Windows Archive
With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there’s a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that’s another story). One of those parts of the UI that’s been virtually unchanged since the release of Windows 95 is the Run dialog, but that’s about to change: Microsoft has released a completely new Run dialog to early testers. Windows Run, also known as the Run dialog, is a surface that has been around for over 30 years. It has become a heavily relied upon tool for developers and advanced users alike. Users have decades of muscle memory where they hit Win+R, navigate through their Run history, and hit Enter to quickly access various paths and tools. We all have our favorite tool we launch there as well. For us, some of our favorites are wt (Windows Terminal), mstsc (Remote Desktop) and winword (Microsoft Word). But it’s more than jUsT a TeXt BoX tHaT rUnS tHiNgS. The Run dialog can handle navigating both local and network file paths as well. And everything it does, it does fast. Win+R opens the run dialog seemingly instantly. If we wanted to modernize the Run Dialog to fit the modern Windows 11 design style, we had to make sure it did everything just as well as before. We needed to maintain the same performance while also keeping the user interface minimal, just as Windows 95 intended. ↫ Clint Rutkas at the Microsoft Dev Blogs The new Run dialog looks like it belongs in Windows 11, which is a nice improvement, but the most important part is that they actually seem to have made it a little faster. Sure, they may have only shaved off a few milliseconds from its opening time, but considering virtually everything else they’ve touched in Windows over the years got considerably slower, that’s a good showing for Microsoft. The new feature they’ve added is that by typing ~\, you can open your home directory. The one casualty is the browse button, which according to Microsoft’s data, literally nobody ever used. I know it’s just a small thing and in the end not even a remotely consequential one, but with an operating system as old and storied as Windows, replacing these ancient parts that millions of people rely on every day absolutely fascinates me. There must be a considerable amount of pressure on the people developing something like this new Run dialog, especially with Windows’ reputation being at one of its lowest points, so it’s good to see them being able to deliver. The new Run dialog is available today for testers, and if you’re on the Windows Insider Experimental Channel, you can enable it in Settings > System > Advanced. Coincidentally, on my Windows 11 machine that I use for just one stupid video game, this Advanced page displays a loading spinner for five minutes and then just dies. Also, Notepad won’t start (one time it showed this dialog), and using the terminal to load it causes the old Win32 version of Notepad to open after 5 minutes of waiting, which then hangs and crashes. People pay money for this.
Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows’ graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and – hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now? The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it’s because some other program is using it to do some dirty work. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You’d be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do. Since there’s no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can’t just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you’d really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there’s no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project. Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I’m on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft made some concrete promises about fixing and improving Windows, and among them was removing useless “AI” integrations. Applications like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and others would see their “AI” features removed. Well, it turns out Microsoft employs a very fringe definition of the concept. Microsoft seems to have stripped away mentions of the “Copilot” brand in the Windows Insider version of the Notepad app. The Copilot button in the toolbar is gone, and instead, you’ll find a writing icon which will present you AI-powered writing assistance, such as rewrite, summarize, tone modification, format configuration, and more. Additionally, “AI features” in Notepad settings has been renamed to “Advanced features” and it allows users to toggle off AI capabilities within the app. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin If the recent changes to Notepad are any indication, it seems Microsoft is, actually, not at all going to “reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points”, as they worded it, but is merely just going to rename these features so they aren’t so ostentatiously present. At least, that seems to be the plan for Notepad, and we’ll have to see if they have the same plans for the other applications. I mean, they have to push “AI” or look like fools. I just don’t understand how a company like Microsoft can be so utterly terrible at communication. While I personally would want all “AI” features yeeted straight from Windows, I’m sure a ton of people are just fine with the features being less in-your-face and stuffed inside a normal menu alongside all the other normal features. They could’ve just been honest about their intentions, and it would’ve been so much better. Like virtually every other technology company, Microsoft just seems incapable of not lying.
Today, we’re excited to announce a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to Windows security and system reliability: the removal of trust for all kernel drivers signed by the deprecated cross-signed root program. This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers. This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update. All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy. ↫ Peter Waxman at the Windows IT Pro Blog The cross-signed root program was discontinued in 2021, and ran since the early 2000s, so I think it’s fair to no longer automatically assume such possibly old and outdated drivers are still to be trusted.
