Windows 8 upgrade

For the umpteenth upgrade to Windows 8, when an upgrade is available but
not installed, one of the system comes to a screeching halt. In the
past it has been Firefox, Thunderbird, or some other program.

Tonight the LAN and the mouse slowed to the point they were nearly not
functioning. I tried a different mouse and no change.

I checked the Updates, and sure enough there were 18 to be installed.

I installed them and now everything is back to normal the mouse is
working, the LAN is working, Everything is working normally.

MS has taken one heck of a way to alert you of updates.

On Fri, 19 Jun 2015 18:06:46 -0400, Keith Nuttle
wrote:

For the umpteenth upgrade to Windows 8, when an upgrade is available but
not installed, one of the system comes to a screeching halt. In the
past it has been Firefox, Thunderbird, or some other program.

Tonight the LAN and the mouse slowed to the point they were nearly not
functioning. I tried a different mouse and no change.

I checked the Updates, and sure enough there were 18 to be installed.

I installed them and now everything is back to normal the mouse is
working, the LAN is working, Everything is working normally.

MS has taken one heck of a way to alert you of updates.

My assumption is that the behavior you're experiencing is unique to your
system, somehow.

On 6/19/2015 11:22 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jun 2015 18:06:46 -0400, Keith Nuttle
wrote:

For the umpteenth upgrade to Windows 8, when an upgrade is available but
not installed, one of the system comes to a screeching halt. In the
past it has been Firefox, Thunderbird, or some other program.

Tonight the LAN and the mouse slowed to the point they were nearly not
functioning. I tried a different mouse and no change.

I checked the Updates, and sure enough there were 18 to be installed.

I installed them and now everything is back to normal the mouse is
working, the LAN is working, Everything is working normally.

MS has taken one heck of a way to alert you of updates.

My assumption is that the behavior you're experiencing is unique to your
system, somehow.

The system is a Toshiba Satellite C55-A5204 i3-3120M 4GB memory.

The OEM computer came with Windows 8. It was upgraded to 8.1 as soon as
released, and has current updates.

I find it hard to believe that it is only my computer, with no hacks to
the OS.

Keith Nuttle wrote:
For the umpteenth upgrade to Windows 8, when an upgrade is available but
not installed, one of the system comes to a screeching halt. In the
past it has been Firefox, Thunderbird, or some other program.

Tonight the LAN and the mouse slowed to the point they were nearly not
functioning. I tried a different mouse and no change.

I checked the Updates, and sure enough there were 18 to be installed.

I installed them and now everything is back to normal the mouse is
working, the LAN is working, Everything is working normally.

MS has taken one heck of a way to alert you of updates.

The updates should have set a Restore Point. You could
roll them back, and try it again. And watch Task Manager
or Resource Monitor, for more hints as to what is using
CPU.

You have enough of a CPU, it shouldn't get bogged by
Windows Update. To do the damage you describe, would require
finding a way to overwhelm the kernel. Extreme memory
pressure might do it. Lots of hard faults (memory pressure
causes swapping to the pagefile). I don't know
what else could do it, as the OS has some defense with
interrupt mitigation, if some hardware goes nuts.
The majority of kernel calls should be non-blocking,
and it should be relatively hard to break the thing.

If you needed other hints, you could run Process Monitor
from Sysinternals.com, and see if there is an "excessive
percentage" of some operation in the trace. I generally
don't set a filter condition on the first run, so I
won't miss any possibility. If I see something that
needs investigation, I can then set a filter which
is more selective.

The addition of a filter driver to your mouse (a HID device),
might cause it to appear to malfunction, but since you have
both mouse and LAN trouble at the same time, I need a more
basic theory to cover both. And they aren't "near one another"
in terms of system busses. Your specific hardware design,
could have the NIC interrupt on the same INTA# as the USB.
But that's an old concept left in the dust, as modern PCI
Express hardware uses inband interrupts, and they're non-interfering.
The days of some PCI INTA# shenanigans might happen on older
equipment (in which case, you'd move the hardware off a particular
USB connector and try another connector). On older chipsets,
the USB blocks are assigned to different hardware
interrupt signals, so you could attempt to separate
busy hardware, by moving the USB peripheral to another
port connector.

Paul

On 6/19/2015 6:06 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
For the umpteenth upgrade to Windows 8, when an upgrade is available but
not installed, one of the system comes to a screeching halt. In the
past it has been Firefox, Thunderbird, or some other program.

Tonight the LAN and the mouse slowed to the point they were nearly not
functioning. I tried a different mouse and no change.

I checked the Updates, and sure enough there were 18 to be installed.

I installed them and now everything is back to normal the mouse is
working, the LAN is working, Everything is working normally.

MS has taken one heck of a way to alert you of updates.

Maybe the update options are somehow set to download the updates without
asking?