Microsoft will end support for Windows XP in April, but before then, the operating system will continue to receive updates. Perhaps taking the opportunity to tie up a few loose end, the company recently addressed a performance-degrading issue that has reportedly plagued the OS for some time.
According to a story by Redmond Magazine’s Kurt Mackie, Microsoft last year identified a problem with the svchost.exe process, which could result in excessive memory usage as the OS goes through the update histories of older versions of Internet Explorer. Microsoft apparently addressed the issue in October 2013, but was “outsmarted” by its software and the problem remained.
Last week, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing group manager Dustin Childs reported the bug as finally slain:
On Tuesday, Microsoft depreciated [sic] legacy security updates for Internet Explorer that had been replaced by more recent ones. We did this to improve customer experience, reducing the time Windows Update requires to check existing updates before installing new ones. This action was purely to improve update performance and does not affect customer security.
While the time to transition from XP may be fast approaching, it’s good to know that until then, Microsoft is still finding ways to make it perform better.
Microsoft Quietly Fixes Windows XP Resource Hog Problem [Redmond Magazine]
Comments
4 responses to “Microsoft Fixes Long-Standing Performance Bug With Windows XP”
At least they fixed it.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702
Option 2 is the most hilarious bug fix ever.
I’m so glad that I’m not the only developer that occasionally accidentally types depreciated when I mean deprecated.
Could have been worse – could have said defecated. “On Tuesday, Microsoft defecated [on] legacy security updates for Internet Explorer”
Actually, it’s funnier if you leave out the [on] !