The Italian Junkyard

Thoughts, ideas, criticism about cars. Interesting news and facts from the world of the automobile. Events in Italy and Modena. What you can find elsewhere, filtered through the eyes of a discerning enthusiast. Design, style, everything on the chopping block. Nobody is safe anymore.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Note for Win 7 users: DO NOT INSTALL UPDATE KB977074


In the last post I forgot to add of a little problem I had while finishing my thesis.
Actually the thesis was already printed, but I was still working on the powerpoint slideshow which I would have then used during my from 10 to 12 minutes long thesis' discussion.

Basically I was using OpenOffice, it's free and it works fine. Unfortunately, its powerpoint counterpart is a bit lame, not really user-friendly, and quite limited in some aspects too.
So I went for Microsoft Office 2007. After the first day using it, I checked Windows Update, and saw some updates was there both for Win and Office. So I downloaded those which interested me and went to sleep.
The day after the laptop refused to start (see pic above), Windows wasn't working if not in Safe (Pointeless) Mode, and the few times I managed to get trought he startup Win was going to stop working in 5 minutes. I thought it was something between OpenOffice and Mic. Office, but I couldn't get rid of any of the two. Fortunately I had sent of copy of the slideshow to one of my millions of email accounts. So I finished it in my second computer I built out of an old Asus laptop and a CRT screen, which I originally setup for the girlfried when she stays at my place so that she can leave her laptop at home.

The point is that even after the D Day and the degree, I couldn't regain control of my laptop, and things weren't looking good, even after that I managed to uninstall basically all programs. As I went trough failing HDDs many times, I was ready to connect the HDD to the other computer to recover the data, and then format my laptop.
A bit of searching on the internet revealed the problem wasn't due to conflicts, programs or other stuff... it was Microsoft, again.

Now Windows 7 is a good OS, no doubts, it's lighter and faster than Windows Vista, easy call btw.
On the other hand, just because Microsoft got this right, it doesn't mean all the updates are safe.
So basically this bad guy, KB977074 is the one, this bad guy is going to take your computer away from you, and won't care if you were playing World of Warcraft with no cheats or if you were working on your thesis, he just won't listen.

So do yourself a favor, don't install this update.

Cheers.

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