Windows Archive
Let’s take a look at how things are going at Microsoft, whose CEO claimed a few months ago that 30% of their code was generated by “AI”. After installing Windows Updates released on or after October 28, 2025 (KB5067036), you might encounter an issue where closing Task Manager using the Close (X) button does not fully terminate the process. When you reopen Task Manager, the previous instance continues running in the background even though no window is visible. This results in multiple lingering instances of taskmgr.exe, consuming system resources and potentially degrading device performance. Additional instances appear as “Task Manager” in the Processes tab and as “Taskmgr.exe” in the Details tab. Although the impact is less if Task Manager is opened and closed a few times, many instances accumulated over time can cause noticeable slowdowns in other applications. ↫ The Windows Health Dashboard Well okay then.
After the release of Windows 95, with its brand new and incredibly influential graphical user interface, it was only a matter of time before this new taskbar, Start menu, and everything else would make its way to Microsoft’s other operating system line, Windows NT. The development of Windows 95 more or less lined up with that of Windows NT 3.5, but it wouldn’t be until Windows NT 4.0, released a little less than a year after Windows 95, that NT, too, would have the brand new user interface. Raymond Chen has published a blog post detailing the cooperation and interplay between the Windows 95 and Windows NT teams, and, as always with Chen, it’s a joy to read. Members of the Windows 95 user interface team met regularly with members of the Windows NT user interface team to keep them aware of what was going on and even get their input on some ideas that the Windows 95 team were considering. The Windows NT user interface team were focused on shipping Windows NT, but they appreciated being kept in the loop. During the late phases of the development of Windows 95, the Windows NT side of the house took a more active role in bringing the Windows 95 user interface to Windows NT. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing Chen details there was a lot of code-sharing, to the point where the Windows 95 version of the GUI contained NT-specific code, and vice versa. This code-sharing was quite a lot less elegant than today with tools like git, since Microsoft’s own internal source code system called SLM (pronounced ‘slime’) did not support branches, so they had to regularly perform three-way merges manually. It was a different time, for sure. Anyway, it’s amazing how much of this ancient Microsoft lore could’ve been lost to time, or shrouded in mystery, if it wasn’t for someone like Raymond Chen regularly sharing the stories from Microsoft’s past.
Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Windows to better deal with blue screens of death. In the release notes for Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.6982 (Dev Channel), the company detailed that after a user experiences a blue screen, Windows will automatically perform a memory scan. We’re introducing a new feature that helps improve system reliability. If your PC experiences a bugcheck (unexpected restart), you may see a notification when signing in suggesting a quick memory scan. If you choose to run it, the system will schedule a Windows Memory Diagnostic scan to run during your next reboot (taking 5 minutes or less on average) and then continue to Windows. If a memory issue is found and mitigated, you will see a notification post-reboot. ↫ Amanda Langowski at the Windows Blogs In its current iteration, this memory scan will trigger after every single error code to collect as much data as possible, but Microsoft states it will refine and narrow the number of error codes in the future. In addition, this feature will not be available on Arm64 and systems with Administrator Protection and/or BitLocker without Secure Boot. Let’s hope this feature won’t be a nuisance, but an actually useful feature that helps people uncover memory problems that otherwise remain undiagnosed.
Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out they’re random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their own homemade shortcut files. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing For those of us who didn’t grow up with Windows, or who, god forbid, are too young to know, PIF or personal information files are effectively shortcuts to DOS programs for use in a multitasking environment. A PIF file would not only point to the relevant DOS executable, but also contain information about the environment in which said executable was supposed to run. Their history goes back to IBM’s TopView, and Microsoft later embraced and adapted them for use in Windows.
Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and there’s one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver dates might look old, but that is not true. The driver date is descriptive info set by the driver provider and can be any date they choose. When determining which driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by the provider inside the driver files to determine the best driver. This lets the device provider promote the best driver, regardless of the chosen date. ↫ Microsoft knowledge base article Whenever I do have to fiddle with Windows machines, I always wondered about why some drivers in Windows Update would show some seriously old dates. It turns out the answer is as obvious as it always tends to be: OEMs.
With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let’s take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing. Microsoft released the first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835) for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is now available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues. First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the update broke localhost auth and following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since it’s 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment – perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again – you can’t actually do anything inside of it. There’s no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 won’t fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who aren’t installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about. You can’t help but wonder, though – with Microsoft pushing “AI” so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?
