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Meltdown-and-Spectre-detector comes to Windows Analytics
After flubbing its early responses, Microsoft's thrown sysadmins a bone
Microsoft's added a Meltdown-and-Spectre detector to Windows Analytics, the company's telemetry analysis tool for sysadmins.
The new version of the tool arrived on Tuesday, when Redmond revealed new features to check antivirus status, operating system update level, and firmware status.
Sysadmins weary from gazing at users' blue screens will, we guess, welcome the OS status check, because if they've got a misbehaving Meltdown/Spectre patch it lets them disable it.
The antivirus check tells you whether your antivirus software is incompatible with patched boxen.
For now the tool can only check firmware status for Intel silicon. Which is handy given Intel's firmware was pulled a couple of weeks back because it was BSODing users. The Intel-only offer is no slight to AMD users, as that company took a few years off from the server silicon until 2017 and has small desktop market share.
The tools can peer into Windows 7 through Windows 10 if users are running the February 2018 patch levels (Win7 SP1, KB2952664; Win8.1, KB2976978; and for Win10, KB4033631). ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
