The day before yesterday, 13th December was the Microsoft Patch Tuesday and there were 6 critical or important hotfixes for the Windows XP system.
Due to the time difference between the US and India, the MS patch Tuesday usually becomes patch Wednesday for us in India and this time was no different.
But yesterday was a difficult ‘patch-Wednesday’ for me, due to a different but connected activity. One of my dear friend’s son has had an HP laptop for a few months now. A month or so back, it seems the company he works for allotted him a laptop , which by the way was more advanced. Naturally the son, in turn, gave away the Laptop to his father. No problems with that.
Now the father has a business of his own and he plans to bring the laptop with him occasionally (everyday ?) to the office and show off!
Oops! sorry!
He wants to bring the laptop to his office, use it there and carry back the pending work home. So he called me to set it up in his office workgroup, etc. Still no problems till then.
The ‘5-minutes-of-your-time-Wednesday’ turned into a ‘damn-difficult-patch-Wednesday’ when I started to ‘corporatize’ it to be used as a professional laptop. I found no less than 89 games and their associated files - not to mention 7 or 8 toolbars. It was so sickening that I forgot to snap up a picture of the IE9 cluttered with toolbars and buttons. And the beauty is that it had not been installed with an AntiVirus or Firewall worth its name.
Now this blog is not into testing/reviewing of Security software and I do not want to name the product(s) and get into a flame war (or worse), but suffice to say that the product(s) don’t find a place either in
>;-)
To add insult to the injury, SuperAntiSpyware detected no less than 573 threats after a Quick Scan, after the de-crap, out of which only 28 were tracking cookies.
8-0
Getting back to the main story, I didn’t download and apply the hotfixes to my own PC even on patch-Wednesday and could manage it only today, Thursday. Belarc Advisor said there were 6 (critical/important) patches as per the latest MS database for the PC. When I attempted to download the last patch KB2639417, the link for ‘IT Professionals’ took me to a page where it was stated Windows XP SP3 machines were not affected by the vulnerability.
:-S
It took a bit of careful look at the Security Bulletin numbers and the actual linking URI to locate the problem. The KB2639417 page link refers to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-087 while it points to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-084. Manually correcting it in the address bar solved the problem and patched the PC.
Here is the snapshot of the words and the URI pointing at different locations - I’ve used the magnifier effect in Paint.NET to show them up
:-)
My Naughty side natters. ‘A patch to download from a patch page? Good going Microsoft. What’s next? Download Windows-8 from an Apple Store?’
Due to the time difference between the US and India, the MS patch Tuesday usually becomes patch Wednesday for us in India and this time was no different.
But yesterday was a difficult ‘patch-Wednesday’ for me, due to a different but connected activity. One of my dear friend’s son has had an HP laptop for a few months now. A month or so back, it seems the company he works for allotted him a laptop , which by the way was more advanced. Naturally the son, in turn, gave away the Laptop to his father. No problems with that.
Now the father has a business of his own and he plans to bring the laptop with him occasionally (everyday ?) to the office and show off!
Oops! sorry!
He wants to bring the laptop to his office, use it there and carry back the pending work home. So he called me to set it up in his office workgroup, etc. Still no problems till then.
The ‘5-minutes-of-your-time-Wednesday’ turned into a ‘damn-difficult-patch-Wednesday’ when I started to ‘corporatize’ it to be used as a professional laptop. I found no less than 89 games and their associated files - not to mention 7 or 8 toolbars. It was so sickening that I forgot to snap up a picture of the IE9 cluttered with toolbars and buttons. And the beauty is that it had not been installed with an AntiVirus or Firewall worth its name.
Now this blog is not into testing/reviewing of Security software and I do not want to name the product(s) and get into a flame war (or worse), but suffice to say that the product(s) don’t find a place either in
- Advanced+ category, Performance Test (Dec 11) of AV-Comparatives (http://www.av-comparatives.org/), or in
- Excellent/Very-Good categories, Proactive Security Challenge (Jun 11?) of Matousec (http://www.matousec.com/).
>;-)
To add insult to the injury, SuperAntiSpyware detected no less than 573 threats after a Quick Scan, after the de-crap, out of which only 28 were tracking cookies.
8-0
Getting back to the main story, I didn’t download and apply the hotfixes to my own PC even on patch-Wednesday and could manage it only today, Thursday. Belarc Advisor said there were 6 (critical/important) patches as per the latest MS database for the PC. When I attempted to download the last patch KB2639417, the link for ‘IT Professionals’ took me to a page where it was stated Windows XP SP3 machines were not affected by the vulnerability.
:-S
It took a bit of careful look at the Security Bulletin numbers and the actual linking URI to locate the problem. The KB2639417 page link refers to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-087 while it points to Microsoft Security Bulletin MS11-084. Manually correcting it in the address bar solved the problem and patched the PC.
Here is the snapshot of the words and the URI pointing at different locations - I’ve used the magnifier effect in Paint.NET to show them up
:-)
My Naughty side natters. ‘A patch to download from a patch page? Good going Microsoft. What’s next? Download Windows-8 from an Apple Store?’
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