In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: render surfaces. Back in at least the Windows 9x days, playing video involved drawing solid green where you wanted the video to go (the video player window), rendering the video pixels to a surface shared with the graphics card, and then have the graphics card replace said green pixels with the video pixels from the shared surface. This approach has a whole array of benefits, not least of which is that it allowed you to render the video on a thread separate from the main user interface, so that if the main interface was sluggish or locked up, the video would keep rendering properly. You could also create two shared surfaces to render multiple frames at once, thereby eliminating tearing. Knowing this, it should be obvious what’s going on with the screenshot and Pain story. Now, when you load the image into Paint or any other image viewer, Windows sends those green pixels to the video card, but if the media player is still running, then its overlay is still active, and if you put Paint in the same place that the media player window is, then the green pixels in Paint get changed into the pixels of the active video. The video card doesn’t know that the pixels came from Paint. Its job is to look for green pixels in a certain region of the screen and change them into the pixels from the shared surface. If you move the Paint window to another position where it doesn’t overlap the media player, or if the media player isn’t playing a video, you will see the bitmap’s true nature: It’s just a bunch of green pixels. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I’ve never had this particular oddity happen, but I do have vague memories of video player windows rendering tons of green artifacts whenever something went wrong with the video player, the file it was trying to play, or whatever else, and I guess the cause of those green artifacts is the same. In modern operating systems, graphics rendering of the UI is done entirely on the GPU, with only the final composition being sent to your display. As such, the green screen effect no longer occurs.
Microsoft has posted a blog post about detailing its latest round of additions to Windows 11, and as will surely not surprise you, it’s “AI”, all the time, whether you like it or not. I’m not even going to detail most of these “features”, as I’m sure most of them will just become yet another series of checkboxes on whatever debloating tool you prefer. Still, there’s one recurring theme running throughout Microsoft’s recent “AI” marketing that really stands out, and this blog post is no different: Until now, the power of AI has often been gated behind your skill at prompting. The more context you provide and detail you share, the richer response you receive in return. But typing it out can be tedious and time consuming, especially if it takes multiple tries to get it right. With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. ↫ Yusuf Mehdi at the Windows Blogs “You’re holding it wrong” has become a recurring meme whenever someone places the blame for a shit product on its users, but we’re really starting to see this line of thinking explode with “AI” tools now. If you’re getting bad, wrong, or downright made up results out of your text generator – which happens all the time – the problem isn’t that the text generator is shit; no, the problem is that the user is shit at manipulating and coercing it into generating the right string of words. This is a major problem for “AI” companies, as the obtuseness of input and the inevitable shoddiness of results is most likely putting users off using them, and if there’s one thing these companies needs, it’s users. All of them are hemorrhaging money without any realistic paths towards profitability, so there’s a mad scramble to convince and trick people into using “AI” tools, and every single recent effort by Microsoft regarding Windows and Office is 100% geared towards this goal. That’s why nothing is sacred, and everything from Notepad to Paint, from the the Windows Start menu to context menus, from the Explorer file manager to your Windows command line is getting Copilot buttons and sparkly icons: Microsoft has to be able to brag about “AI” user numbers to keep the scam going. As the bubble gets bigger and bigger, and as we come closer and closer to that satisfying pop, you can expect ever more places in Windows to get “AI” features. I can’t wait for the sparkle icon to show up when formatting a disk, installing a driver through Device Manager, or during a kernel panic. I can’t wait for the blue screen of death to open a Copilot chat that advises you to do something utterly unrelated. You can do it, Microsoft.
It seems like Microsoft is continuing its quest to force Windows users to use Microsoft accounts instead of local accounts, despite the fact Microsoft accounts on Windows are half-baked and potentially incredibly dangerous. In the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build (26220.6772), the company has closed a few more loopholes people were using to trick the Windows installer into allowing local user accounts. We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly. ↫ Amanda Langowski at the Windows Blogs It seems that the specific workaround removed with this change is executing the command “start ms-cxh:localonly” in the command prompt during the installation process (you can access cmd.exe by pressing shift+F10 during installation). Several other workarounds have also been removed in recent years, making it ever harder for people forced to use Windows 11 to use a local account, like the gods intended. The only reason Microsoft is pushing online accounts this hard is that it makes it much, much easier for them to collect your data and wrestle control over your installation away from you. A regular, proper local account with additional online accounts for various services would work just as well for users, allowing them to mix and match exactly what kind of cloud services they want integrated into their operating system. However, leaving this choice to the user invariably means people aren’t going to be using whatever trash services Microsoft offers. And so, Microsoft will make that choice for you, whether you like it or not. There are a million reasons to stay away from the Windows version that must be making Dave Cutler cry, and the insistence on online accounts is but one of them. It’s a perfect example of how Microsoft developers Windows not to make it better for its users, but to make it better for its bottom line. I wonder how much more Microsoft can squeeze its users before we see some sort of actual revolt. Windows used to just lack taste. These days, it’s also actively hostile.
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.
