14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just released a new set of cumulative updates for Windows 10, only one week before the company is projected to begin this month’s Patch Tuesday rollout bringing security fixes for its software.
This time, however, the firm decided to go for out-of-band releases because of the critical chip bug discovered in Intel, AMD, and ARM hardware, and the emergency patches land on Windows 10 as cumulative updates.
Windows 10 cumulative update KB4056892 is specifically aimed at version 1709, also known as Fall Creators Update, and in addition to bringing a fix for the said hardware vulnerability, it also comes with a bunch of other fixes which were most likely supposed to land next week on Patch Tuesday.
First and foremost, installing cumulative update KB4056892 pushes OS version number to 16299.192 and keeps a system protected against the Meltdown and Spectre security flaws.
There are security updates for the Windows SMB Server, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, the Windows Kernel, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and the Microsoft Scripting engine, but additionally, there are also non-security fixes for bugs like the one in Edge browser causing the app to stop responding when displaying content from a software rendering path.
Non-security updates
Also, Microsoft Edge is getting a bunch of other improvements as well, and after installing this update, video playback should work smoother even on multi-monitor setups. Printing Office Online documents in the browser should also work correctly, and so the touch keyboard which didn’t support the standard layout for 109 keyboards.
There are several known issues in cumulative update KB4056892, two of which existed in the previous update and caused update installation to stop at 99% and Windows Update history to report that the install failed despite completing correctly.
Additionally, Microsoft says that due to this cumulative update, when calling CoInitializeSecurity, the call will fail if passing RPC_C_IMP_LEVEL_NONE under certain conditions, while due to some compatibility issues with certain antivirus software, only systems with AV ISV update to ALLOW REGKEY are being offered the update.
You can read the full changelog in the box after the jump and head over to the official knowledge base article (linked above) to find more technical details on the known issues.