Windows Archive
Microsoft is reorganising the Windows teams. Again. For those unaware, the Windows organization has essentially been split in two since 2018. Teams that work on the core of Windows were moved under Azure, and the rest of the Windows team (those that focused on top level features and user experiences) remained under the Windows org. That is finally changing, with Davuluri saying that the Windows client and server teams are now going to operate under the same roof once again. “This change unifies Windows engineering work under a single organization … Moving the teams working on Windows client and server together into one organization brings focus to delivering against our priorities.” ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central I mean, it’s obviously far too simplistic to attribute Windows’ many user-facing problems and failures on something as simple as this particular organisational split, but it sure does feel like it could be a contributing factor. It seems like the core of Windows is mostly fine and working pretty well, while the user experience is the ares that has suffered greatly in recent years, pressured as the Windows team seems to have been to add advertising, monetisation, tons of sometimes dangerous dark patterns, and more. I hope that bringing these two teams back together will eventually lead to an overall improvement of the Windows user experience, and not a deterioration of the core of the platform. In other words, that the core team lifts up the user experience team, instead of the user experience team dragging the core team down. A Windows that takes its users seriously and respects them could be a fine operating system to use, but it reorganisations like this take a long time to have any measurable effect. Of course, it could also just have no effect at all, or perhaps the rot has simply spread too far and wide. In a few years, depressing as it may seem, Windows 11 might be regarded as a highlight.
Some time ago, I described Windows 3.0’s WinHelp as “a program for browsing online help files.” But Windows 3.0 predated the Internet, and these help files were available even if the computer was not connected to any other network. How can it be “online”? ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I doubt this will be a conceptual problem for many people reading OSNews, but I can definitely understand especially younger people finding this a curious way of looking at the word “online”. You’ll see the concept of “online help” in quite a few systems from the ’90s (and possibly earlier), so if you’re into retrocomputing you might’ve run into it as well.
A few months ago, Microsoft finally blinked and provided a way for Windows 10 users to gain “free” access to the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program. For regular users to gain access to this program, their options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise their settings to Microsoft’s computers (the “cloud”). In other words, in order to get “free” access to extended security updates for Windows 10 after the 25 October end-of-support deadline, you have to start using OneDrive, and will have to start paying for additional storage since the base 5GB of OneDrive storage won’t be enough for backups. And we all know OneDrive is hell. Thanks to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, though, Microsoft has dropped the OneDrive requirement for users within the European Economic Area (the EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein). Citing the DMA, consumer rights organisations in the EU complained that Microsoft’s OneDrive requirement was in breach of EU law, and Microsoft has now given in. Of course, dropping the OneDrive requirement only applies to consumers in the EU/EEA; users in places with much weaker consumer protection legislation, like the United States, will not benefit from this move. Consumer rights organisations are lauding Microsoft’s move, but they’re not entirely satisfied just yet. The main point of contention is that the access to the Extended Security Update program is only valid for one year, which they consider too short. In a letter, Euroconsumers, one of the consumer rights organisations, details this issue. At the same time, several points from our original letter remain relevant. The ESU program is limited to one year, leaving devices that remain fully functional exposed to risk after October 13, 2026. Such a short-term measure falls short of what consumers can reasonably expect for a product that remains widely used and does not align with the spirit of the Digital Content Directive (DCD), nor the EU’s broader sustainable goals. Unlike previous operating system upgrades, which did not typically require new hardware, the move to Windows 11 does. This creates a huge additional burden for consumers, with some estimates suggesting that over 850 million active devices still rely on million Windows 10 and cannot be upgraded due to hardware requirements. By contrast, upgrades from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 did not carry such limitations. ↫ Eurconsumer’s letter According to the group, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that Microsoft is much more aggressive in phasing out support for Windows 10 than for previous versions of Windows. Windows 10 is being taken behind the shed four years after the launch of Windows 11, while Windows XP and Windows 7 enjoyed 7-8 years. With how many people are still using Windows 10, often with no way to upgrade but buying new hardware, it’s odd that Microsoft is trying to kill it so quickly. In any event, we can chalk this up as another win for consumers in the European Union, with the Digital Markets Act once again creating better outcomes than in other regions of the world.
