On 12/28/2017 10:31 PM, Paul wrote:
T wrote:
On 12/28/2017 04:48 PM, T wrote:
Windows is a house of cards, but you can cope with it and never
land on what I am speaking of if you follow a the few simple
rules I point out.


Although my rules would have not helped with this, I am in
the process of PCI certifying sever Windows 7 computers.
Four of the seven had their updates crashed.Â* I wrote
the fix as a tip over on the Window 7 group.

Windows is a house of cards and as some have reported over here,
some never have an issue with it.

M$ Update service is a PAIN IN THE ASS.Â* It speaks to M$'s
quality control issues.Â* This kind of update crap does not
happen to this extent in any other OS.


It's actually a design issue, and not a quality issue.

Windows Update does not scale well, the more updates
that are poured into the database.

Microsoft has attempted to fix this, by switching
Windows 7 over to jumbo "one a month" updates.
This is an attempt to hide the problem.

However, for a guy like you, this doesn't solve the
problem of "how do I get to Nirvana?". The thing is,
you have to get patched up enough, to load the Patch
Tuesday one, and if wuauserv is spinning in circles,
that might not happen for hours and hours. Just getting
prepared to get there, is a problem.

In the past, we found an article identifying two
patches that put the OS in an "as ready as it's gonna
get" state, and from there, you can attempt the
latest Patch Tuesday cumulative. OK, so I think the
search term I need is '369. Maybe these will serve
as a bread crumb.

Â*Â*Â* http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/...aspx?q=3020369

Â*Â*Â* http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/...aspx?q=3125574

The people at wsusoffline deal with this too. They
actually have a file in their download, which lists
the "pre-requisite" patches to make Windows Update work.
For Vista, there were at least five patches that
made up their list. (I actually got Windows Update
working on Vista once - it's a metric bitch!!!) And
if I needed to bootstrap myself today on the topic,
I might dig around my Wsusoffline collection for a hint.

If an OS has gone out of support there, then you have
to dig up the "last" version they offer, to get the
desired patch list. For example, the last WinXP-supporting
version was 9.2.1. Vista is no longer being supported, so
you'd have to discover which version was the last for
Vista, to get their best guess as to the patch list
to use.

Basically, any patch that has win32k.sys, atmfd.sys,
or some GDI thing, would have a lot of dependencies that
caused Windows Update to loop for hours on end. The people
at Wsusoffline know exactly which files are the troublemakers,
they analyze incoming patches and figure out which patch
supersedes one already in their short list, and that becomes
the "new fixer" on the list. And so on. That's the
methodology. I'm not good enough at that, to do it
myself. I tried my own hand at Vista. And failed.
Twice. I used their list on the third try, and it
worked. It took *days* for those combined experiments.
There was even hair loss and a blood pressure rise.
I almost bought a Balmer dart board.

Â*Â* Paul

Awesome read. Thank you!

"design issue, and not a quality issue" are the
same thing to me. But I see your difference.