I’ll never grow tired of reading about the crazy tricks the Windows 95 development team employed to make the user experience as seamless as they could given the constraints they were dealing with. During the 16bit Windows days, application installers could replace system components with newer versions if such was necessary. Installers were supposed to do a version check, but many of them didn’t follow this guidance. When moving to Windows 95, this meant installers ended up replacing Windows 95 system components with Windows 3.x versions, which wasn’t exactly a goods thing. So, they came up with a solution. Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten. If so, and the replacement has a higher version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the replacement was copied into the SYSBCKUP directory for safekeeping. Conversely, if the replacement has a lower version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the copy from SYSBCKUP was copied on top of the rogue replacement. ↫ Raymond Chen All of this happened entirely silently, and neither the installers nor the user had any idea this was happening. The Windows 95 team tried other solutions, like just making it impossible to replace system components with older versions entirely, but that caused many installers to break. Some installers apparently even went rogue and would create a batch file that would replace the system components upon a reboot, before Windows 95 could perform its silent fixes. Wild. I used Windows 95 extensively, and had no idea this was a thing.
Usually, when developers or programmers write articles about their experiences developing for a platform they have little to no experience with, the end result usually comes down to “they do things differently, therefor it is bad actually”, which is deeply unhelpful. This article, though, is from a longtime Windows user and developer, but one who hasn’t had to work on native Windows development for a long time now. When he decided to write his own native Windows application to scratch a personal itch, it wasn’t a great experience. While I followed the Windows development ecosystem from the sidelines, my professional work never involved writing native Windows apps. (Chromium is technically a native app, but is more like its own operating system.) And for my hobby projects, the web was always a better choice. But, spurred on by fond childhood memories, I thought writing a fun little Windows utility program might be a good retirement project. Well. I am here to report that the scene is a complete mess. I totally understand why nobody writes native Windows applications these days, and instead people turn to Electron. ↫ Domenic Denicola Denicola decided to try and use the latest technologies and best practices from Microsoft regarding Windows development, and basically came away aghast at just how shot of an experience it really is. I’m not a developer, but you don’t need to be to grasp the severity of the situation after following his development timeline and reading about his struggles. If this is truly representative of the Windows application development experience, it’s really no surprise just how few new, quality Windows applications there are, and why even Microsoft’s own Windows developers resort to things like React for the Start menu to enabler faster and easier iteration. This is a complete dumpster fire.
Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it’s going to implement over the coming two months. In coming builds, you’ll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They’re also scaling back their obsession with ramming “AI” in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I’m sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we’ll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes. There’s also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to “improve File Explorer”. I feel like Microsoft’s been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark. Beyond these first round of improvements that we’re supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local). There’s some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.
It’s only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the utter idiocy that is modern Windows, but apparently it’s one enough people complained about Microsoft is finally addressing it. In all of its wisdom, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to set the name of your user’s home folder during the installation procedure of Windows 11. The folder’s name is automatically generated based on your Microsoft account’s username or email address, something I’ve personally really disliked since I have been using thomholwerda for as long as I can remember. Last year, they introduced an incredibly obtuse method of setting your own home folder name, but now the company is finally adding it as an optional step during the regular installation process. Expanding on our work which started rolling to Insiders last fall, you can now choose a custom name for your user folder on the Device Name page when going through Windows setup. This most recent update now makes it easier to choose a custom name. The naming option is available during setup only. If you skip this step, Windows will use the default folder name and continue setup as usual. ↫ Windows Insider Program Team This means you now have the option of defining your own home folder name, excluding CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³. It’s a very small change, and certainly not something that will turn Windows’ ship around, but at least it’s something that’s being done for users who actually care. It’s also such a small change, such a small addition, that one wonders why it’s taken them this long. I’m assuming there’s already some incredibly complex and hacky way to change your automatically assigned home folder name by diving deep into the registry, converting your root drive back to FAT16, changing some values in a DLL file through a hex editor, and then converting back to NTFS, but this is clearly a much better way of handling it.