If you’re still running old versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and up, either for restrocomputing purposes or because you need to keep an old piece of software running, you’ve most likely heard of Legacy Update. This tool allows you to keep Windows Update running on Windows versions no longer supported by the service, and has basically become a must-have for anyone still playing around with older Windows versions. The project released a fairly major update today. Legacy Update 1.12 features a significant rewrite of our ActiveX control, and a handful of other bug fixes. The rewrite allows us to more easily work on the project, and ensures we can continue providing stable releases for the foreseeable future, despite Microsoft recently breaking the Windows XP-compatible compiler included with Visual Studio 2022. ↫ Legacy Update 1.12 release notes The project switched sway from compiling with Visual C++ 2008 (and 2010, and 2017, and 2022…), which Microsoft recently broke, and now uses an open-source MinGW/GCC toolchain. This has cut the size of the binary in half, which is impressive considering it was already smaller than 1MB. This new version also adds a three-minute timer before performing any required restarts, and speeds up the installation of the slowest type of updates (.NET Frameworks) considerably.
Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can’t log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: “Your credentials could not be verified”. She’s using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn’t it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn’t fix it. My initial instinct is that since she’s using an online account instead of a local one, perhaps Microsoft is having some server issues? A quick check online indicates that no, Microsoft’s servers seem to be running fine, and to be honest, I don’t even know if that would have an effect on logging into Windows in the first place. The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. Despite the fact the PIN code she’s entering is correct, we try to go through this process to see if it goes anywhere. This is where things really start to get weird. A few dialogs flash in and out of existence, until it’s showing us a dialog telling us to insert a security USB key of some sort, which we don’t have. Dismissing it gives us an option to try other login methods, including a basic password login. This, too, doesn’t work; just like with the PIN code, Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid (just to be safe, we tested it by logging into her Microsoft account on her phone, which works just fine). In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount. The next option we try is to actually change the PIN code. This doesn’t work either. Windows wants us to use a second factor using my wife’s phone number, but this throws up another weird error, this time claiming the SMS service to send the code isn’t working. A quick check online once again confirms the service seems to be working just fine for everybody else. I’m starting to get really stumped and frustrated. Of course, during all of this, we’re both searching the web to find anything that might help us figure out what’s going on. None of our searches bring up anything useful, and none of our findings seem to be related to or match up with the issue we’re having. While she’s looking at her phone and I’m browsing on my Fedora/KDE PC next to hers, she quickly mentions she’s getting a notification that OneDrive is full, which is odd, since she doesn’t use OneDrive for anything. We take this up as a quick sidequest, and we check up on her OneDrive account on her phone. As OneDrive loads, our jaws drop in amazement: a big banner warning is telling her she’s using over 5500% of her 5GB free account. We look at each other and burst out laughing. We exchange some confused words, and then we realise what is going on: my wife just got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S25, and Samsung has some sort of deal with Microsoft to integrate its services into Samsung’s variant of Android. Perhaps during the process of transferring data and applications from her old to her new phone, OneDrive syncing got turned on? A quick trip to the Samsung Gallery application confirms our suspicions: the phone is synchronising over 280GB of photos and videos to OneDrive. My wife was never asked for consent to turn this feature on, so it must’ve been turned on by default. We quickly turn it off, delete the 280GB of photos and videos from OneDrive, and move on to the real issue at hand. Since nothing seems to work, and none of what we find online brings us any closer to what’s going on with her Windows 11 installation, we figured it’s time to bring out the big guns. For the sake of brevity, let’s run through the things we tried. Booting into safe mode doesn’t work; we get the same login problems. Trying to uninstall the latest updates, an option in WinRE, doesn’t work, and throws up an unspecified error. We try to use a restore point, but despite knowing for 100% certain the feature to periodically create restore points is enabled, the only available restore point is from 2022, and is located on a drive other than her root drive (or “C:\” in Windows parlance). Using the reset option in WinRE doesn’t work either, as it also throws up an error, this time about not having enough free space. I also walk through a few more complex suggestions, like a few manual registry hacks related to the original error using cmd.exe in WinRE. None of it yields any results. It’s now approaching midnight, and we need to get up early to drop the kids off at preschool, so I tell my wife I’ll reinstall her copy of Windows 11 tomorrow. We’re out of ideas. The next day, I decide to give it one last go before opting for the trouble of going through a reinstallation. The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. It involves booting into WinRE, loading up cmd.exe, and replacing utilman.exe in system32 with cmd.exe: If you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open “utilman.exe”, but since that’s just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you’ll see a new “adminstrator” account with full access to your computer. During the various reboots, I do some more web searching, and I stumble upon a post on
Some time ago, people noticed that buried in the Windows Bluetooth drivers is the hard-coded name of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. What’s going on there? Does the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 receive favorable treatment from the Microsoft Bluetooth drivers? Is this some sort of collusion? No, it’s not that. ↫ Raymond Chen So, what is the actual problem? It’s a funny one: an encoding mistake. The device local name string for a device needs to be encoded in UTF-8, and that’s where the developers of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 made a mistake. The string contains a registered trademark symbol – ® – but they encoded it in code page 1252, which not only isn’t allowed, but gets rejected completely. So, Windows’ Bluetooth drivers have a table that contains the wrong name for a driver, accompanied by the right name to use. This mouse is the only entry.
