By Woody Leonhard, Columnist, Computerworld |

Reliable reports of blue screens after installing this week's Win10 1809 patch KB 4490481

I’m getting reports from many directions, on a wide array of machines, that the second March cumulative update for Win10 version 1809, KB 4490481, is throwing “System Service Exception” blue screens on restart

windows blue screen death crash freeze — Thinkstock

I first saw Martin Brinkmann’s report on ghacks.net:

Ran into a System Service Exception error on restart after installing the update on one machine. System Restore fixed the issue, Startup repair did not.

On Tenforums, poster doctorwizz says:

I was rebooting from Win10 to boot to Win8.1. The update was installing on the shutdown phase and it was taking longer to install this time. So I tried to boot to Win10 again. It was continuing to update and bam. BSOD System Service Exception.

Also on Tenforums, secondsight says:

I like doctorwizz above also have BSOD on every machine I have after restarting to complete this update. They all run Win 10 Enterprise. I don’t have any special software running and I’ve never had such problems before. I got out of the fix by doing a system restore and I’m back at 17783.379 now. I tried an experiment or two. I tried the standalone windows catalog installer … same thing.

Christian Vanderbrouk tweeted:

Can confirm. Recommend avoiding this update until @windows gets its act together. … Did a system restore and things are working again.

And there’s a report from Grisu_1968 on drwindows.de (Google translation):

I have the problem that I get a blue screen s. 2 PCs if I install the KB4490481 Windows Update. Since both PCs have very different hardware I suspect that there may be problems with an installed software.

The one PC AMD (Desktop) is the one listed under My System. The other PC is my notebook (Intel) Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th Gen

Brinkmann’s original conjecture, that it’s somehow related to Intel hardware, seems to be contradicted by Grisu_1968.

I have no idea what’s happening, but it’s very disheartening that this bug didn’t get picked up in the extensive beta testing round for the second monthly cumulative update for 1809. Microsoft's been testing the living daylights out of Win10 1809 patches, and still we're seeing widespread BSODs.

Ball's in your court, Microsoft, but fer heaven's sake — what does it take to confirm that the two-versions-per-year pace is sheer insanity?

Follow the details on the AskWoody Lounge.

Woody Leonhard is a columnist at Computerworld and author of dozens of Windows books, including "Windows 10 All-in-One for Dummies."

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