Windows 11 has never pretended to be a clean backward-compatibility story. Since its launch, Microsoft has systematically trimmed support for aging APIs, drivers, and runtimes — and developers maintaining legacy codebases are absorbing the consequences. The question worth asking in 2026 isn’t whether these deprecations cause friction. They clearly do. The real question is whether that friction is severe enough to push serious developers away from Windows entirely. The answer is complicated. Microsoft’s deprecation schedule is aggressive, but the ecosystem response has been pragmatic rather than revolutionary. Developers aren’t fleeing en masse — they’re adapting, often through containerization and virtualization workarounds that add complexity without solving root problems. Where Regulated Software Sectors Feel It Most Industries running long-lifecycle software — healthcare, manufacturing, financial services — feel Windows 11’s deprecations most acutely. These environments commonly depend on legacy Visual C++ redistributables, hardcoded system paths, and DLL dependencies that assume a Windows 7 or Windows 10 runtime environment. Refactoring isn’t a sprint; it’s a multi-year program. The October 2025 end-of-support deadline for Windows 10 accelerated these conversations significantly. Organizations that delayed migration decisions now face either extended security update costs or forced compatibility work — neither of which was budgeted under normal refresh cycles. Some sectors exploring digitally-adjacent tools, from productivity software to platforms like New York Casinos online, face analogous pressures around maintaining software that runs consistently across evolving OS environments. Which Legacy APIs Windows 11 Actually Breaks According to Microsoft’s deprecated features documentation, APIs including NPLogonNotify and NPPasswordChangeNotify have had their password payload functionality disabled by default starting in Windows 11 version 24H2, with potential full removal signaled for future releases. This matters most for authentication middleware and enterprise SSO integrations built years ago with assumptions about credential pipeline access. The kernel-level changes arriving in April 2026 compound this. Microsoft is now blocking legacy cross-signed drivers by default — a policy shift affecting toolchain components that have operated uninterrupted for decades. Older trusted drivers retain compatibility for now, but the direction of travel is clear: unsigned or legacy-signed kernel code is getting progressively harder to run without explicit policy overrides. How Developers Are Responding to Forced Migration Containerization has become the dominant short-term response. Vendors like Numecent and Cloudhouse offer packaging solutions that isolate legacy runtimes — including 16-bit emulation and Windows XP compatibility modes — inside containers that run on Windows 11 without requiring refactoring. This buys time, but it doesn’t eliminate technical debt. As XMA’s migration analysis notes, while 99.7% of applications are compatible with Windows 11, the remaining 0.3% are disproportionately critical legacy systems that can block entire enterprise upgrade pipelines. For development teams maintaining those systems, workarounds like Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365 are Microsoft’s preferred answer — cloud-hosted compatibility rather than native resolution. Does Linux Finally Win the Developer Desktop? No direct evidence suggests Windows 11 is triggering a meaningful migration of developers to Linux or macOS as a primary environment. Microsoft’s own response to compatibility pressure consistently points back to Windows-native solutions. Tools like UiPath Studio, for instance, still maintain Windows-Legacy .NET Framework 4.6.1 support — signaling that the ecosystem isn’t yet willing to cut that rope entirely. What’s actually shifting is the developer mental model around dependency management. The assumption that Windows will perpetually run anything from any era is visibly eroding. Developers building new toolchains today are making different architectural choices — favoring cross-platform runtimes, containerized builds, and abstracted driver interfaces precisely because Windows’ compatibility guarantees feel less permanent than they once did. Linux gains ground not through dramatic defection but through incremental preference shifts among developers who simply want fewer surprises.
