Posted on 01/09/2019 4:38:27 PM PST by dayglored
Quality Assurance? We've heard of it
Microsoft has doubled down on efforts to persuade users to migrate to Windows 10 by breaking Windows 7 networking for some.
Windows Server 2008 R2 is also affected.
While the last few monthly updates for the soon-to-be-obsolete OSes featured a known issue affecting an "unknown" number of "problematic configurations" that require manual reinstalls of network drivers, January's monthly update seems to have upped the ante somewhat.
2019's treat has seen some users finding their shares are now inaccessible, with RDP and other connectivity also suffering.
The issue, which affects both the bonzer monthly roll-up (KB4480970) and the more petite Security-only update (KB4480960, which has no known issues according to Microsoft at time of writing), leaves users receiving an INVALID_HANDLE when attempting to kick off a SMB2 connection.
A bit of sleuthing by a contributor posting on Administrator.de has pointed to the problem being related to Microsoft tweaking security settings in the update, with administrators on the host system being affected.
The post by "Andi" at Administrator.de reckoned it was down to "an extension of security".
This is of scant comfort to users who have had to back-out the patch to get connectivity up and running again. After all, there is important stuff in those updates that really needs to be installed.
The Administrator.de contributor suggested a possible solution, requiring a Registry change around Admin credentials.
Users have reported success, but The Reg has been unable to check it out for ourselves, so try it at your own risk. The usual health warnings apply: fiddling with the Registry could leave your system irrevocably borked.
Others have opted to uninstall and await an official fix to be emitted by Microsoft.
We contacted the Windows giant to find out when such a fix might be forthcoming, but have yet to receive a response.
In the meantime, a Reddit thread has popped up with users discussing their own experience of Microsoft's latest quality cockup, with one wag observing: "We are their QA and I think we do a fantastic job of finding problems. Just not pre-release."
Ouch. ®
On a few occasions when I tried to get some old games to run from floppies on an Atari 800 Computer to show the kids... I didn't have a lot of luck. I wasn't sure if it was the disc drive or the discs themselves. I noticed that the data and programs stored on audio cassettes for my Spectravideo SV-328 home computer still worked the last time I tried. I got that computer from a clearance special in the DAK catalog which was written by Drew Kaplin.
Audio cassettes are somewhat more robust over time because you don't have the head alignment issue, the speed of the media is constant, and the data rate is lower than on a floppy. So chances of it being readable are considerably better, in general.
Aha, yeah, I remember DAK. :-)
Now that you mention it... I remember having head realignment procedures for some of the 5 1/2” floppy drives. I also remember having programs that did it by basically wrapping the head over and over against a stop. I do not remember doing this on the 3 1/2” drives, but this might be because by the time the generic ones came out they were pretty cheap and not worth messing around with.
So what so you use?
so = do (sorry about that, Chief)
Thanks - I went through some “tutorials” on-line and did the sharing, etc,. but so far only the printer managed to be usable via the laptop over WiFi - the shared music only works as a media deal where the media player can see and use that set of folders....I have some friends in the business and will probably bother one of them for some hints/help....
I learned a new one too. Borkage makes as much sense.
Impressive that you actually found a definition! Thanks!
The phrase from the mozilla project docs is one of my all time favorites. In its case, XP meant “cross platform” - they were serious about it working right on the different operating systems.
I have a huge problem with mozilla for what they did to Brendan Eich. On the other hand I have a huge problem with google. I have less of a problem with MS, usually, but they have not been very competitive in browsers for, what, 15 years?
Are you sure that a floppy drive head can’t seek the strongest signal?
Audio cassettes definitely have alignment issues between record and play. Azimuth (side to side tilt) is the most sensitive. Being off even a little bit causes severe high end loss, which is magnified when any noise reduction is used.
Vertical alignment can be an issue too.
In the old days, aligning the heads on any tape recorder could result in the user’s old tapes not sounding right any more.
Some equipment had user-adjustable azimuth; a very good and necessary thing, actually.
Floppy drives use stepper motors to position the head from track to track, and every one I ever worked with, tore apart, repaired, etc. was a simple one-step-per-track. Meaning, there was no way for the stepper motor to adjust the head position within a track to maximize signal strength.
You could adjust Track-0 position mechanically, but then all the other track positions moved along with it. I imagine it had to be that way for cost reasons.
It's a wonder that floppies worked at all. Then again, they were hardly trouble-free...
Yeah, for some reason that ("XP") took me a while to remember was "cross platform", not a Windows release. Must be getting forgetful in my dotage...
... another form of "borkage"! :-)
Ok - you da man on this. Thanks for the education.
I wonder if the higher density designs eventually implemented the ability to twiddle the radial position just a little based on signal strength.
When writing, the thing would revert back to its static alignment. But when reading, this hypothetical servo would be able to respond to control computed from raw signal strength, or raw S/N.
For that matter, playback heads on tape decks could have auto-aligned on playback with a simple feedback circuit based on getting the most high frequency energy off the tape. But I never heard of one that did that.
Floppies were used for carrying data from one machine to another, often between three or more machines. Each could write to it. Writing was done "per-sector", with many (9,18,...) sectors per track. So each track would have sectors that were written by many different drives, each of which had its head in slightly different position.
Diskettes rotated at 300 RPM -- 5 full rotations per second. Try to imagine designing the stepper/servo motor mechanism for that -- it would have to be capable of adjusting head position 5 * 18 = 90 times per second. Not only would it wear out quickly, but it would make a hell of a buzzing sound, which would vary in character based on the drive-writing history of each diskette.
Ummm, I don't think so. :-)
Hard drives get away with adaptive positioning (often using a separate servo track) because, by definition, the platter is only written and read by that particular enclosure and head/arm mechanism. As I understand it, the positioning control is linear, not stepped.
Totally makes sense and thanks for the explanation.
I think up to one full rotation would have been lost for each “sub seek.” It would not have been worth doing.
Wow what a coincidence, I just made the fatal mistake of updating Windows 10 and now my scanner and printer don’t work. It won’t even recognize them and I looked everywhere for help, so I thought I’d try Freep. Anyone who has Windows 10 do NOT update if you value your printer and scanner.
"Win10 don't need no steeeekin' peripherals!..."
Yeah, I’ll never update again. This has happened to me before through the years, I’ll update and it ends up screwing up my computer. So I bought this new one 2 years ago and didn’t update at all, just refused to. And like an idiot I decided to do it today and of course, the printer and scanner no longer work. I had to use my cellphone to take photos of these documents I wanted to scan and send to somebody. Thanks Microsoft!!
For me this fixed the problem of shares on Win 7 boxes not being available to certain other machines in the network.
The fix (KB4487345) is only available via the Update Catalog:
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4487345
Does anyone know if this Windows 7 update problem has been corrected by MS yet? I get the reminder to update every morning but have been afraid to.
Thanks!
Personally I'm waiting for the February update release.
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