn't cost Microsoft that much to release the fix for both, and the gesture of goodwill could help deter companies from switching to GNU/Linux or OS X instead of buying Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell.
What business sense is there in fixing soon-to-be-obsolete products
Because other products using the same update mechanism aren't quite as soon-to-be-obsolete.
I repair old computers to be resold and the amount of time it would take to get the first updates was the single longest time waster of re-installing a fresh copy of XP on an old machine. The last 2 days it only took about 5 minutes for XP to figure out what updates were exactly needed instead of what had become the normal several hours.
I seem to remember reading that the time used by the previous update conflict resolution algorithm scales exponentially with the number of updates issued for a particular platform. Until recently, the number of updates wasn't big enough to cause a problem, but after 12 years of updates, this has changed.
What I'd really like Microsoft to do for XP (and other versions of Windows) is when the product reaches end of life, create a new installation medium which includes all the updates. If anyone wants to do legacy installations of the OS in future for special purposes, that could be quite handy.
in the past the astroturfers and other MS fans said I was full of crap because I said my computer took 10 minutes to boot to a useable state. Screw all of you. I stand by my past assertions that MS OS's are crap- they always have been and always will be.
When are they going to figure out what causes my Win 7 to take 10 minutes to boot to a useable state? Maybe in 2025...
Partial downtime / reduced capacity still represents money though. In some cases, large amounts of money. There are a lot of realtime call processing systems that run 2003 because the vendor doesn't support, or charges a lot of money to upgrade to software supporting, Server 2008 or newer. The systems need to come online in a specific order instead of all at once (might be 4-10 or more) and if you have a vendor onsite doing maintenance, charging by the hour, who can't leave until it's verified operational, that 15-60 minutes per server gets really expensive.
Sounds like you should have rolled the updates into an updated xp iso. Search the MS kb for more info.
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
I wonder, how much Co2 has been released into the atmosphere, with this bug present on millions of computers, over decades, causing PC's to eat more electricity than they should.
If the summary is correct I don't really see how this affects servers all that much... The summary says it is an issue in the first 15-60 minutes after startup. Servers are generally up for longer periods of time so the actual impact would be low for W2K03.
It's about time they fixed this. I intermittently run a Virtual Machine version of XP. A few months ago, I noticed windows update service (running under svchost) would chew up 99% of the cpu when booted up for 10 minutes. Seems the problem was windows updates check for the presence of every single IE update ever released, when they were all superseded by the latest IE cumulative updates anyway and not per-requisites for anything else. I'm not sure why they are patting themselves on the back, when they just did the equivalent of declining superceded updates in WSUS (generally done in seconds, btw).
One was a theoretically-exploitable, but extremely difficult to do so, obscure security bug that was almost invisible,
The other brought even top-of-the-line machines to a grinding halt constantly without reason.
Despite my own priorities, one of those is obviously going to get a LOT more attention.
To be fair they usually don't do this kind of stuff.
Right. Normally, if it's broken, it stays broken until a new product release really fucks it up...
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