14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released previews of the next monthly rollups for Windows 7 and 8.1, and according to the official changelogs, the most important bugs hitting these two OS versions are still unfixed.
The April 2019 monthly rollups for the two operating systems caused several critical issues, including boot failures or devices becoming unresponsive.
Microsoft confirmed the bug exists on devices running certain antivirus software, including Sophos, Avira, ArcaBit, Avast, and McAfee. ArcaBit and Avast have both released patches to correct the problems, whereas the other antivirus vendors are still working with Microsoft on resolving them.
The previews of the next monthly rollups bring no change in this regard, so the same antivirus issues are likely to be experienced after installing them. Given these are previews of the next full updates shipping in May, it remains to be seen if the antivirus problems are corrected in the meantime.
The next updates are scheduled to go live on May 14.
Work in progress on antivirus patches
The previews of monthly rollups are KB4493453 for Windows 7 and KB4493443 for Windows 8.1.
According to the official changelogs, which you can find in full in the box after the jump, these updates bring only improvements for the new Japanese Era and the way it’s handled on Windows 7 and 8.1. There are no other changes included right now.
As for users whose devices encountered issues after installing either the April 2019 monthly rollups or these previews, the easiest way to restore the full functionality of the computer is to simply remove the updates. Microsoft says it’s still working with security vendors on patches for all impacted antivirus products, but no ETA is available at this point.
You can find full information on the acknowledged issues, as well as on the current progress on patch development, on the linked KB articles above.