One of the most annoying things I encountered while trying out Windows 11 a few months ago was the utterly broken dark mode; broken since its inception nine years ago, but finally getting some fixes. One of the smaller but downright disturbing issues with dark mode on Windows 11 is that when Explorer is in dark mode, it will flash bright white whenever you open a new window or a new tab. It’s like the operating system is throwing flashbangs at you every time you need to do some file management. Luckily, it turns out there’s a fix, as Neowin details. Windows 11 is turning four in a couple of months, but Microsoft still has not fixed this annoying and, for some people, legitimately life-threatening bug (there is a reason why we have seizure warnings in games, movies, etc). As such, users have to take things into their hands and come up with custom solutions. One such solution is a simple Windhawk mod that fixes what a nearly four-trillion-dollar company still won’t figure out. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin This made me check out Windhawk, and it seems like an awesome project for people forced to use Windows. It is basically a package manager for various small mods, fixes, and changes for Windows, allowing you to mix and match exactly what you need. This way, you can easily fix the little niggles that bother you, all from a central location. The list of available mods is quite long already, and browsing through it, I’ve already seen quite a few things I’d be applying in a heartbeat if I were to be using Windows. Every mod comes with its source code included, ensuring you can check that it does exactly what it says it will do, and of course, you can contribute your own mods as well.
A version of Windows that’s often overlooked, and often probably entirely unknown, is Windows/386. When Microsoft released 2.x, they did so in two very different variants: Windows/286 and Windows/386. The former would run on anything from a 8088 and up, but wouldn’t make use of any of the new features of the 386, while the latter, as its name implies, was optimised for the 386 and introduced a ton of advanced features to the platform. Windows/386 laid the groundwork for the much more successful Windows 3.x and 9x, but weirdly enough, it’s never really been studied all that well to understand how it works and what it’s doing under the hood. That has changed now, as Will “CaptainWillStarblazer” Klees, whom we already know for his amazing work to allow RISC Win32 applications to run on x86, has delved deep into Widnows/386 with a ton of reverse-engineering to uncover many of its secrets. There’s so many amazing findings in here, I honestly have no idea where to even start or what to highlight, so I’m picking two things that I think are quite entertaining. First, Windows/386 does a number of checks to determine if your PC can run it, and one of the checks it does concerns “defending against early buggy 386 steppings”. It turns out that this exact check for buggy steppings in early 386 processors survived in Windows all the way up until Windows 8.1, which is wild to think about. A second fascinating finding is that a crucial component of Windows/386 finds its origins in an unusual place: Xenix, Microsoft’s UNIX implementation. Finally, it begins loading the Virtual DOS Machine Manager (VDMM) into memory from the file WIN386.386. This file is not an OS/2 Linear Executable like the 386 files from later versions of Windows (that format did not yet exist), rather it is the 32-bit x.out executable format from Xenix-386 (thank you, Michal Necasek!), which makes sense as it was the only 32-bit executable format that Microsoft would have a linker for at the time (and interoperated well with Microsoft’s OMF-based tools, such as MASM). ↫ Will “CaptainWillStarblazer” Klees at Virtually Fun There’s a fun detail about the 386 version of Xenix: it was ported to the 386 by a company we all came to hate deeply: SCO. The technology world is far smaller than we often seem to think. Apparently Xenix for the 386 was the first fully 32bit operating system for the x86 architecture, illustrating that once, a long, long time ago, SCO was an actually capable, innovative company. The work by Klees and his extremely detailed write-up are a joy to read, so head on over and have some fun.
