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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Windoze updates are now bricking laptops.....
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9308 |
Interesting video. He had to erase and rewrite the BIOS chip in a laptop, after a Windoze update attempted to auto-update the BIOS as part of the update - and it basically bricked the laptop in the process. Windoze bricking laptops.... Pretty disturbing.  What the hell is Windoze Update even DOING trying to screw with a BIOS update in the first place? That should be strictly at the discretion of the user, or a service shop, but it should NEVER be part of the freakin' OS update. MHOO..... Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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Mixtel90 Guru  Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
Ah, you should always password protect your BIOS. Then Windoze can modify it via a back door. :( I miss having BIOS in a proper ROM. Much safer. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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IanRogers Senior Member  Joined: 09/12/2022 Location: United KingdomPosts: 151 |
You can tell windows NOT to update any firmware. You can check this in your settings.. update.. advanced.. I would never allow ANYONE to update GPU or BIOS firmware.. Many Laptop suppliers password protect the BIOS so you cannot even go in and change it back. ( which in my opinion is naughty ) You have to request the password from them.. I'd give my left arm to be ambidextrous |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
I like this bloke's videos. You get to see everything, including mistakes. A very good learning process. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| IanRogers Senior Member Joined: 09/12/2022 Location: United KingdomPosts: 151 |
Yeah!! LOL An hour in to find out the power brick is bricked... Sort of thing I'd get!! I'd give my left arm to be ambidextrous |
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hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 713 |
Trying to sell you a new laptop / issue of Windows .... It is best to NEVER connect a Windows machine to the internet . @ first boot tell it there is no internet available . my site |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
Actually, you shouldn't really connect anything with a microprocessor / microcontroller to the internet. Bad things can happen. ;) IMHO the main failure with all versions of Windows is that they are based on a system that was never intended to be connected to anything bigger than a medium-large office network. Until relatively recently the networking facilities were a kludge on a kludge. None of it was designed with security as a priority. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 713 |
IMHO Windows exhibits little ' failure ' ..... It pretty much controls the cyber-life of mankind . Mostly ( but not entirely ) in a benevolent way . I truly believe the ' updates ' are partially designed to cripple the machines they feed . ( maxing out the memory ) ..... Selling more computers ..... my site |
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Hans Senior Member Joined: 18/10/2022 Location: CanadaPosts: 116 |
I have an Intel, Mac and OS X has not been much better. In the last several days, there have been three emergency updates and users were instructed to update immediately! In the middle of all of this, I’ve never encountered a pop-up on my Mac that says call support. You have a bad virus when in fact, it was one of the vulnerabilities that they were trying to stop with the emergency update Obviously it didn’t work hence the third emergency update. If they had addressed the issues given to them by people in the know, then, and fix the problem, the first time I may not have been infected by whatever took over my machine. I spent three hours recovering my operating system, and fortunately did not lose any of the purchased software that was on my machine. All this to say they’re all the same! Hans…  |
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| robert.rozee Guru Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 2350 |
well... in my experience Linux does not have these problems. which leads on to the next point - the best Windows is Windows running in a VM (virtual machine). Oracle's Virtual Box is free, relatively simple to set up, and can have several VMs running at the same time with minimal impact on CPU resources. i run Windows XP in a VM when i need it, safely sandboxed away from everything else, and if it were to ever go haywire i can just copy a backup VM over the broken one. i have shared file space configured, USB devices can be passed through to a VM, and the clipboard can also be shared. one major advantage of a VM (once set up) is that you can take it from machine to machine and not need to worry about product keys and activation. literally the same VM can run for 100 years over 100 hardware upgrades and be oblivious to it all. i really don't know why hardware vendors don't install Linux as the base operating system on new machines, with Windows then running in a VM. you can configure this to be pretty much transparent to the end user. Windows is then 100% hardware agnostic. actually, i do know why they don't do this - Micro$oft won't agree to it! cheers, rob :-) |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
I ran Mint for a long time and, on the whole, loved it. I'd probably have still been running it now but I couldn't get it to install on the little fanless PC that I'd just got. As it came with Windows ready installed I figured it might be safer to go along with that rather than get stuck with a bricked PC (no Windows media supplied, of course). I wasn't too upset because I knew from experience that NanoCAD was far more stable in Windows than under Wine. And, of course, there ws no way to play Minecraft properly. :) Edited 2023-07-15 17:13 by Mixtel90 Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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lew247 Guru Joined: 23/12/2015 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1702 |
Windows updates do not update bios The only way the bios gets updated is if you do it manually OR you do it as part of the update program that comes with "some" laptops and even then there are so many warnings before it will even try and update that the only way this happened is if he did it himself and used the wrong bios. I've been using Windows since the first one came out and Dos before that and while I have had a few problems they were nothing commoon sense couldn't fix or revert. It's not perfect but no OS is. |
