Windows Client Guidance against speculative execution vulnerabilities

AndreTen · 28 Mar 2018

tomseys said:

Right but this is a recommended critical update. It's not about new goodies, it's about spectre. So they are recommending people to update to it. I was recommended to do it on the HP forum while describing another issue.

It is this recommendation coupled with an inability to roll it back that led me to waste a lot of time and money.

That's why I'm posting this.

If this new spectre bios for some reason disagrees with your machine, you can't roll back . You are stuck.

My update with two systems (Haswell tower and Broadwell laptop) went smooth. HP provided roll back BIOS after the first patch released in Jan, which was problematic. Both systems received actual working BIOS fix in late Feb and early March.

tomseys · 28 Mar 2018

ddelo said:

I agree 100%. But there will be a point of time, when everybody should take the risk and do the upgrade in order to resolve the Spectre vulnerability. Now if that was the proper time

...only the future will show!

True.. I'll keep an eye out and see how things develop.

tomseys · 28 Mar 2018

AndreTen said:

My update with two systems (Haswell tower and Broadwell laptop) went smooth. HP provided roll back BIOS after the first patch released in Jan, which was problematic. Both systems received actual working BIOS fix in late Feb and early March.

Yeah the one I had which is the only one that was released so far can't be rolled back. I was told that they may make it rollbackable in the future or release a new bios but I was given no timeline or guarantees. My laptop became a very noisy hot mess after upgrading to this bios so after spending many days trying to fix it I just decided it was easier to spend $450 and get a new laptop. I'm not going to touch the bios on it for now.

AndreTen · 28 Mar 2018

tomseys said:

Yeah the one I had which is the only one that was released so far can't be rolled back. I was told that they may make it rollbackable in the future or release a new bios but I was given no timeline or guarantees. My laptop became a very noisy hot mess after upgrading to this bios so after spending many days trying to fix it I just decided it was easier to spend $400 and get an updated laptop.

Sorry to hear that. What model was it? I have Probook. Trying to stay away from their consumer line-up, if I can. Not that tehy are not good enough, but managing Probook (or even Elite) is so much easier and worth spending extra 50$

tomseys · 28 Mar 2018

AndreTen said:

Sorry to hear that. What model was it? I have Probook. Trying to stay away from their consumer line-up, if I can. Not that tehy are not good enough, but managing Probook (or even Elite) is so much easier and worth spending extra 50$

I usually get ones from the consumer lineup. The laptop that got messed up was an HP 15 model f018dx. So the new one I got is an HP 15 bs062st (runs about $400). I guess these are comparatively low end laptops. I had actually tried a couple of amd based bottom of the barrel laptops (one HP, one Lenovo) which I returned because they had issues before coming to this new HP model. I really like this new laptop, very fast and quiet and so far so good.

tomseys · 28 Mar 2018

Btw, and this is veering off the topic of this thread so I'll keep it brief, but as I've described, since my laptop got messed up presumably by this bios, I bought 3 other laptops in the past week. Two were AMD processor based - one an HP and one by Lenovo, and a third what I'm using now which is very good, an HP laptop with an intel processor. The AMD ones were slow and had various issues so I returned them.

I noticed something strange with all of them and that is after you update them - you turn the computer on for the first time, go through initial setup and let the windows updates complete and store updates complete before you do anything else, running an sfc scan at that point shows errors/corruption. But running the three dism commands shows no problems. I had to do a repair upgrade to get the sfc error free. So it seems these laptops are either coming with errors from the factory or the windows updates are causing errors to them. Just thought it was weird and makes me wonder how many consumers are using these laptops with errors that can be found via sfc /scannow.

CountMike · 28 Mar 2018

How old were those windows on them and did it update after ?

tomseys · 28 Mar 2018

CountMike said:

How old were those windows on them and did it update after ?

The version was pretty close.. and yes they updated fine up to the latest version of Windows 10 (on this laptop I'm not going to force the latest update with that key trick.. I believe it will come in a day, I think it has a delay on it) and the laptops worked fine no problems at all other than the two amd ones were slower than my old laptop and one had a noisy hard drive, one showed a strange ram reading etc.

Still, sfc scan showed errors after updates completed apparently successfully (confirmed in system/about) and with WU offering no more updates, dism didn't show much or anything and an inplace repair upgrade made the errors in sfc go away.

IronZorg89 · 28 Mar 2018

I am not very familiar with BIOS/UEFI firmware upgrade, but I was wondering if restoring the machine from a previous system image backup would not do the trick. To be honest, I don't know the answer and would like someone more knowledgeable with this kind of issue to chime in.

tomseys · 28 Mar 2018

My image backup didn't work right. But using factory install image disks which I had did not allow to me to fall back to factory installed bios either. The bios did not budge. Man it would be nice it that worked.