If you need to reinstall Windows 11, you’re most likely going to need to do a hell of a lot of post-install work to make Windows 11 somewhat manageable. There’s countless tools to make this process a little bit easier, and one of them, Flyoobe, just got a major update to aid in removing all the “AI” nonsense Microsoft is forcing down the throats of its users. Starting off with version 1.7, people who hate the way Microsoft has been stuffing AI features into Windows 11 will be pleased to know that there is an OOBE view that allows you to discover and disable all AI and Copilot features after the installation of the OS. Moreover, the OOBE view that handles bloat removal has been enhanced too, and now allows presets ranging from Minimal to Full, along with the ability to load custom presets from GitHub. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin If Microsoft actually cared about the users of its Windows operating system, they would simply include an advanced options view during installation, in which you could customise your installation. Instead, users have to rely on what are essentially hacks to get to a point where their operating system installation can serve their needs, which is batshit insane to me. I’m glad projects like Flyoobe exists, but they shouldn’t have to.
Microsoft has been working on allowing driver developers to write Windows drivers in Rust, and the company has published a progress report detailing this effort. In the windows-drivers-rs GitHub repository you’ll find a bunch of Rust crates for writing Windows drivers in Rust. Using these crates, driver developers can create valid WDM, KMDF, and UMDF driver binaries that load and run on a Windows 11 machine. Drivers written in this manner still need to make use of unsafe blocks for interacting with the Windows operating system, but can take advantage of Rust’s rich type system as well as its safety guarantees for business logic implemented in safe Rust. Though there is still significant work to be done on abstracting away these unsafe blocks (more on this below), these Rust drivers can load and run on Windows systems just like their C counterparts. ↫ Nate Deisinger at the Windows Driver Developer Blog As mentioned above, there’s still work to be done with reducing the amount of unsafe Rust code in these drivers, and Microsoft is working on just that. The company is developing safe Rust bindings and abstractions, as well as additional safe structs and APIs beyond the Windows Driver Framework, but due to the complexity of Windows drivers, this will take a while. Microsoft states that it believes memory-safe languages like Rust are the future of secure software development, but of course, in true Microsoft fashion, the company doesn’t want to alienate developers writing traditional drivers in C either.
The history of Android applications on Windows is convoluted, with various failed and cancelled attempts by Microsoft to allow Windows users to run Android applications behind us. Now that these attempts are well dead and buried, Microsoft is going at it from a different perspective: what if you could continue where you left off on your Android phone, right on your Windows machine, but without having to run an Android applications on Windows? We are beginning to gradually roll out the ability to seamlessly resume using your favorite apps from your Android phone on your Windows 11 PC to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channels. To start with, you will be able to resume or continue listening to your favorite Spotify tracks and episodes right from where you left off on the Spotify app on your Android phone. First, start listening to one of your favorite songs or episodes in the Spotify app on your Android phone. On your PC (running the latest Insider Preview builds in the Dev or Beta Channels) a ‘Resume alert’ will appear on your taskbar. When you click on that alert, Spotify’s desktop app will open and the same track will now continue playing on your PC. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc So basically, the Spotify application on Windows will know where you left off on the Spotify application on Android, and resume playback. This is table-stakes for most services, and it doesn’t seem like it would warrant such a big announcement from Microsoft, and while I don’t use Spotify, I assume it was already built into the service anyway. It seems all Microsoft is doing is providing a nice little notification to expose that functionality a little bit more clearly, but it also explains that you need to manually link your device and the Spotify Android application to the Windows PC and Spotify Windows application, which seems like a lot of manual steps. Does this mean every application developer needs to opt into this and add this feature, thereby making it dead on arrival? Well, yes, you’ll need to add support on both sides of the equation, which I can guarantee you very few developers will do. Not only does this feature require you to already have a Windows version of your application – which, statistically, you don’t – it also requires you to do the work yourself, and manually apply to Microsoft to even gain access to the required APIs and SDKs. The odds of this feature making it beyond a few very big names Microsoft can give money to is slim.
