Windows Archive
It’s no secret that a default Windows installation is… Hefty. In more ways than one, Windows is a bit on the obese side of the spectrum, from taking up a lot of disk space, to requiring hefty system requirements (artificial or not), to coming with a lot of stuff preinstalled not everyone wants to have to deal with. As such, there’s a huge cottage industry of applications, scripts, modified installers, custom ISOs, and more, that try to slim Windows down to a more manageable size. As it turns out, even Microsoft itself wants in on this action. The company that develops and sells Windows also provides a Windows debloat script. Over on GitHub, Microsoft maintains a repository of scripts simplify setting up Windows as a development environment, and amid the collection of scripts we find RemoveDefaultApps.ps1, a PowerShell script to “Uninstall unnecessary applications that come with Windows out of the box”. The script is about two years old, and as such it includes a few applications no longer part of Windows, but looking through the list is a sad reminder of the kind of junk Windows comes with, most notably mobile casino games for children like Bubble Witch and March of Empires, but also other nonsense like the Mixed Reality Portal or Duolingo. It also removes something called “ActiproSoftwareLLC“, which are apparently a set of third-party, non-Microsoft UI controls for WPF? Which comes preinstalled with Windows sometimes? What is even happening over there? The entire set of scripts makes use of Chocolatey wrapped in Boxstarter, which is “a wrapper for Chocolatey and includes features like managing reboots for you”, because of course, the people at Microsoft working on Windows can’t be bothered to fix application management and required reboots themselves. Silly me, expecting Microsoft’s Windows developers to address these shortcomings internally instead of using third-party tools. The repository seems to be mostly defunct, but the fact it even exists in the first place is such a damning indictment of the state of Windows. People keep telling us Windows is fine, but if even Microsoft itself needs to resort to scripts and third-party tools to make it usable, I find it hard to take claims of Windows being fine seriously in any way, shape, or form.
We’ve pulled together all kinds of resources to create a comprehensive guide to installing and upgrading to Windows 11. This includes advice and some step-by-step instructions for turning on officially required features like your TPM and Secure Boot, as well as official and unofficial ways to skirt the system-requirement checks on “unsupported” PCs, because Microsoft is not your parent and therefore cannot tell you what to do. There are some changes in the 24H2 update that will keep you from running it on every ancient system that could run Windows 10, and there are new hardware requirements for some of the operating system’s new generative AI features. We’ve updated our guide with everything you need to know. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica In the before time, the things you needed to do to make Windows somewhat usable mostly came down to installing applications replicating features other operating systems had been enjoying for decades, but as time went on and Windows 10 came out, users now also had to deal with disabling a ton of telemetry, deleting preinstalled adware, dodge the various dark patterns around Edge, and more. You have wonder if it was all worth it, but alas, Windows 10 at least looked like Windows, if you squinted. With Windows 11, Microsoft really ramped up the steps users have to take to make it usable. There’s all of the above, but now you also have to deal with an ever-increasing number of ads, even more upsells and Edge dark patterns, even more data gathering, and the various hacks you have to employ to install it on perfectly fine and capable hardware. With Windows 10’s support ending next year, a lot of users are in a rough spot, since they can’t install Windows 11 without resorting to hacks, and they can’t keep using Windows 10 if they want to keep getting updates. And here comes 24H2, which makes it all even worse. Not only have various avenues to make Windows 11 installable on capable hardware been closed, it also piles on a whole bunch of “AI” garbage, and accompanying upsells and dark patterns, Windows users are going to have to deal with. Who doesn’t want Copilot regurgitating nonsense in their operating system’s search tool, or have Paint strongly suggest it will “improve” your quick doodle to illustrate something to a friend with that unique AI Style™ we all love and enjoy so much? Stay strong out there, Windows folks. Maybe it’ll get better. We’re rooting for you.
I finally seem to be recovering from a nasty flu that is now wreaking havoc all across my tiny Arctic town – better now than when we hit -40 I guess – so let’s talk about something that’s not going to recover because it actually just fucking died: Windows 7. For nearly everyone, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14th, 2020. However, if you were a business who needed more time to migrate off of it because your CEO didn’t listen to the begging and pleading IT department until a week before the deadline, Microsoft did have an option for you. Businesses could pay to get up to 3 years of extra security updates. This pushes the EOL date for Windows 7 to January 10th, 2023. Okay but that’s still nearly 2 years earlier than October 8th, 2024? ↫ The Cool Blog I’d like to solve the puzzle! It’s POSReady, isn’t it? Of course it is! Windows Embedded POSReady’s support finally ended a few days ago, and this means that for all intents and purposes, Windows 7 is well and truly dead. In case you happen to be a paleontologist, think of Windows Embedded POSReady adding an extra two years of support to Windows 7 as the mammoths who managed to survive on Wrangel until as late as only 4000 years ago. Windows 7 was one of the good ones, for sure, and all else being equal, I’d choose it over any of the releases that cam after. It feels like Windows 7 was the last release designed primarily for users of the Windows platform, whereas later releases were designed more to nickle and dime people with services, ads, and upsells that greatly cheapened the operating system. I doubt we’ll ever see such a return to form again, so Windows 7 might as well be the last truly beloved Windows release. If you’re still using Windows 7 – please don’t, unless you’re doing it for the retrocomputing thrill. I know Windows 8, 10, and 11 are scary, and as much as it pains me to say this, you’re better off with 10 or 11 at this point, if only for security concerns.
