I received two calls last week from different family members claiming that their computers suddenly stopped working. About two years, ago, I helped each family buy a used, off-lease, Dell D400 laptop for general home use. The computers have identical configurations, running Windows XP as the base, and of course, a full stack of open source software such as Open Office, ClamWinAV, Firefox, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Gaim (Pidgin), etc. One family member dropped off the computer to my home for me to look at it, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong; whether or not it was software of hardware related. Some research found an interesting article over at the UK’s The Register.com about how a certain Microsoft Update is eating people’s CPU cycles. Although no one knows for sure what the problem is, one thing is for sure, it seems to be wide spread as a few Prometheon clients now have the issue too. I’ve tried the various fixes with no luck, however, the only way that I’ve found to reclaim your system’s CPU, is to turn off Microsoft Update entirely. Assuming that Microsoft doesn’t acknowledge the problem or plans issue a fix, will of course leave your Windows system vulnerable over time. If Automatic Update is turned off, naturally, you will no longer receive updates to either Windows or Office. This, however, is the only remedy right now until Microsoft offers a remedy or software fix.

This incident goes to the heart of the argument on why the open source software development process is more often better than a closed source code, proprietary approach. Mistakes and errors like this on a major and vital component like the operating system can be avoided simply by having a widespread, peer reviewed operating system development method like BSD or Linux. The only reason my family members run Windows XP instead of say, a Linux distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu, is because at the time they bought the latops, there was a the lack of wireless driver support on Linux. Now that the major Linux distributions have better wireless card support, I’m going to seriously consider moving them to Linux entirely, instead of just “open source apps on top of Windows”. I wasted a few hours trying to trouble shoot these machines and never did figure out the exact problem, and I still don’t have a fix for them so that they can continue receiving critical updates to the frequently vulnerable Windows XP. The computer industry needs a better solution to complex, closed source operating systems like Windows, and I believe a collaborative rather than competitive approach would benefit us all.

Read more about the Microsoft Update problem at the following websites:

http://www.theregister.com/2007/05/11/ms_update_glitch/
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=927891
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=2792