14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft rolled out this month’s Patch Tuesday updates last week and although no problems have been reported at first, it turns out that some Windows XP machines are actually getting some botched fixes.
A number of users who reported the issue on Microsoft’s Community forums are revealing that after installing March 2014 Patch Tuesday fixes their computers are stuck in an endless reboot loop which doesn’t allow the device to start at all.
Booting in Safe Mode doesn’t work either, they say, which means that they’re stuck with a broken computer which cannot be used at all.
“Today, when I powered on the relevant PC, it went through BIOS and XP logo screens OK, but never reached the high-res background colour stage of the boot process; instead it auto-rebooted---and repeated this loop endlessly. Booting in Safe Mode made no difference,” one user reported.
“I was able to load XP only by telling the PC's BIOS to use my backup drive as the boot drive ... this backup drive is a clone of the normal boot drive; I re-clone it to match the primary disk about once a week.”
As you can see, this isn’t quite the kind of resolution that comes in handy to beginners, so unless you’re an experienced user, you might not be able to fix the computer.
Microsoft hasn’t yet released a fix and it’s unclear whether this is an issue affecting a bigger number of computers because the botched updates are taking the device offline, so some of those whose devices were broken down might not be able to report the problems.
Another user has reported a similar problem, again after installing the updated delivered by Microsoft on this month’s Patch Tuesday.
“At restart, after BIOS and XP-logo screens, I got a black screen permanently. After hitting several times <ctrl> + <alt> + <delete> keys together, then the hotkey that initiates STANDBY, then again the three keys above, I got a blue screen with the message: ‘STOP: d0000144 Unknown Hard Error’” he said.
This was the penultimate Patch Tuesday rollout for Windows XP, as support for this particular OS version will be retired on April 8. After this date, no other patches and security updates would be released, which means that users who’ll still run Windows XP will basically become vulnerable to attacks based on exploit trying to take advantage of the unpatched security flaws.