Down the digital rabbit hole of issues

My weekend started out peaceful… I treated myself to an omelette and some toast, made up some green tea and worked on some recent Left 4 Dead footage. Wow… Normally when I edit video footage I have to do a lot of trimming. Like trimming down two and a half hours of Serious Sam footage into two minutes… with our most recent game of Left 4 Dead though? It’s an hour and thirty minutes in length and so far I have about 15 minutes worth of footage with more territory to cover. I believe this could be its own miniseries.

After awhile I finally decided to give myself a break and head into Windows… Just when I thought I made it clear out of Windows Update hell I came across an issue with my microphone. It was recognized by Windows but not a single program acknowledged its existence. After some web searching I found out that if you blanket disable all apps from having access to your mic it’ll completely cut you off (despite that little message on the right telling you that it won’t block the mic from Windows). After fixing that problem I launched Steam and discovered that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider needed an update. Then I changed my mind and settled on Quantum Break instead… that’s when I ran into another problem. After playing for a few minutes my monitors would go black. This happened again at the exact same point in the game. Tomb Raider finished updating and I launched it, same problem. I updated my drivers to the latest ones (because somehow during Windows Update Microsoft oh so kindly installed an older one) and the problem still persists even on the latest beta drivers. I tried Skyrim and that seemed to remain stable, but DOOM 2016 choked just like Quantum Break and Tomb Raider.

That was last night. Today/tonight I ran more diagnostics; turns out it actually wasn’t Windows 10 in this particular case, because upon further testing I could replicate the same issue under Linux. I’ve tried clean installs of Windows and a couple other tricks but merit the same result. The only other thing that’s been done recently is a bios update. I’ll save that for tomorrow, I’ve been bashing my head against this long enough…

I’ll nibble on some clouds and I’ll lay my weary head to rest.

Microsoft surprised me with an unexpected update

So I pretty much spent most of my day today relaxing on the couch playing some FPS games, streaming from my desktop. Well, after I decided I was done I wandered back to my desk to find that my system is ready to install Windows Updates! Which is really bizarre because I have Windows Update set like this:

UpdateSet

Yet I was seeing this:

Updated

I was really worried that Microsoft somehow forced Windows Updates to activate in some sort of recent update that I installed a week ago. However upon checking specifics on the update itself it was for one item… KB2999226 From September 15th of last year… For the C Runtime? WTF Microsoft?

I restarted my system and everything was fine. I immediately looked in services and checked Windows Update, nothing. They were disabled, set to off as per usual. So I’m not sure what to think. Did an update not install last time? Or did a program I use detect that C Runtime was out of date, hence triggering the update? Did it really connect up to Microsoft to grab that one update for whatever reason? Either way this beyond any form of strange I’ve ever seen… I’m definitely glad it wasn’t Windows 10 being shoved on the system. I have all kinds of custom settings and software that would have been severely compromised.