i gather it affects win 8 rather than 7?

my 5 pc's have all updated with no problem.

yes, i'm of the update school of thought - ymmv ;-)

It hit one of my machines, the only one with Kaspersky AV on it. Also the only one with Win 7 Pro.

No BSOD here.

I did notice Known issue #1. Fonts not in the Windows\Fonts folder, file in use message. I use FontExpert and it does not copy/delete from the Windows fonts folder to install/uninstall. It just links to the file(s) via the registry.

There are so many reasons to turn off automatic updates for ALL software, including Windows. This is just one of them.

I know that many people disagree with me on this, but I have never updated Windows on any of my 15 computers in the past decade, except when a service pack or .NET update is required to install new software. I also don't use anti-virus software on any computer, although I occasionally will run the "malicious software removal tool" or similar scanner that doesn't install any background processes. I've not once had a virus or any other malware.

Not only do my computers run incredibly fast and smoothly, but here's the key thing: if they work today, they will work tomorrow.

I also do a complete backup (I partition my drives, so this only takes five minutes) before installing or updating any software, on the rare occasions that I actually do make a change. I've actually had to use these on many occasions because the new software screwed up something that was working.

My win 8.1 box = died for no reason yesterday. No recovery possible, all system restores failed, no booting possible. Tried every option in the "repairs" menu settings, and dad to do a "REFRESH" which too it back to factory setup state. Must reinstall all software again. Zero data files lost, so that is good.

This was out of the blue to me since everything was running perfect (except Vegas, of course!) I was probably hit by the update.

"Must reinstall all software again."

We know you like to live on the edge, but don't you think this is a good enough signal to start using a system image backup tool?

Ditto to what john_dennis said: you should never every have to do a re-install of Windows. It takes forever, and when you are finished with that, you are really just getting started, because you have to install all your applications, set your preferences, figure out how to get all your browser bookmarks, etc.

If you do an image backup, all you do is press a button to start the restore, and when it is finished, your computer is exactly like it was the moment you backed up. If you take the extra step of partitioning your boot drive so that only your operating system and programs are on the C: drive, you can do this restore in under ten minutes.

I'm familiar with imaging and do it at work, but I do like to nuke and rebuild every year anyway :)
I started it, went to dinner and it was done when I came back. Just shocked me because this computer is less than a year old, and was running perfectly the day before. Silly silly windoze :D

Good advice I know. Do you recommend any particular image back up system?

Richard

Trueimage Home 11.0.

Like most software, the newer versions are worse, not better.

Not sure how well this runs under Windows 7 64-bit. I have that installed on a separate drive, but still run all my utilities when booted under Windows XP Pro 32-bit.

for imaging, we're using
http://www.easeus.com/

because it worked to restore our laptops where a couple other famous ones we tried did not work well, and were overly complex and slow for the task.

maybe it is not the best, but it works easy, fast, simple and cheap

and the free partition changer has been epic for me for changing volumes

This topic seems to come up every year. I have trashed my system in dozens of unique and fascinating ways, but my image backups have saved me every time (maybe that's why I felt so willing to experiment!). Tried a bunch of backup packages, settled on Acronis about 10 years ago, switched to Macrium about a year ago. My system is used for everything including web serving and is up 24/7, has been with rare exceptions for the past decade, has been upgraded with faster processors, graphics, drives every couple of years. Man, I'm dating myself. Think I'll go lie down.

just be aware that your imaging program recognises / can handle uefi bios (that is, if your pc uses uefi ;-))...

I've been using GHOST 15 for the last few years. I don't install it. I do a standalone boot image save after booting from the GHOST CD. I once maintained a "utility" partition like johnmeyer but I gave up the process some years ago. I don't do incremental saves, just point-in-time saves. I reload the "golden" image, do whatever maintenance I choose, install new applications and immediately save that as a new "golden" image. The image doesn't actually achieve gold status until it has run without error for some time. I always keep a few images in the past as well as milestones such as 1) base O/S with no applications, 2) base O/S with applications that will never be updated like Vegas 8, 9 10, 11, 12 and 3) the latest Vegas short of the final release.

When working on problems from others on the forum, I sometimes install some really hokey applications. When I'm all done, I just restore the system boot image and forget that I ever did it. I'm also likely to restore the system if I come home and find my seat warm.

I understand that Symantec has abondoned the GHOST market though they still have other backup/restore solutions, likely at a higher price and complexity. Right now, this solution works for all my machines. When I change hardware in 2016, I may look at other system image backup software, but only if there is a hardware compatibility necessity.

same methodology as john above. pretty much fail safe.