Windows 11 2024 Update, also known as version 24H2, is now publicly available. Microsoft announced the rollout alongside the new AI-powered features that are coming soon to Windows Insiders with Copilot+ PCs and Copilot upgrades. Unlike recent Windows 11 updates, version 24H2 is a “full operating system swap,” so updating to it will take more time than usual. What is going as usual is the way the update is being offered to users. Microsoft is gradually rolling out the update to “seekers” with Windows 11 versions 22H2 and 23H2. That means you need to go to the Settings app and manually request the update. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin I’ve said it a few times before but I completely lost track of how Windows releases and updates work at this point. I thought this version and its features had been available for ages already, but apparently I was wrong, and it’s only being released now. For now, you can get it by opting in through Windows Update, while the update will be pushed to everyone later on. I really wish Microsoft would move to a simpler, more straightforward release model and cadence, but alas. Anyway, this version brings all the AI/ML CoPilot stuff, WiFi 7 support, improvements to File Explorer and the system tray, the addition of the sudo command, and more. The changes to Explorer are kind of hilarious to me, as Microsoft seems to have finally figured out labels are a good thing – the weird copy/cut/paste buttons in the context menu have labels now – but this enhanced context menu still has its own context menu. Explorer now also comes with support for more compression formats, which is a welcome change in 2007. To gain access to the new sudo command, go to Settings > System > For developers and enable the option. For the rest, this isn’t a very impactful release, and will do little to convince the much larger Windows 10 userbase to switch to Windows 11, something that’s going to be a real problem for Microsoft in the coming year.
As part of our vision for simplified Windows management from the cloud, Microsoft has announced deprecation of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS. However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates through the WSUS channel. We will also support any content already published through the WSUS channel. ↫ Nir Froimovici What an odd feature to deprecate. Anyone with a large enough fleet of machines probably makes use of Windows Server Update Services, as it adds some much-needed centralised control to the downloading and deployment of Windows updates, so you can do localised partial rollouts for testing, which, as the CrowdStrike debacle showed us once more, is quite important. WSUS also happens to be a local tool, that is set up and run locally, instead of in the cloud, and that’s where we get to the real reason WSUS is being deprecated. Microsoft is advising IT managers who use WSUS to switch to Microsoft’s alternatives, like Windows Autopatch, Microsoft Intune, and Azure Update Manager. These all happen to run in the cloud, giving up that control WSUS provided by running locally, and they’re not free either – they’re subscription services, of course. I mean, technically WSUS isn’t free either as it’s part of Windows Server, but these cloud services come on top of the cost of Windows Server itself. Nobody escapes the relentless march of subscription costs.
Are you developing a game for Windows, and are you working on input handling? At first, it could reasonably be assumed that mouse and keyboard should be the simplest parts of this to deal with, but in reality, they are not – at least if we are talking about Windows. In fact, several extremely popular AAA games ship with severe mouse input issues when specific high-end mice are used, and some popular engines have issues that are still extant. In this article we’ll explore a few reasons why that is the case, and end up with a solution that works but is still unsatisfactory. I assume that there is a whole other level of complexity involved in properly dealing with accessories like steering wheels, flight sticks, and so on in simulators, but so far I never had the pleasure of working on a game that required this, and this article will not cover those types of input devices. ↫ Peter ‘Durante’ Thoman So, what is the problem? Basically, there are two ways to handle mouse input in Windows: if you use batched raw input processing, which is pretty much a requirement, you need to also choose whether or not to keep legacy input enabled. If you keep it enabled, the legacy input will add so much junk to your message queue it can negatively impact the performance of your game quite harshly. If you disable it, however, something really fun happens: you can no longer move the game window… Because the Windows UI uses legacy input. Thoman has a solution that he and his company uses, and he considers it an ugly hack, but they just don’t know of a better way to solve this issue. Thoman keeps legacy input enabled, but just limits the number of message queue events per frame that are being processed (they limit it to 5). As far as they can tell, this doesn’t seem to have any negative side effects, but it’s clearly a bit of an ugly hack that shouldn’t be necessary. I found this a rather interesting niche topic, and I wonder how many people have struggled with this before, and what kind of other solutions exist.
