Last Win7 update broke some stuff
Three days ago was the last ever Patch Tuesday for anybody still with Windows 7 but apparently, as I gathered from other places, it broke a few things. From the presence of a black background instead of a desktop wallpaper, to a "Windows is not genuine" message. Furthermore, the latest security rollup (KB4534310) seemed to be the root cause of it.
On the contrary, this didn't happen to me, probably because I have my desktop wallpaper stored in My Pictures (but more so in a subfolder of it). Guess I'm lucky, but were any of you affected by this?
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I never applied the last update. I had heard some people had issues with it, so I stayed away.
What's funny is, it always seems to be the last update that breaks something. That can't be a coincidence. IIRC, the last Windows XP updates had issues also, and well, Vista's updater barely worked near the end unless you applied some patches in just the right order. Even then it was still buggy.
When I restarted my Windows 7 computer for updates on its EOL day, I noticed the background was black after opting out of the "support has ended" prompt, which got me scared into thinking Windows got deactivated. Luckily, this wasn't the case as it didn't say "Windows is not genuine" on the bottom of the screen like it would, I also double-checked in System Properties and my Windows 7 is still activated.
What really caused the black background in my case was I had my wallpaper stretched and the update broke the "Stretch" mode in background settings. When I changed it to a different mode (such as "Fill", "Fit", or "Center"), the wallpaper came back. Weird.
I happen to have come across the full story about this > https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/final-windows-7-update-breaks-desktop-wallpaper-functionality/ (and apparently they had reached to Microsoft about it, but so far no answer)
But at least this didn't delete people's files or whatever else.
Yeah, but it still demonstrates lack of QC by Microsoft. You would expect the final commonly available update to have been properly checked before release, but nope Nadella's schemes strike again.
lack of QC? I'd wager it was intentional. Have I mentioned Microsoft is evil?
It's not as crippling as the last POS update for Windows XP, where they forgot to register the Windows Installer DLLs.
But I think that the quality of software in general has deteriorated in recent years. Today I heard that the latest update to the Twitter application for Android causes it to crash when opened. It seems to affect much more than a handful of hardware/software combinations (and probably all of them), yet it was missed before release.
Furthermore, Facebook's application has had long-standing issues with phantom notifications on my Android device (ugh, if not for girlfriends or parents I'd have neither of the two). Windows 8.1 briefly deactivated itself on my mother's PC last year even though it was an HP OEM preinstall with an SLIC in the BIOS. And I'm not gonna go on and on about Windows 10 again.
It is a general lack of true creativity and care fostered by the rapid-rapid-rapid ideal created by social media. It all has to happen now now now, send it out edit and rebut it later when it offends people. Everything has to be over-centralized so Bobbette can check her feed and likes on the work machine and then carry on at the coffee shop. Who cares about Joe over there who could care less about being able to quickly see Bobbette had a vanilla latte with soymilk and cinnamon, granting "likes" on the second to his cousin's cat videos, all he wants is to be able to talk with friends and family when he's away.
It all has to happen now. Change and "new" stuff now. And those have to be implemented as fast as they are thought of, regardless of future consequences. Because how does it look to supervisors if reports said only bugfixes and performance optimizations and a few "additions" rather than 4 dozen "feature" implementations?
@SomeGuy
I do not disagree to those statements either.
I honestly don't think software is any worse now than it has been in the past. There have always been stupid bugs and instability in applications. The good thing about it these days is that if something breaks, it's usually pretty easy to find a fix or at least find someone else with the same problem. 20 years ago? If something broke you'd be on your own to fix it. You might have vendor support if it was a current piece of software, but beyond that, you were SOL. That's why computer support forums got so popular.
Plus it's easy to look back at old software and think it was more stable... it's had years to get patches, new releases, better support, workarounds.... etc. It doesn't necessarily mean it was any better.