This will provide some reference for anyone interested. I hope this post will be alright, because in some places having a whole bunch of links leads to it being rejected. First of all, I was not kidding about the destructive MS "fixes." I must have accumulated at least 20 articles like these, from credible sources like InfoWorld, and the number keeps on growing. MS would have us believe that these issues are almost entirely affecting non-legit copies of Windows, but there are widespread reports of them on known-good installations as well, and happening to manufacturer installs on various particular OEM hardware. What I think is that their quality control and testing of these patches has just gone to hell, over the last few years.
Some Examples:
Since I have several systems of my own, and am responsible for maintaining a few systems of others, this has all forced me into a posture of "wait and see." I hold off two or three weeks before installing most KBs, to let the dust settle and to see whether the latest ones might turn out to be like some of the ones above. I maintain a log of what each KB is and does, before I decide to accept them. With practice, you get some feel for what is apt to be more risky. (I turned OFF the Automatic Updates a few years ago, choosing the "Notify Me Only" option. This is not foolproof, however: I've seen some updates that I have deliberately "Hidden" creep back into the main pending list, **unbidden !**)
This happens to segue neatly into the Win 10 considerations, in that there has been much press about not being able to opt out of or avoid the Win Updates in this latest Windows. But I've seen later accounts that there may be some top tier edition of Win 10 that does allow for user control over this. The exact details of that need to become clearer.
In any case, here is my initial, cautionary reading list on Win 10:
(Oh, and if you happened to really enjoy the Win games like FreeCell, you're probably out of luck . . . . )
(I disabled every KB like this, that was paving the way for upgrade transition to 10. So far, the notifications or icons have NOT been following me.)
(I've only browsed the first third of this last one, since I'm not actually dealing with 10 yet.)
Please excuse if all this amounts to an information overload, but I hope it may prove of some use, and saves you some time and trouble in searching.
Jordan
From: Bill Troop
To: "xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
Sent: Monday, August 3, 2015 1:34 AM
Subject: Re: still running in Windows 10
Jordan, I would love to see the links and hope the.issues are cosmetic.