It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs

So what exactly happens to Phenom x2

Preferably before my system eats itself, that would suck.

Hint: M$ seems to have pre-empted the hackers this time, where the cure is worse than the disease.

Bricks Windows 7 AMD Systems Too

The analogous fix for Windows 7 (KB4056894) bricked my venerable Optiplex 740 (Athlon 64 X2), with a cryptic blue screen of death. Further, system restore doesn't work, failing with "unknown error code 0x8000FFFF". There's an elaborate fix for system restore (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2709289) that requires merging a hotfix into a repair disk via black magic.

Time to turn off Automatic Updates again... just when they're needed most.

There must not be a single AMD machine in Microsoft's patch testing labs

Haha, I jest. What patch testing labs? SatNad doesn't care.

"If a patch borks something, we'll just release another patch! Remember to set Windows Update to always-on!"

It bricks Windows 7 on AMD Athlon X2 as well

Yup, it showed up on my PC tonight, before Patch Tuesday, and a family member saw it and applied it dutifully, just like I told them they should always do. The Windows automatic startup repair would not work. I could use one of its options to rollback to the Restore Point it created before it installed and all is well now. And Check For Updates is now turned off.

This was an HP desktop. My Compaq desktop also has an AMD processor so I removed its power cord for now. Both are 10+ years old and started out on Vista but are running perfectly for the limited use they see.

Nice title by the paid author

Wow "wreck some AMD machine" instead of "wreck AMD Athon machine from year 2000", this way people who saw the headline and didn't bother to read the article will make assumptions that even Ryzen is affected which it does not. How does wrecking a EOL, less than 1% in the world be "gets worse"? Its like this example, it gets worse, the volkswagens cars is getting wreck, only the pre 90's era beetle. So stupid.

Task Manager process

wuauclt.exe = amdfubar.exe

It is true

So this explains why my old home server stopped working two days ago. It's an Athlon CPU running Windows 7 Pro and now it won't boot, it halts with a strange blue screen, with only one line of memory addresses. I guess it's time for that long overdue Linux upgrade.

There is a high likelihood that this tracks back to Intel's door - Intel actively wants to spread some mud onto AMD and could well supply information to microsoft to use as a fix that contained am AMD wrecker

My AMD laptop installed the patch automatically over the weekend, then immediately disabled the keyboard during the boot sequence, so i couldn't type the PIN to boot into windows.

I had to take my laptop back home (i was out travelling) and stick a USB keyboard into it just to type the PIN.

Well done.

Hasty Updates = Bad Engineering = No QA

It's time Microsoft and others learn that Software Development needs Engineering Discipline and strong Quality Assurance. Windows 10 shows much evidence of bad engineering. Marketing and Sales need to have their wings clipped and QA needs to have a much stronger voice.

This is what happens

When you relinquish control to a faceless corporation that does not care about you in the slightest. But you shouldn't be running such antiquated hardware anyways. So it's totally your own fault.

This is why

If you use Windows always have a hot swap drive in reserve in case the system gets totally broken.

This got me out of trouble more than once when for no discernible reason a routine KB update hosed my system (black screen during startup).

Yet installing the same update on a fresh install then the hot swap drive worked fine.

Maybe undetected malware/drive corruption/etc ?

Bricked

Had 3 computers running Win 7 Pro on Athlon processors with BSOD Monday morning (stop screen). They were planned for replacement in the next year, but this is still very inconvenient.

AMD does not require a fix for Meltdown as was explained

I do not understand why MS issued the fix for AMD for both Meltdown and Spectre while it was said that AMD is not vulnerable to Meltdown. That possible is starting point for the mess.

AMD pain

I have experienced many of the same problem described above including the error when trying to use the restore to an earlier time. However I did find on his machine, earlier restore points. Most of which threw up the same memory read error. However one from November ran right through and I thought it had completed, but has displayed this error message. http://www.http://speeednet.co.uk/images/amd.jpg Could be that the fix is preventing itself being changed or removed, so in essence what is the difference between this fix and a virus?

I am currently using Dart 7 to try and uninstall the hotfix, when it finally stops the spinning timer and kicks in.

Spectre update

My Pc is AMD phenomenon based and runs windows 10. The Microsoft fix was applied in a recent updates the pc boots up without any problems as have been described by many. Maybe the update onlyaffects athlon based pcs.

Who's going to replace my bricked hardware?!

Completely Bricked. AMD 1800X, Asus Strix X370F, GTX 1070.

This is complete crap on Microsoft's part. I've never been so ready to bail on Windows than I am right now.

This "patch" completely bricked my PC. BSOD every time. I even pulled hard drives to drop in a fresh drive and tried to boot from a newly created windows 10 install USB. Still, I get the same BSOD errors. Which one of them, AMD or Microsoft, is going to replace by new door stop?

AMD running OK with the patches

AMD Athalon 7450 Dual-Core with the KB4056892 patch installed and my machine runs fine.....

My data points

Did fresh 10 install on Phenom X2/8GB 12800 DDR3L/C650D machine with brand new SSD.

So far it seems to be working fine but did notice that the damnable atibtmon.exe error is back after one round of patches.

Could there be a connection?

I have yet to try it on an older system as it is in pieces due to the lack of a working graphics card and my 40" monitor being tied up with fecking This Morning!

(cough multipath hack with 3D glasses so I can use the TV at the same time /cough)

My older system is a Core 2 Duo T7300 running Intel/W7 x32 so shouldn't be affected.

Also two netbooks both Intel Atom based.

Thankfully, I had a recent data backup along with an Acronis partition image from October. Other than updating the system with the December rollup, I was lucky to be back in business in less than an hour.

Not Just AMD systems, ALL SYSTEMS, its luck of the lottery draw...

All I see is AMD this and that in regards to KB4056892, but many systems are affected including mine that houses an i7 5960x on a Gigabyte X99-SLI motherboard. The PC went into a boot loop. Fortunately for me I had made an Arconis backup on the 6th of January before this mess was released, so I went back, downloaded the tool to hide the update and also created a group policy windows update choosing option 2 which prevents windows from downloading updates without my consent, this only works on Windows 10 Pro. I contacted Microsoft and the representative told me that many systems are reporting similar issues across the board, so this is not an exclusive AMD problem...

I fix the update follow this

Okay long story short the update killed my desktop and to format hard drive and reinstalled windows 10. After 2 weeks I hit the check for updates button in windows 10 and it wanted to install the update again with a windows defender update also. It did it's thing and installed the update, after it wanted to restart to finish but this is what I did different this time. I went and downloaded this update for AMD processors from Microsoft.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073290/unbootable-state-for-amd-devices-in-windows-10-version-1709

Downloaded and installed that update, once it finished it asked to restart, so then I finally restarted the computer.

It rebooted and booted right up, checked update history and it had the KB4056892 and the the KB4073290 installed successful.

So it will never try install it again.

Problem solved..