14 DAY TRIAL // The January 2019 Windows 7 monthly rollup caused several issues on devices where it was installed, including what originally seemed to be an activation problem.
Update KB4480970 was released on January 8 to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines, and it brought security improvements, as Microsoft resolved vulnerabilities in the operating system and other components.
But as the company itself acknowledged, some computers also experienced an activation bug, and it was originally believed that update KB4480970 was the culprit. Microsoft said the following in an update to the KB page posted last week:
“Some users are reporting activation failures and ‘Not genuine’ notifications starting around January 8, 2019, or later, on volume-licensed Windows 7 KMS clients. Notifications may state:
‘Windows is not genuine.’ ‘Your computer might be running a counterfeit copy of Windows.’ On screen errors and logged events reference ‘0xC004F200 (non-genuine).’”
Issue now fixed
But on January 12, Microsoft updated the page once again to state that the activation issue wasn’t, in fact, caused by update KB4480970 and it was all just a coincidence that it showed up just after the company released this monthly rollup.
The activation bug has already been fixed, Microsoft says, so the behavior described above should no longer be experienced on Windows 7 devices.
“The timing of this issue coincides with the release of the January updates (KB4480960 and KB4480970) that were released on Tuesday, January 8, 2019. These events are not related. The issue has been corrected on the backend Microsoft Activation and Validation servers,” it says.
A couple of days ago, Microsoft also released a new patch to resolve a network issue caused by monthly rollup KB4480960 on Windows 7. There’s just one bug that’s still unfixed in this update, as Microsoft acknowledged that it might break down apps that use a Microsoft Jet database with the Microsoft Access 97 file format.