It is no secret that Windows 11’s dark mode is undercooked, to put it mildly. While modern parts of the operating system support dark mode and they look fantastic with it, plenty of commonly used UI surfaces and legacy parts are still stubbornly light. Those include common file action dialogs, such as copying/moving progress, deleting prompts, file properties dialog, and more. Nearly four years into Windows 11’s lifecycle, Microsoft is finally fixing that. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin Many things about Windows baffle me deeply, but the half-baked, broken “dark” mode must be one of the biggest of them all. Here’s one of the largest, wealthiest companies in the world, and while introduced in 2016, the dark mode in their flagship operating system product is still effectively broken. Nine years into its existence, Windows users finally will no longer be blinded whenever they start a file operation, which is nice, I guess, but I doubt this new push to fix dark mode in Windows will cover everything. Windows’ dark mode joins the Settings application as one of those things that’s just deeply half-assed in Windows. I find it incredibly hard to believe Microsoft couldn’t have taken like five developers from their “AI” team to comb through Windows years ago to address these issues, so my only conclusion is that they just don’t care. Windows and its user experience just isn’t a priority for the company, and this should really make Windows users reconsider their “choice” of operating system.
We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! One of the most hated “features” of Windows is its update system – it’s slow, error-prone, and most annoyingly of all, tends to interrupt users at the worst possible times. This last issue is apparently so common it’s basically a recognisable meme, among both tech enthusiasts as well as regular users. The root cause of the problem is that because Microsoft wants to force users to install updates, you can only postpone them for a short while, after which Windows will install updates, even if you’re about to start a presentation. Microsoft is now bringing this approach to the Microsoft Store. Up until now, the Microsoft Store allowed you to install updates whenever you pleased, but that’s no longer the case. Just like Windows Update, you now only have the option to postpone application updates for a short while, after which they will be installed. There’s no registry hack to turn this off or revert back to the old behaviour. Be advised in case you’re using applications from the Microsoft Store for anything critical that starting soon, they will just update in the middle of whatever you’re doing. Splendid.
We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! We all know the earlier versions of Windows NT were available not only for x86, but also for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC (and there were unreleased ports to SPARC and Clipper). While we have the operating systems archived and available, applications properly compiled for the non-x86 versions of Windows NT can be a bit harder to come by. For instance, while Microsoft Word for MIPS and Alpha have been available for a while, we apparently never had a copy of Microsoft Word for PowerPC archived. Until now. Antoni Sawicki was pointed to an eBay auction for a copy of Microsoft Office Standard 4.2, and the photographed box clearly said it contained version for x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. He decided to buy it, and it did, indeed, contain the PowerPC version of Microsoft Word. Of course, he made this version of Office available online for posterity. An excellent find, and good to see we have people willing to spend money just to ensure software isn’t lost to time.
Remember the old Windows Control Panel? It’s still there, in your up-to-date Windows 11 installation, as a number of settings still cannot be changed in the “new” Settings application. In the latest Insider Preview for Windows 11 in the Dev Channel, Microsoft moved another long list of settings from the Control Panel to Settings. The focus is very much on time and language this time around. A whole slew of more niche features related to the clock, such as adding additional clocks to the Notification Center or changing your time synchronisation server, can now be done in Settings. Format settings for time and date have also been moved into Settings, which is a welcome change for anyone dealing with mysterious cases where Windows somehow insists on using anything but the sane 24-hour clock. As for language settings, things like enabling Unicode UTF-8 support is now available in Settings as well, and you can now copy existing language and regions settings from one user to another, and to the welcome screen. Lastly, keyboard settings like the character repeat/delay rate and blink rates are now also in Settings. It’s absolutely wild to me that Windows still has two separate places to change settings, and that countless settings dialogs still look like they came straight from Windows 95. It’s a reply fractured user experience, and one that’s been in place since the release of Settings in Windows 8, 13 years ago. The curve Windows is graded on compared to its competitors has basically become a circle. People write entire treatises about how Linux is not ready for the desktop because of some entirely arbitrary and nebulous reasons, while at the same time Windows users are served a hodgepodge of 30 years of random cruft without anyone even so much as raising an eyebrow. I’ve long argued that if you truly take a step back and look at the landscape of desktop operating systems today, and you were to apply the same standards to all of them, there’s no chance in hell Windows can be considered “ready for the desktop”. The fact Windows has had two competing settings applications 13 years now with no end in sight is just one facet of that conclusion, but definitely an emblematic one.
