Data Execution Prevention (DEP) settings that may prevent patching or file changes...

If you have it set like this...



Then you should be fine, no problems. However, if you have the SECOND dot filled in, that may be the exact reason you have problems with upgrade or patch for software. I personally ran into trouble with it at work today, what a nightmare. I thought it might be worth sharing, put it set like above if you don't have the first dot filled in. You'll be better off. A reboot will be required anytime you change this setting.


Paul

It's worth noting that the first option is the default for Windows installs, but is also the less secure of the two choices. I always set to the second option as part of my setup of any new Windows computer. I'd only recommend changing back to the first option if you're actually having a problem, and even then- it's possibly better to whitelist the program that's crashing, rather than turn off protection completely.

chris

I seem to remember something about some OEM systems having the second option set as supplied or maybe one of these "helpful" security checking / fixing programs enable it.

WindWalkr said:

It's worth noting that the first option is the default for Windows installs, but is also the less secure of the two choices. I always set to the second option as part of my setup of any new Windows computer. I'd only recommend changing back to the first option if you're actually having a problem, and even then- it's possibly better to whitelist the program that's crashing, rather than turn off protection completely.

chris

Click to expand...

turn it back to less secure before patching, then put it back after patching... sounds like that might help.

If N3V is doing things by the book this shouldn't be a problem regardless of which setting you use. DEP really is there to prevent instructions from being executed in memory address spaced tagged as non-executable, i.e, data pages. It's a safeguard against Virus and Malware infection and in general, bad programs that just have an indiscriminate problem of popping off
the stack or jumping into some address that they should be in nor that the programmer intended.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Execution_Prevention

"DEP occasionally highlights software problems, usually with older software that was not compiled and tested to take advantage of the feature. "


http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/what-is-data-execution-prevention

I bought a high end Gaming computer from Dell some years ago, that had DEP, and everytime I would open Windows Explorer , or one of the other windows apps, Dep would crash the computer. Dell sent me another computer, that did the same thing. I finally disabled DEP, and never had another problem with that computer.

Robert2d6 said:

I bought a high end Gaming computer from Dell some years ago, that had DEP, and everytime I would open Windows Explorer , or one of the other windows apps, Dep would crash the computer. Dell sent me another computer, that did the same thing. I finally disabled DEP, and never had another problem with that computer.

Click to expand...

We had to do that where I was working due to some software we were running. The program would crash to the desktop randomly and this was the cause. We also had a problem on the Lenovo ThinkPad laptops where there is also a setting in BIOS for this too. I can't remember what it's called, but we had to disable the setting before we installed our image otherwise the program would go through the motions and nothing would change. This problem was a pain because we were pretty busy running around and would forget to change the BIOS before imaging the machines. We'd come back hours later only to find that they hadn't updated.

John

thanks Robert and jcitron, for this info...