Microsoft veteran says some 'broken by update' PCs were already doomed
Patch Tuesday often gets blamed when a reboot merely exposes damage already done, according to Chen
It's not me, it's you. Five words that signify the end of a relationship with a toxic partner, or an ill-timed riposte to users tired of broken Microsoft updates.
According to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, updates from the company aren't always to blame for borked customer devices. Sometimes those devices were already broken, but customers hadn't noticed until a Patch Tuesday restart attempt left them with an unbootable system.
Chen wrote: "My colleagues over in enterprise product support often get corporate customers who report that 'Your latest update broke our system'." It seems a reasonable complaint – the computer was working fine until an update.
However, a thorough investigation of log files, dumps, and traces can reveal that the culprit was not the update. In fact, rolling back the update doesn't fix things. Restarting a system that hasn't had the update applied yet results in another unbootable device.
According to Chen, what is really happening is that a few weeks prior, somebody did something to the device. Perhaps it was a new driver. Maybe a new group policy that did something a little suspect with the registry. Something that left the device unbootable but it wasn't noticed until the Patch Tuesday restart.
"And then," writes Chen, "Patch Tuesday comes around, the update installs, and the system reboots, and now the new software or the new driver or the sketchy configuration settings kick in to make their lives miserable."
"It wasn't the update that broke their system. It was the fact that the system rebooted."
It's a cute story, until one considers that Chen comes from an earlier era of Windows when Microsoft thoroughly tested code before shipping it. More recently, the company has churned out a succession of updates that left customer computers in varying states of distress.
At the end of March, Microsoft released an out-of-band update to deal with a preview patch that didn't even manage to install, let alone render a customer's device unbootable.
Uncontrolled tinkering with devices might be a factor in unbootable computers, but a larger factor these days is that many Microsoft updates have proved just as flaky as administrators suspect, if not more so. ®