Whether you like Microsoft and its products or not, the one thing we can all agree on is that the company is absolutely terrible at naming things. Sometimes I feel like managers at Microsoft get their bonuses based on how many times they can rename products, because I find it hard to accept that they’re really that inept at product naming in Redmond. I mean, just look at my recent article about the most Microsoft support document of all time. Bonkers. While the list of examples of confusing, weird, unclear, and strange Microsoft product names is long, let’s go back to that weird moment in time where Windows updates were suddenly given names like the “Fall Creators Update”. As with every naming scheme Microsoft introduces, this one was short-lived, but for once, we have an explanation. Raymond Chen explains: It was during an all-hands meeting that a senior executive asked if the organization had any unconscious biases. One of my colleagues raised his hand. He grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite from those in the Northern Hemisphere. He pointed out that naming the updates Spring and Fall shows a Northern Hemisphere bias and is not inclusive of our customers in the Southern Hemisphere. The names of the semiannual releases were changed the next day to be hemisphere-neutral. ↫ Raymond Chen If you live in the northern hemisphere – and you can’t live much more north than I do – you don’t often have to think about how the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed. We all know it – I assume, at least – but it’s not something that we’re confronted with very often, as our media, movies, books, and so on, all tend to be made in and for consumers in the northern hemisphere. I’m assuming that people in the southern hemisphere are much more acutely aware of this issue, because their media is probably dominated by stories set in the northern hemisphere, too. It’s wild that Microsoft ever went with a seasonal naming scheme to begin with, and that it somehow slipped through the cracks for a while before anyone spoke up.
The most popular desktop operating system today is still Windows, with its userbase roughly equally divided between Windows 10 and Windows 11. While we tend to focus on the marketing names used by Microsoft, like Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 11, their real name is still, to this day, Windows NT. Underneath all the marketing names, there’s still the Windows NT version number corresponding to the marketing name; Windows XP was Windows NT 5.1 (or 5.2 for the 64bit version), Windows 7 was Windows NT 6.1, and the current latest version, Windows 11, is Windows NT 10.0, a version number that’s been static since 2015. Of course, version numbers don’t really mean anything, but it does highlight that yes, the Windows you’re using is still Windows NT, and thus, the operating system you’re using isn’t a part of the Windows 3.x/9x line, but of the NT line. And probably the first version of Windows NT that set us on this path is Windows NT 4.0 – with Windows 2000 sealing the deal, and Windows XP delivering the obvious knock-out punch. Since Windows NT 4.0 turned 29 years old a few days ago, Dave Farquhar published a retrospective of this release, highlighting many important changes in Windows NT 4.0 that in my mind mark it as the true beginning of the shift from Windows 9x to Windows NT as Microsoft’s consumer operating system. First, Windows NT 4.0 was the first version of Windows NT that shipped with the user interface from Windows 95. It brought over the Start menu, taskbar, and everything else introduced with Windows 95 to the Windows NT line, which up until that point had been using the same user interface as Windows 3.x. A default Windows NT 4.0 desktop basically looks indistinguishable from a Windows 95 desktop, and like the earlier versions of NT, it came in a workstation edition for desktop use. Second, another massive, at the time controversial, change came with the graphics subsystem, as Farquhar notes: And one change, easily forgotten today, regarded graphics drivers. Microsoft moved the video subsystem from user space, ring 3, to kernel space, ring 0. There was a lot of talk about Ring 0 versus ring 3 on July 19, 2024 thanks to the large computer outage on that day. In 1996, this move was controversial, for the same reasons. The fear was that a malfunction in the graphics driver would now be able to take down the entire system. But the trade-off was much improved performance. It meant Windows NT 4.0 could be used for serious graphics work. ↫ Dave Farquhar Windows NT 4.0 delivered more than what’s highlighted by Farquhar, of course. A major new feature in Windows NT 4.0 was DirectX, as it was the first Windows version to come with it preinstalled. DirectX support remained limited in NT 4.0, though, so Windows 9x remained the better option for most people playing video games. Other new features were the System Policy Editor and system policies, Sysprep, and, of course, a whole slew of low-level improvements to both the operating system itself as well as its various server-oriented features. Windows NT 4.0 also happened to be the last version of Windows NT which supported the Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures, although Windows 2000 retained support for Alpha in its alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Of course, Windows would later expand its architecture support with first Itanium, and more recently, ARM. As someone who was selling and managing computer systems at the time, Farquhar has some great insights into why NT 4.0 was such a big deal, and why it seemed to fare better in the market than previous versions of Windows NT did. He also highlights on particular oddity from NT 4.0 that’s still lurking around today, an oddity you really don’t want to run into.