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| IanRogers Senior Member Joined: 09/12/2022 Location: United KingdomPosts: 151 |
Windows will update all firmware if you let it..  Why anyone would check any of the options is beyond me. I'd give my left arm to be ambidextrous |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
Those are driver files supplied to Microsoft by the various companies and are normally installed as part of Windows. Microsoft are giving you the option to reinstall them or update them to the latest versions that they've been given. Nothing here is part of the BIOS, which lives in flash nowadays. Usually the only way to change that is by using a software tool provided by the motherboard manufacturer. Windows updates can do some pretty scary stuff, but AFAIK they never, ever touch the BIOS as that's too low level and is often protected - it may even be in ROM or protected against write access. TBH I take the stories about windows updates "bricking" machines with a pinch of salt. They may overwrite the wrong disk partition (due to some crazy configuration) and leave the machine unbootable (no active boot track) but that's not "bricked". Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3150 |
I've certainly updated drivers. I would, however, be suspicious of the ones dated "1968". PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on fruitoftheshed |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9308 |
Interesting replies! @ Mick - you mention bricking vs not-bricking. Can you elaborate some more? Just interested to know more of your thoughts on that. It seems to ME, that in the video, the update DID screw with the BIOS, as rewriting the original BIOS file recovered the laptop. So are you suggesting the update in fact DIDN'T do that, but instead perhaps the BIOS flash chip just somehow became corrupted - at exactly the same time the update happened? I guess that IS possible, but seems unlikely to happen just when MS were doing an update. In the video, he never shows attempts to access the BIOS, but I also remember in the video, the machine would not even start till he reflashed the BIOS chip, so the problem WAS there, and that IS essentially bricked(cos it would not even start up anymore or POST) - but only became a problem after the Windoze update.... Seems a bit too much of a coincidence to me.  Love to hear your(and anyone else's) thoughts on that. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| hitsware2 Guru Joined: 03/08/2019 Location: United StatesPosts: 713 |
' bricked ' is in the eye of the beholder . My Wife might hit a wrong key and freeze her screen and ( her PC is ' bricked ' ) If I can fix it I have done ' magic ' ... It is pretty hard ( save something like spilling a beer on the keyboard or dropping it ) to render a PC inoperable . ! BUT ! Relatively easy to confuse an O.S. into apparently being ' bricked ' I do not know if Windows updates get into the BIOS ( UEFI ? ) but am sure it is possible , ( nowdays ) as the chip is flashed rather than ROM , and ways are provided to ' update ' .... https://www.wikihow.com/Update-Your-Computer%27s-BIOS my site |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
There *may* be cases where a windows update has messed UEFI up, but not very likely to mess BIOS up. They are different. BIOS is relatively crude and can't boot from any drive greater than 2.1TB because of the way the master partition table works. It also doesn't have installable drivers like UEFI does. UEFI allows signed drivers to be updated - you are effectively updating the BIOS via the OS. There are a lot of safeguards and error checking to prevent UEFI getting corrupted. The "BIOS chip" is now a SPI flash chip so something has to deliberately write to it. The most likely possibility is that someone has done something that interrupts the write process after the chip has gone through the erase cycle - like pulling the power plug out of a laptop with a flat battery. As I said earlier, Windows can also install to the wrong partition if it is being put onto a mapped drive. It seems to assume that it will install to the first physical drive, not C:. If the first drive has been mapped to D: it will get overwritten by the Windows install. I didn't think this could happen, but it did on one of my machines. Maybe it was just the brain-finger interface that was at fault? I dunno. It got stuck without an active boot partition so things *appeared* to be bricked. Edited 2023-07-16 17:26 by Mixtel90 Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 6798 |
Updating the flash chip is very much like updating a CMM2. The updating program is running from RAM. It erases the flash, verifies that it is empty, sends the new data to the flash, verifies that it is correct then does something like a reboot. If someone messes with this process you have a "bricked" machine as you've damaged the updating program, but if it's left to continue then it will almost certainly complete properly. The data written will have been error checked prior to writing, of course. You can, of course, also have a hardware problem where the cheap Chinese knock-off of a proper flash chip has exceeded it's count of 1 erase cycle, in which case all bets are off! Like I said, I tend to take these reports with a pinch of salt. IMHO it's almost always a user problem, not the computer. People love to get lots of Youtube views, especially at the expense of someone like Microsoft. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| pd-- Senior Member Joined: 11/12/2020 Location: AustraliaPosts: 122 |
Its impossible to say what went wrong after it was fixed with a big hammer. but the most likely thing is that the uefi data got scrambled. and part of the windoze update process booted into a loop. The normal fix is just a cold boot " reboot factory defaults " and windoze will figure out where it was upto and continue on. Sum of the updates involve booting into a temporary block of code so that it can update core parts of the os. Its very difficult to brick any half reasonable peas of hardware thees days a lot of pc's have two copies of bios or a separate protected boot loader . https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/boot-and-uefi |
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