I'm also likely to restore the system if I come home and find my seat warm

who's been editing MY vegas!?

otherwise there's some pretty good hemorrhoid creams available now ;P

Thanks guys. Very much appreciated. I'll explore these options but shall then have to consider which medium to use for the saved image --- I imagine the image will take a lot of space, especially if it includes all my programmes as well as the Windows and Office software. Do you use DVDs or USBs and why do you prefer one rather than the other?

Thank you.

Richard

Well, I allowed automatic update and after reading John's warning hoped that the devil wouldn't strike my machine. Been a good exercise in finding out how to escape the blue screen of death and the value of TrueImage software. Also a good lesson in keeping backups and disk images up to date, rather than a week or two old. I've learned that lesson (I hope).

"Do you use DVDs or USBs and why do you prefer one rather than the other?"

Why would anyone consider using a DVD or USB device for a backup. Both are incredibly slow when compared to better alternatives such as an external eSATA hard drive. Unless your PC has hardly any files stored on it, backing-up terabytes of data on DVD would take forever. I have an external dual 3.5" drive housing with 2 Western Digital 2 TB SATA drives that I use for backup. I perform Image Backups using Windows Image backup on one drive, and incremental file backups on the other using Acronis True Image backup software.

Ditto to what Gary said: backups to disk are the way to go. I used to use USB (2.0) external drives, but while that was much faster than DVD or USB thumb drives, it was still slower than I wanted.

Based on advice in this forum, I installed removable disk drive bays in my computer which lets me use inexpensive bare SATA drives as backups. I can get these for about $70 for 2-3 TB. Since I partition my main boot drive, and only keep my programs and Windows on it (and configure all my software to store intermediate files on another drive or partition), that C: drive is pretty small. I just checked, and after 3.5 years of use, my C: drive is only 10 GB. I could probably prune a little from that and get it down to 8 GB. I can back that up to a SATA drive in under five minutes. Just as important, when I need to restore, it takes less than ten minutes.

Serena's post is the best testimony to the value of these image backups. Her computer went from being a doorstop to being a valuable asset in just mere minutes, and it now operates exactly as it did before, with no loss of all those little things you do to your computer (preferences, wallpaper, performance tricks you read about but have now forgotten) that will take months to recreate.

If you use your computer for your living, doing an image backup, at least once a week is not an option: you MUST do it.

BTW, here is some benchmark information on how long it takes me to image my entire C: drive.

I realized, after my last post, that I hadn't done a backup for a few weeks. So I did one, but I timed it. I continued to do my work while it backed up.

Total time for a complete image of my C: drive, including a complete validation of the backup after it was created: three minutes and twenty seconds (3:20). If I hadn't done the validation (which I consider essential, but other people skip), the time would have been close to two minutes.

Two minutes!!

How can anyone not take the time to do that??

Of course I did do the partitioning "trick," and I do keep all those updates and other flotsam off this computer, but I just checked, and I have over thirty programs installed that I used frequently enough to have them on on desktop, so it isn't like this is a computer that doesn't have a lot of stuff on it, as you can see (perhaps someone would like to start a "show us your desktop" thread):

My C drive is an SSD with 44GB of data. I have Macrium Reflect set up so that it backs up incrementally every other night at 1am. When the backup partition (on a different hard drive) gets full, I start a new full backup, erase all the incremental backups, and move the previous full backup over to a different drive. From time to time I copy a full backup over to DVD-R (Macrium and other imaging utilities can split a full backup into DVD-sized chunks).

So in this fashion I could never lose more than an average of a day's worth of "stuff." But my emails are backed up automatically by my email provider (mail.com), and all my Vegas stuff is never kept on the C drive anyway. If my backup drive blows out then I still have a several-months-old image in a different drive. If everything blows out, then I have a 6-month-old image on DVD disk stored in a different building.

The incremental backups are automatic, so I don't think about backups at all until my backup drive is full, which takes several months. Finally, I've never had a DVD data disk fail. I'd never back up to one directly (~15MB/sec max) but as an archive they are great. I use Taiyo Yuden (single layer) and Verbatim (double layer), highly regarded. There are good brands and crummy brands.

I'm a bit embarrassed to show my entire desktop since it needs a good cleaning, but here is a jpeg of my System Tray. Lots of stuff that runs all the time and seems to play very well together. A freeware web server called Abyss hosts a couple of websites (including that link above) on the PC, a cool program called ReplayAV records internet radio shows that I then copy over to my Android phone for later use, Avast is my antivirus, and TeamViewer allows me to link to other relative's PC screens for troubleshooting (or to my system from another PC for getting needed files remotely).

Riredale, incremental back-up of the C drive sounds great! I am going to look into that.

VMP