If there’s one thing Microsoft is good at, it’s creating weird variants of Windows with odd names that tech media talk about for like a day, after which everyone, especially Microsoft, forgets they even exist. Usually, these weird Windows variants are the result of either legal requirements, or, more commonly, of perceived threats to Windows’ dominance on the desktop. An example of the former are the various “N” editions of Windows, while an example of the latter is the one we’re talking about today: Windows 11 SE. I honestly had completely forgotten Windows 11 SE existed, and most likely you did, too. Windows 11 SE was (one of) Microsoft’s response(s) to the growing popularity of Chromebooks in schools, and as such, this Windows variant omitted a bunch of features for performance and distraction reasons, stored files in OneDrive instead of locally, was locked down so only administrators could control which applications could be used, and so on. In fact, unless specifically whitelisted, Windows 11 SE would not run any Win32 or UWP applications – everything had to be either a PWA or a website. Notably, it was only available in combination with a few specific devices. The past tense in the preceding paragraph should be a dead giveaway of what’s happening. Yes, Microsoft just cancelled the whole thing, after being on the market for only a few years. Microsoft will not release a feature update after Windows 11 SE, version 24H2. Support for Windows 11 SE—including software updates, technical assistance, and security fixes—will end in October 2026. While your device will continue to work, we recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11 to ensure continued support and security. ↫ Windows 11 SE support document In other words, if your school fell for Microsoft’s sales pitch for Windows 11 SE, you’re kind of screwed after October 2026, because Windows 11 SE only shipped on specific, low-cost, low-powered devices. You’d think other variants of Windows 11 will more or less run on those, too, but if not – or far too slowly – your school is now sitting on a pile of e-waste. Anybody want to run a betting pool for the Windows variant Microsoft will cancel next?
Stuck at the bottom of NVIDIA’s announcement of its latest graphics driver update is a section about the company’s plan for Windows 10 support. As we all know, Windows 10 will become end-of-life in October of this year, and like so many others, NVIDIA needs to deal with this. Before we get to Windows 10, though, NVIDIA also reminds users that a few very popular GPU generations will no longer receive driver updates after October of this year. The company notes that GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures will Game Ready Driver in October 2025, after which they’ll only get quarterly security updates for another three years. These three architectures roughly correspond to the GeForce GTX 7xx, 9xx, and 10xx series and their mobile counterparts, as well as a few other higher-end cards from the same generations. The full list is available to see if your GPU will receive its last driver update in a few months. As for Windows 10 support, the company notes: Also, we’re extending Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support for all GeForce RTX GPUs to October 2026, a year beyond the operating system’s end-of-life, to ensure users continue to receive the latest day-0 optimizations for new games and apps. ↫ Andrew Burnes at nvidia.com Considering half of Windows users are still using Windows 10, this is probably the correct policy by NVIDIA. Ideally this support would last even longer than just that one year, but with a company like NVIDIA you kind of have to take what you can get, because generous they are not.
Microsoft is finally changing the way Task Manager reports CPU utilisation to make it consistent across the different tabs. So apparently this has been gradually rolling out to the 34 different Windows 11 beta dev preview testing alpha release candidate service pack 4 channels since early this year, but then stopped the roll-out to fix some issues. These issues seem fixed now, as the roll-out restarted this week. It”s an important change that I think y’all will care about. From the original announcement of the change back in February: We are beginning to roll out a change to the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools. For backward compatibility, a new optional column called CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab showing the previous CPU value used on the Processes page. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blogs Before this change, Task Manager’s Processes tab didn’t take the number of processor cores into account when calculating PCU usage, so you could see a process at 100% CPU usage even if it was only using one core. These new changes standardise CPU usage reporting across all tabs, taking the number of CPU cores into account properly. Rejoice.
