Windows Archive

As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated. Soon, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 11 26H1, but you most likely won’t be getting it because it’s strictly limited to devices with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Series processors. The only way to get this version of Windows is to go out and buy a device with a Snapdragon X2 Series processor. Windows 11 26H1 will not be made available to any other Windows 11 users, so nobody will be able to upgrade to it. Furthermore, users of Windows 11 26H1 will not be able to update to the “feature update” for users of Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, the regular Windows versions, planned for late 2026. Instead, Microsoft promises there will be an upgrade path for 26H1 users in a “future” release of Windows. Why? Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026. This is because Windows 11, version 26H1 is based on a different Windows core than Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2, and the upcoming feature update. These devices will have a path to update in a future Windows release. ↫ AriaUpdated at the Windows IT Pro Blog The same thing happened when Qualcomm releases its first round of Snapdragon processors for Windows, as Windows 24H2 was also tied to this specific platform. It seems Microsoft is forced to have entirely separate and partially incompatible codebases just to support Snapdragon processors, which must be a major pain in the ass to deal with. Considering Windows on ARM hasn’t exactly been a smashing success, one may wonder how long Microsoft remains willing to make such exceptions for a singular chip.

It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone. We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing. This new combined stack is called “Windows MIDI Services.” The Windows MIDI Services core components are built into Windows 11, rolling out through a phased enablement process now to in-support retail releases of Windows 11. This includes all the infrastructure needed to bring more features to existing MIDI 1.0 apps, and also support apps using MIDI 2.0 through our new Windows MIDI Services App SDK. ↫ Pete Brown and Gary Daniels at the Windows Blogs This is the kind of work users of an operating system want to see. Improvements and new features like these actually have a meaningful, positive impact for people using MIDI, and will genuinely give them them benefits they otherwise wouldn’t get. I won’t pretend to know much about the detailed features and improvements listed in Microsoft’s blog post, but I’m sure the musicians in the audience will be quite pleased. Whomever at Microsoft was responsible for pushing this through, managing this team, and of course the team members themselves should probably be overseeing more than just this. Less “AI” bullshit, more of this.

We often lament Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of its Windows operating system, but that doesn’t mean that they never do anything right. In a blog post detailing changes and improvements coming to the Microsoft Store, the company announced something Windows users might actually like? A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal. This enables developers and users with a new way to discover and install Store apps, without needing the GUI. The Store CLI is available only on devices where Microsoft Store is enabled. ↫ Giorgio Sardo at the Windows Blogs Of course, this new command-line frontend to the Microsoft Store comes with commands to install, update, and search for applications in the store, but sadly, it doesn’t seem to come with an actual TUI for browsing and discovery, which is a shame. I sometimes find it difficult to use dnf to find applications, as it’s not always obvious which search terms to use, which exact spelling packagers are using, which words they use in the description, and so on. In other words, it may not always be clear if the search terms you’re using are the correct ones to find the application you need. If package managers had a TUI to enable browsing for applications instead of merely searching for them, the process of using the command line to find and install applications would be much nicer. Arch has this third-party TUI called pacseek for its package manager, and it looks absolutely amazing. I’ve run into a rudimentary dnf TUI called dnfseek, but it’s definitely not as well-rounded as pacseek, and it also hasn’t seen any development since its initial release. I couldn’t find anything for apt, but there’s always aptitude, which uses ncurses and thus fulfills a similar role. To really differentiate this new Microsoft Store command-line tool from winget, the company could’ve built a proper TUI, but instead it seems to just be winget with nicer formatted output that is limited to just the Microsoft Store. Nice, I guess.

What happens when you slopcode a bunch of bloat to your basic text editor? Well, you add a remote code execution vulnerability to notepad.exe. Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command (‘command injection’) in Windows Notepad App allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files. ↫ CVE-2026-20841 I don’t know how many more obvious examples one needs to understand that Microsoft simply does not care, in any way, shape, or form, about Windows. A lot of people seem very hesitant to accept that with even LinkedIn generating more revenue for Microsoft than Windows, the writing is on the wall. Anyway, the fix has been released through the Microsoft Store.

