Autopatcher was a phenomenal, cool, free, easy to use alternative to Windows Update.
In short what it did was allow you to easily download and install the various updates the Microsoft offered, while easily avoiding the ones which you didn’t want.
One of the ones often avoided was WGA, the amazingly-wrongly-named “Windows Genuine Advantage.” WGA, for those who don’t know, checks your computer over and over and over again to make sure it’s not a pirated version. I’m not sure why it needs to check more than once since a version of Windows is, presumably, either pirated or not pirated. But WGA runs all the time. In fact you can’t download some Windows software unless you run WGA first.
Windows Genuine Advantage is no help to any Microsoft customer. Microsoft believes that most people who are using pirated versions of Windows don’t know that they are. However, these versions of Windows are not doing Microsoft customers any harm.
WGA, on the other hand, does.
For one there’s the inconvenience factor. Here but one example:
WGA, as you might imagine, doesn’t run on a Mac. I have high speed internet at work, but not at home. I bring my Mac to the office and try to download new Windows patches (which I can later install on my Windows machine at home) but oh-wait, I can’t do that, because I can’t run WGA on my Mac, so I can’t download those security patches. End result? My Windows machine at home is woefully out of date because trying to download these things over dialup is absurdly long.
“Well,” you say, “that’s such a fringe case. Most honest users of Windows never need to worry about WGA.”
Those who believed that were conclusively proven wrong when the WGA servers at Microsoft went down a few weeks ago. (See WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft’s anti-piracy strategy.)
Autopatcher
I, like many others, liked Autopatcher because it could be downloaded once and applied on many different machines. I could stick it on my USB drive on my keychain and use it on any Windows machine I needed to.
Finally Microsoft told Autopatcher that they had to stop what they were doing or Microsoft would sue them.
So tonight, after a couple of weeks since I last ran Windows, up popped WindowsUpdate telling me there are new updates. I ran them and then, of course, was prompted to reboot.
Now when I login to my Windows XP installation, Windows Explorer crashes immediately. I can see it run briefly, but then it just goes away. I can run TaskManager or even a command shell.
Turns out that according to Microsoft’s own support site what probably happened was that a DLL didn’t install correctly. I tried the suggested fix (changing a registry value from 0 to 1) but my registry didn’t even have the subkey they refer to.
Even booting into SafeMode fails (great saftey-net Microsoft, thanks!)
Booting into my “Last Known Good Configuration” also doesn’t help.
Anyone involved in developing the registry really ought to be dragged into the town square and beaten with sticks.
So, to recap: the 3rd party site that provided me access to security updates from Microsoft worked without fail for as long as I can remember. Then Microsoft shut them down. On the first attempt to use WindowsUpdate, Microsoft managed to FUBAR my entire Windows installation.
Q: Where do you want to go today?