Microsoft's Meltdown patch may be causing old AMD PCs to fail to boot

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AMD’s CPUs may have been immune to Meltdown and Spectre, but it turns out they are not immune to Microsoft’s patch for the same.

ZDNet reports that Microsoft’s community forum is filling up with complaints from users using PCs powered by AMD Athlon processors that are having trouble booting after applying KB4056892.

After the patch is installed PCs are not able to boot past the Windows logo and a user report:

“After several failed boots [it does] a rollback and [then] it shows error 0x800f0845. Unfortunately, it seems it’s not easy to disable the automatic updates without gpedit tweaks, so it tries installing and rolling back the update over and over,” wrote the reporter.

It seems the issue is only affecting very old AMD chipsets such as the AMD Athlon X2 6000+. AMD denies any patch is needed for their PCs, saying there is a “near zero risk” its chips could be compromised.

The patches have also had other undesired effects, including stopping PulseSecure VPN client and Sophis’s Sandboxie from working.

More about the topics: amd, amd athlon, meltdown, security, Spectre

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