It’s no secret that Windows 11 isn’t exactly well-liked by even most of its users, and I’m fairly sure that perception has permeated into the general public as well. It seems Microsoft is finally getting the message, and they’re clearly spooked: the company has told The Verge that they have heard the complaints, and intend to start fixing many of the issues people are having. The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year, you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows. ↫ Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows, to The Verge This entire statement is utterly meaningless. I have zero faith in words; only actions will do. Microsoft has made many promises over the years, and they have a history of simply not following through on them. Up until this year is over and there have been material improvements in Windows 11 that we can measure, see, and point to, nothing has changed between the day before the statement and the day after. Anyone taking this at face value and reporting it as such is an idiot. This means that at the end of this year, Windows 11 should be faster, more stable, experience far fewer breaking updates, have fewer – nay – zero ads, a far more consistent user interface, proper local account support, and more. If these things haven’t become reality once the countdown runs out and on 31 December, Microsoft lied to our faces once more. Until then, don’t use Windows.

Since I have no qualms about kicking a proprietary software product while it’s down, let’s now switch to NTDEV‘s thoughts on the state of Windows 11. Unfortunately, the issue that plagued Windows since the dawn of time has only aggravated recently. Windows 11 is a mixture of old and new technologies that are glued together, with decades of legacy code that simply refuses to die (because if it did a lot of corporate costumers would complain, and whether we like it or not they are paying big cash for support to Microsoft). Also, it tries to have a “modern” UI that unfortunately not only is inconsistent, but also it’s too heavy for its own good, being just a lipstick on a bloated old pig. Last, but certainly not least, it is full of AI features that most people didn’t ask for, some are even actively feared (see Recall) and are also quite lacking in polish and usefulness. Until Microsoft stops treating Windows as an “AI innovation platform” of sorts and starts treating it as the stable, reliable tool it was always meant to be, the user experience will continue to feel like a battle between the person sitting at the desk and the company that built the desk. ↫ NETDEV When even some of the most knowledgeable and respected Windows/Windows NT developers and experts are this down on the current state of Windows, you know things are way worse than we even know from just following the news and our own experiences. Back in 2024, I stated that I firmly believe we will see Windows – or at least, huge, crucial chunks of it – shift to an open source development model, as it’s the only way for Windows to move forward without crumbling into itself. It would also be a massive cost-cutting and personnel-culling step for Microsoft, something that seems to become ever more relevant now that the company bet massively on “AI”, without any of it paying off. They’re going to need to do some serious cost-cutting once the “AI” bubble bursts, and Windows will definitely be the first on the chopping block. As a side note, the step to release Windows as open source won’t be nearly as difficult or problematic as people think. In fact, Microsoft has provided access to the source code behind Windows and various other products for decades, and countless governments and organisations have access to said source code. On top of that, the source code to Windows XP and Server 2003 is out there, hosted on GitHub, and various other leaks have occurred as well over the years. While I’m sure a large clean-up effort would still be required, and while it surely will be a big engineering effort, if there were any truly shocking things in the code Microsoft wouldn’t want the world to see we’d already know by now. I’m getting the strong feeling Microsoft is trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of Windows before it ends up on the chopping block. Windows will definitely not be axed, but cost-cutting is inevitable.

I totally forgot you could do this, but back in the Windows 9x days, you could hold down shift while clicking restart, and it would perform a sort-of “soft” restart without going through a complete reboot cycle. What’s going on here? The behavior you’re seeing is the result of passing the EW_RESTART­WINDOWS flag to the old 16-bit Exit­Windows function. What happens is that the 16-bit Windows kernel shuts down, and then the 32-bit virtual memory manager shuts down, and the CPU is put back into real mode, and control returns to win.com with a special signal that means “Can you start protected mode Windows again for me?” The code in win.com prints the “Please wait while Windows restarts…” message, and then tries to get the system back into the same state that it was in back when win.com had been freshly-launched. ↫ Raymond Chen There’s a whole lot more involved behind the curtains, of course, and if conditions aren’t right, the system will still perform a full reboot cycle. Chen further notes that because WIN.COM was written in assembly, getting back to that “freshly-launched” state wasn’t always easy to achieve. I only vaguely remember you could hold down shift and get a faster “reboot”, but I don’t remember ever really using it. I’ve been digging around in my memories since I saw this story yesterday, and I just can’t think of a scenario where I would’ve realised in time that I could do this.

