Some ‘broken by update’ PCs were already doomed

It’s not me, it’s you. Five words that signify the end of a relationship with a toxic partner, or an ill-timed riposte to users tired of broken Microsoft updates.

According to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, updates from the company aren’t always to blame for borked customer devices. Sometimes those devices were already broken, but customers hadn’t noticed until a Patch Tuesday restart attempt left them with an unbootable system.

Chen wrote: “My colleagues over in enterprise product support often get corporate customers who report that ‘Your latest update broke our system’.” It seems a reasonable complaint – the computer was working fine until an update.

However, a thorough investigation of log files, dumps, and traces can reveal that the culprit was not the update. In fact, rolling back the update doesn’t fix things. Restarting a system that hasn’t had the update applied yet results in another…