At last! Many Tablet PC users had given up hope that a fix for a well-documented memory leak in the 2005 Edition of
the OS would ever be patched. Some had opined that it would take the release of Longhorn to address the problem. Today,
without fanfare, Microsoft has released a patch that cures this vexing problem.
The download page is
here. The Register's Andrew Orlowski, who has been covering this story since he broke it early last year, has a
story here. Tablet PCs fans everywhere are
celebrating.
UPDATE: Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor questions why this patch was released under the Windows Genuine Advantage program. When it's officially released, WGA will require validation (it's optional at present) prior to download. He makes an excellent point. This doesn't seem to be the kind of download that would/should require validation.
1. Why shouldn't it require validation? Why on earth should Microsoft be expected to give fixes to people that pirate their software?
I don't care if there's a bug in Windows that causes you to lose all your data and break out in hives, Microsoft shouldn't be faulted for asking that you validate your copy of Windows to get it. They have to spend money paying their engineers to fix the bug so they have a right to deny access to people that didn't pay for the software. If you stole someone's car and found out it has bad brakes do to you take it back to the owner and demand that they fix it? It's really no different here - if you stole your OS then I hope it turns out to be a buggy mess for you.
Posted at 4:57AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steve