It’s no secret that the Windows 95 installer uses a heavily stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, but what can you actually do with it? How far can you take this runtime? Can it run Photoshop? It is a long-standing tradition for Microsoft to use a runtime copy of Windows as a part of Windows Setup. But the copy is so stripped-down, it cannot run anything but the setup program (winsetup.bin). OR IS IT? A mini-challenge for myself: create a semi-working desktop only based on runtime Windows 3.10 shipped with Windows 95 installer but not using any other Microsoft products. ↫ Nina Kalinina A crucial limitation here is that Kalinina is not allowing herself to use any additional Microsoft products, so the easy route of just copying missing DLLs and other files from a Windows 95 disk or whatever is not available to her; she has to source any needed files from other sources. This may seem impossible, but during those days, tons of Windows (and even DOS) applications would ship with various Microsoft DLLs included, so there are definitely places to get Windows DLLs that aren’t coming directly from Microsoft. As an example, since there’s no shell of any kind included in the stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, Kalinina tried Calmira and WinBar, which won’t work without a few DLLs. Where to get them if you can’t get them straight from Microsoft? Well, it turns out programs compiled with later version of MSVC would include several of these needed DLLs, and AutoCad R12 was one of them. WinBar would now start and work, and while Calmira would install, it didn’t work because it needs the Windows Multimedia Subsystem, which don’t seem to be included in anything non-Microsoft. It turns out you can take this approach remarkably far. Things like Calculator and Notepad will work, but Pain or Paintbrush will not. Larger, more complex applications work too – Photoshop 2.5.1 works, as does Netscape, but without any networking stack, it’s a little bit moot. Even Calmira XP eventually runs, as some needed DLLs are found inside “Mom For Windows 2.0”, at which point the installation starts to look and feel a lot like a regular Windows 3.x installation, minus things like settings panels and a bunch of default applications. Is this useful? Probably not, but who cares – it’s an awesome trick, and that alone makes it a worthwhile effort.

Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates. Left unchecked, they pile up and hog valuable space. Luckily, clearing them out is easier than cleaning your kitchen junk drawer. Let’s explore Storage Sense, Disk Cleanup, manual deletion, and a few bonus performance tips to keep your PC running like new. ↫ Microsoft Windows Learning Center You may think this is one of those junk SEO articles generated by “AI” to trap Google searches, but no, this is published by Microsoft on Microsoft’s website. Instead of fixing the long-standing and well-known problems around Windows being absolutely terrible at keeping itself clean and functional over longer periods of time, the company figured it’d be a better idea to just keep shoving that responsibility unto users instead. None of the tools mentioned in this article should need to be run or set up by users manually. A computer is supposed to make life less tedious, not more so, and I already have enough cleaning up and laundry to do out here in the real world, and I don’t want to be bothered with it on my computer. Why on earth am I supposed to manually remove unnecessary Windows Update files? Why did Adobe installers leave about 15GB of old installers in some directory inside C:/Windows on my wife’s computer that I had to remove using a third party tool? In what universe is this okay? Sometimes I wonder how much of our collective time is wasted just by dealing with Windows on a day-to-day basis in our society. Imagine the time we could reclaim and spend on our loved ones, families, and hobbies instead, if only Windows was developed by people with even a modicum of competency.

Up until now, it’s always remained possible to activate Windows offline, by calling a phone number, going through a lengthy phase of entering digits on your phone dialpad, and carefully listening to and entering a string of numbers on the device you’re trying to activate. For a while, even, this was, as far as I can tell, one of the easiest ways to fix activation issues caused by replacing one component too many, causing Windows activation to think you had a new machine. Phone activation was always remarkably more lenient and forgiving than online activation. Well, as part of Microsoft’s crusade to make Windows progressively more shit, it seems phone activation is going away. However, that seems to no longer work on Windows 11 or 10 or Windows 7 either, as another user Ben Kleinberg has documented on his YouTube channel. Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: “Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh” ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin They’re going after your local, non-online account, they’re going after offline activation – what’s next in line on the chopping block? Are they going to actively start blocking the various debloat tools that make Windows 11 at least slightly less of a block of concrete chained around your neck? Please switch to a real operating system.

