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Windows 7 Users Who Installed January Update Report Network Issues; Some Say the Update Has Also Incorrectly Flagged Their OS License as 'Not Genuine' (itpro.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the not-again dept.

Some Windows 7 admins are feeling the pain of Microsoft's latest updates in this week's Patch Tuesday releases. From a report: Users who've installed this Tuesday's KB4480970 cumulative January update have been complaining of network connectivity issues on those devices based on a network that uses the SMBv2 file sharing protocol. Microsoft released its update to fix several identified vulnerabilities, including a remote execution flaw in PowerShell and to add robustness against side-channel attacks like those targeting the Meltdown and Spectre flaws. But a number of users immediately complained of networking issues, with Microsoft confirming there are now three known problems with the January patch. The other issues comprise an authentication error, and a file-sharing issue affecting some user accounts. ZDNet adds: Regarding the 'Not Genuine' Windows 7 error, Microsoft confirms that "some users are reporting the KMS Activation error, 'Not Genuine', 0xc004f200 on Windows 7 devices". "We are aware of this incident and are presently investigating it. We will provide an update when available," writes Microsoft on both KB4480960 and KB4480970.

8 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Just patches? by omnichad · · Score: 4, Interesting

    These "patches"are getting to be almost as complex as the feature updates. Why would security updates be changing so much? Even mitigating a complex attack shouldn't require a registry hack to fix broken functionality.

    Looks like Home and Pro users are guinea pigs for more than just the semi annual updates now. How did this even make it out of testing?

    1. Re:Just patches? by gweihir · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think MS just does not care anymore about ordinary users. Sure, they are incompetent and their products never were good, but what is recently happening with win7 and win10 is way beyond that.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  2. This is why update strategy was by NotSoHeavyD3 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    On windows 7 I used to do the following

    Turn off auto updates

    Check for updates by hand

    Only if the update was at least a week old update at a time of my choosing

    Of course when I tried this on windows 10 check for updates is now check for the latest alpha updates and immediately apply them.

    --
    Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
  3. Remote Desktop Dead by WankerWeasel · · Score: 5, Informative

    Experienced this issue with remote desktop which the update killed. Found others were experiencing the same. Uninstall the update and remote desktop works again.

    1. Re:Remote Desktop Dead by WankerWeasel · · Score: 4, Informative

      KB4480970 on Windows 7 Professional. Kept getting a message that the connection couldn't be made and it may be because the password expired. Happened when attempting to connect to it from 2 difference devices (another desktop and a smartphone) which both were able to connect to it previously. Heck, I used Remote Desktop to install the update on the remote computer and after the restart to finish the install, it would no longer connect. Had to get out a keyboard and mouse to attach to it, login, and uninstall KB4480970. Now it works fine again.

  4. Any fix for slow SMB? by snapsnap · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I copied a 2 GB file, and it took nearly threee weeks. It finally completed and the md5sum checked out, but that's ridiculous. I don't need to access our Windows file share often, but some of my coworkers do. It's driving them nuts.

    1. Re:Any fix for slow SMB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Win10 fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Windows Box (a G5 Dual 2.5Ghz Machine w/ 100 GIG of RAM) for about 3 weeks now while it attempts to copy a 2GB file from one folder on the SMB to another folder. 3 weeks. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running Slackware 1.0, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Win10 machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

      In addition, during this file transfer, Explorer will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even vi is straining to keep up as I type this.

      I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Windows installs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Win10 that has run faster than its Android counterpart, despite the Arm's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2.5 Ghz Dual machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Win10 machine is a superior machine

      Win addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Windows machine over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

  5. I hope they have fix by the time I boot up windows by Revek · · Score: 3, Funny

    Should happen sometime in the next six months.