Microsoft, as is known, has blocked the release of updates to Windows 7 and 8.1 devices running a new generation processor.
The company announced the change in January 2017, adding support for all processors will be available for Windows 10, not older versions of Windows.
The company then released the updates, KB4012218 and KB4012219, which for the first time had the ability to detect hardware on Windows 7 and 8.1 systems and stop the update by displaying the following image:
Let's see what we can do with this..
GitHub user zeffy decided to take a closer look at how Microsoft manages to lock down the installation of updates. Upon closer inspection, he noticed that the locking is done at the operating system level.
So what he did was the following:
He downloaded the KB4012218 Patch from Microsoft.
He extracted the contents of the MSU file using the expand command line tool. What he essentially did was extract all the files in the update so he could analyze them individually.
There were a lot of files, and then he used PowerShell to filter the files for anything that started with “wu” to find the ones related to Windows Update.
Reading the code and searching for the calls, he discovered wuaueng.dll, and its two functions: sCPUSupported(void) and IsDeviceServiceable(void).
After finding the cause, he would have to develop a solution to bypass the Windows Update block.
By tinkering a bit with IsDeviceServiceable(void), I managed to prevent Windows Update from being notified about what CPU the machine is using.
So the solution is a crack that “fixes” the dll. Zeffy uploaded the patched files (32-bit and 64-bit) for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to his GitHub page. The source code is also available and you can check it out.
The patches work like scripts that you simply need to run to make the necessary changes. Windows Update will continue to work exactly as before.
Attention: before applying the crack, keep a backup copy of the Wuaueng.dll file.
Of course, the above method may last until the next Wuaueng.dll is released by Microsoft.