I’m sure most of us here are aware of the bright red-and-yellow colour scheme called “Hot Dog Stand”, included in Windows 3.1. While it’s not the only truly garish colour scheme included in Windows 3.1, its name probably did a lot to make it stand out from the others. There’s been a ton of speculation about the origins of the colour scheme, and why it was included in Windows 3.1, but it seems nobody ever bothered to look for someone who actually worked on the Windows 3.1 user interface – until now. PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon contacted Virginia Howlett, Microsoft’s first user interface designer who joined the company in 1985, and asked her about the infamous colour scheme. It turns out that the origin story for the infamous colour scheme is rather mundane. In Howlett’s own words: I do remember some discussion about whether we should include it, and some snarky laughter. But it was not intended as a joke. It was not inspired by any hot dog stands, and it was not included as an example of a bad interface—although it was one. It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow. ↫ Virginia Howlett, quoted by Wes Fenlon in PC Gamer Howlett then lists a few other included colour schemes that were just as garish, or even more so, as examples to underline her point. Personally, I’m a huge proponent of allowing users to make their interfaces as ugly and garish as they want, as the only arbiter on what’s on your screen is you, and nobody else. Hot Dog Stand and similar garish themes need to make a comeback, because there’s bound to be some people out there whose vibes align with it.

With the current, rapidly deteriorating state of the Windows operating system, you have to take the small wins you can get: Microsoft is now offering the option of removing “AI” actions from Windows 11’s context menus. buried deep in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 release notes, there’s this nugget: If there are no available or enabled AI Actions, this section will no longer show in the context menu. ↫ Windows Insider Preview release notes If you then go to Settings > Apps > Actions and uncheck all the “AI” actions, the entire submenu in Windows 11’s context menus will vanish. While this is great news for those Windows users who don’t want to be bothered by all the “AI” nonsense, I wish Microsoft would just give users a proper way to edit the context menu that doesn’t involve third party hackery. KDE’s Dolphin file manager gives me full control over what does and does not appear in its context menu, and I can’t imagine living without this functionality – there’s so many file-related operations I never use, and having them clutter up the context menu is annoying and just slows me down. There’s more substantial and important changes in this Insider Preview Build too, most notably the rollout of the Update Orchestration Platform, which should make downloading and installing application updates less cumbersome, but since it’s a new feature, application won’t support it right away. This release also brings the new Windows MIDI Services, and Microsoft hopes this will improve the experience for musicians using MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0 on Windows. There’s a slew of smaller changes, too, of course. I’m not exactly sure when these new features will make their way to production installations – who does, honestly, with Microsoft’s convoluted release processes – but I hope it’s sooner rather than later.

During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines. “And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can’t run Windows 11.” He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won’t or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it’s absolutely bonkers to me that we’re mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should’ve 100% forced Microsoft’s hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen. Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there’s also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don’t have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on. At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.

With all the problems Windows is facing, I think one area where Microsoft can make some easy, quick gains is by drastically improving Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It seems that in the latest developer releases, they’re doing just that. The most impactful change – possibly – is that Microsoft is going to preload Explorer. We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn’t be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it. If you have the change, if needed there is an option you can uncheck to disable this called “Enable window preloading for faster launch times” in File Explorer’s Folder Options, under View. ↫ Windows Insider Program Team Microsoft is also reordering the context menu in Explorer, and while this may seem like a small set of changes, the new context menu does look much tidier and less busy. They achieve this by moving a few top-level items to a submenu, and reordering some other elements. Sadly, the context menu still retains its own context menu (“Show more options”), which is a traditional Win32 menu – which I still think is one of the most Windows of Windows things of all time. Regardless, I hope these small changes make Explorer more bearable to use for those of you still using Windows, because we all know you need it.