If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is. Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses the design team, its goals and process then explains how usability engineering principles such as iterative design and problem tracking were applied to the project, using specific design problems and their solutions as examples. ↫ Kent Sullivan This case study was written in 1996 by Kent Sullivan, who joined the Windows 95 user interface team in 1992. I consider the second half of the ’90s as the heyday of user interface design, with Windows 9x, Apple’s Platinum in Mac OS 8 and 9, and BeOS’ Tracker/Deskbar as the absolute pinnacles of user interface design. Coincidentally, this also seems to mark the end of a more scientific, study-based approach to designing graphical user interfaces. Reading through this particular case study for Windows 95 feels almost quaint. Where are the dozens of managers pushing for notification spam, upsells, and dark patterns to enable expensive data-hoarding services? Why are none of the people mentioned in the study talking about sneaky ways to secretly and silently convert your local account to an online account? Where are all the “AI” buttons? Why is there n chapter on how to trick people into enabling telemetry data? The user interfaces of the late ’90s were the last ones designed by people who actually cared, by people who approached the whole process with the end user in mind, rooted in scientific data collected by simply looking at people use their ideas. They were optimised for the user as best they could, instead of being optimised for the company’s bottom line. It’s been downhill ever since.
The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you’re running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It’s the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you’re not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux. That’s about to change, though: Microsoft has finally announced that Windows Server will be able to boot from ReFS. We’re excited to announce that Resilient File System (ReFS) boot support is now available for Windows Server Insiders in Insider Preview builds. For the first time, you can install and boot Windows Server on an ReFS-formatted boot volume directly through the setup UI. With ReFS boot, you can finally bring modern resilience, scalability, and performance to your server’s most critical volume — the OS boot volume. ↫ chcurlet-msft at Microsoft’s Tech Community Without diving too much into the weeds, ReFS can roughly be seen as Microsoft’s answer to modern file systems like ZFS and Btrfs, with comparable design goals and feature sets. It’s been around since 2012, but only for Windows Server, and with every Windows Server release since, the company has improved performance, added new features, and fixed bugs. Now, in 2026, it seems Microsoft thinks ReFS is ready to be used as a bootable file system for Windows Server. If you want to try this for yourself, you need to be a Windows Insider and make sure you have Windows Server build 29531.1000.260206-1841 or newer. During installation, the Windows installer will ask you to choose between NTFS and ReFS; the rest of the installation process will be pretty much the same as before. Now all we need is to wait for ReFS to become an option on client versions of Windows too, which would mark – arguably – only the second time in history Windows transitioned from one default filesystem to the another.
Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually. Here’s a refresher on what, exactly, Sysmon does. System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network. The service runs as a protected process, thus disallowing a wide range of user mode interactions. ↫ Mark Russinovich and Thomas Garnier After installing the optional cumulative update in question, KB5077241, you can install Sysmon as an optional Windows component. Of course, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, so it’s not quite as straightforward as you’d think. In Windows 11, there’s two places to add optional Windows features, and in the case of Sysmon, you have to go to the old Windows features dialog instead of the new View or edit optional features one. And also, don’t forget to first remove the old Sysmon from Sysinternals in case you have it installed. After installation, run sysmon -i as an administrator to enable the feature.
The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates. As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there’s a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won’t be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request. Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions – Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 – but if you’re happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.
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.
Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system? This binder contains the original design specifications for “NT OS/2,” an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, Windows, gained popularity, prompting IBM and Microsoft to end their OS/2 development partnership. Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM’s OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Unlike Windows 3.x and its successor, Windows 95, NT’s technology provided better network support, making it the preferred Windows environment for businesses. These two product lines continued development as separate entities until they were merged with the release of Windows XP in 2001. ↫ Object listing at the Smithsonian The actual binder is housed in the Smithsonian, although it’s not currently on display. Luckily for us, a collection of Word and PDF files encompassing the entire book is available online for your perusal. Reading these documents will allow you to peel back over three decades of Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of Windows NT layer by layer, eventually ending up at the original design and intent as laid out by Dave Cutler, Helen Custer, Daryl E. Havens, Jim Kelly, Edwin Hoogerbeets, Gary D. Kimura, Chuck Lenzmeier, Mark Lucovsky, Tom Miller, Michael J. O’Leary, Lou Perazzoli, Steven D. Rowe, David Treadwell, Steven R. Wood, and more. A fantastic time capsule we should be thrilled to still have access to.
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.
Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later. Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment. ↫ Pavel Osadchuk There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive. Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered. On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?
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.
