Last Updated on November 29, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
Windows has released a patch, January 3, 2018—KB4056892 (OS Build 16299.192), that is supposed to help address the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.. BUT some owners of AMD based machines are reporting crashes.
This thing is turning into a giant mess. The microsoft update January 3, 2018—KB4056892 (OS Build 16299.192) is supposed to patch the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. It doesn’t say so directly but the following in the KB article seems to indicate that is one of the features of the update.
- Security updates to Windows SMB Server, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Windows Kernel, Windows Datacenter Networking, Windows Graphics, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and the Microsoft Scripting Engine.
Windows 10 supposedly does not give the user any choice in updates. I posted an previous article that mentioned that you could not opt out of Windows 10 updates
My original objection to Windows 10 was that the home version would force updates with no opt out option.
There are two potential issues with the updates:
- There may be a HUGE performance impact after the update is processed. 30% seems to be the common number. So, after you apply a patch from microsoft to address a major cluster___ from intel, your machine may be 1/3 slower. I’ll have to see what happens.
- Some AMD users are reporting crashes.
According to a ZDnet article, KB4056892 is causing issues for AMD Athalon users.
Microsoft’s Windows patch for the Meltdown and Spectre attack methods is reportedly causing problems for users with AMD Athlon CPUs.
According to a number of complaints on Microsoft’s community forum, the problems are appearing on Athlon systems that received the update for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, labelled KB4056892.
What seems to happen, according to the ZDNet article, is that the update installs, then fails, then reinstalls.
That scraping sound you are hearing is thousands of trial lawyers sharpening their daggers.
UPDATE Jan 9 2018 — It appears that the Windows 10 patch has been installed since Jan 3, 2018 and I am not noticing any performance hit as of now. See my related post.
See other posts from this blog regarding Meltdown
See other posts from this blog regarding Spectre
Note – until things settle down the Meltdown tag will give all related posts (as of Jan 2018)