Last week, Julio Merino published an article I wish someone had written ages ago: a fair, unbiased look at the differences between Windows NT in its original form and UNIX roughly at the time of the initial releases of Windows NT. Merino, who has a long career in tech and has made contributions to several operating systems, does a great job cutting through the fanboyism and decades’ worth of conventional wisdom, arriving at the following conclusion that I think many of us here will share even without diving into the great depth of his article. NT was groundbreaking technology when it launched. As I presented above, many of the features we take for granted today in systems design were present in NT since its inception, whereas almost all other Unix systems had to gain those features slowly over time. As a result, such features don’t always integrate seamlessly with Unix philosophies. Today, however, it’s not clear to me that NT is truly “more advanced” than, say, Linux or FreeBSD. It is true that NT had more solid design principles at the onset and more features that its contemporary operating systems, but nowadays… the differences are blurry. Yes, NT is advanced, but not significantly more so than modern Unixes. What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place… bloat in the UI doesn’t let the design shine through. The sluggishness of the OS even on super-powerful machines is painful to witness and might even lead to the demise of this OS. ↫ Julio Merino You should definitely read the whole thing, and not just the conclusion, as it will give you some great insight into some of the differences between the two approaches, and how the UNIX and Windows NT worlds learned from each other and grew together. It’s well-written, easy to read, and contains a ton of information and details about especially Windows NT most people are probably not aware of. Reading through the article helped my crystallise a set of thoughts I’ve been having about the future of Windows, and in particular, the future of Windows NT as a short-hand for the kernel, lower-level frameworks, and everything else below the graphical layer. I think there’s a major change coming to Windows NT, something so big and unheard of it’s going to be the most defining moment in Windows NT history since its very first release. There’s a few facts that lie at the root of my conclusion. First, ever since the very beginning, Windows NT has been developed in roughly the same way: behind closed doors by a group of specialists inside Microsoft, and every now and then we got a massive dump of new code in the form of a major Windows release. It’s only recently that Microsoft has started taking a more rolling release approach to Windows development, with smaller updates peppered throughout the year, with different release branches users can subscribe to. Second, despite many of us almost equating Microsoft with Windows – or perhaps with Windows and Office – the reality of it is that Windows hasn’t been the primary driver for revenue for Microsoft for a while now. In Microsoft’s fiscal year of 2023, Windows made up just 10% of the company’s total revenue that year, which amounts to $22 billion out of a total revenue of $211 billion. Azure alone is almost four times as large at $80 billion, and even LinkedIn – yes, LinkedIn – is good for $15 billion in revenue, making Windows only about a third more profitable than the most soulless social network in human history. Third, despite Windows’ decreasing revenue share, the operating system is becoming ever larger in scope. Not only does it need to cover the literally infinite possible combinations of x86 hardware in both the desktop/laptop and server space, it now also needs to cover what is surely going to be a growing market for ARM hardware, starting with laptops, but surely expanding to desktops and servers, too. Microsoft needs to foot the bill for all of this development, and for how much longer can the company justify spending an inordinate amount of money on a massive army of Windows developers, when the revenue they bring in is such a small part of the company, and a part that’s decreasing every year, to boot? Fourth, the competition Windows faces is surprisingly strong. Not only are macOS, Chrome OS, and even the Linux desktop doing better than ever, mobile computing is also competing with Windows, and that’s a space Microsoft is simply not present in at all. This is especially pressing in the developing world, where often people’s first and only computing experience is mobile – through Android, mostly – and Microsoft and Windows simply don’t play any role. Given these facts, there’s only one reasonable course of action for Microsoft. I think the company is going to address all of these issues by releasing large parts of Windows NT as open source. I base this on a gut feeling bourne out of the above facts, and not on any form of insider information, and there is a 99.9% chance that I am wholly, completely, and utterly wrong. Still, deep down, I feel like releasing Windows as open source makes the most sense considering the challenges the operating system and its parent company are facing. You and I are going to witness Windows NT’s source code being published as open source on GitHub by Microsoft within 5-7 years, accompanied by an open governance model wherein contributions are welcomed and encouraged. Even if such a step will not be taken by Microsoft, I am convinced that, in the future, when today’s employees and executives write and publish their memoirs, it will contain a lot of discourse on the very serious consideration that took place within the company in the past to do so. You can quote me on this. And then laugh at me when it inevitable turns out I’m wrong.
The consequences of the massive CrowdStrike failure for Windows are slowly coming into focus. Microsoft recently held a security summit with some of the large security software vendors, and the company is making several rather vague promises about what it’s going to do to make sure an incident like CrowdStrike never happens again. A key part of these promises is the realisation that security software really shouldn’t be running in the kernel, and to make that possible, MIcrosoft will need to add several security features in userspace. Both our customers and ecosystem partners have called on Microsoft to provide additional security capabilities outside of kernel mode which, along with SDP, can be used to create highly available security solutions. At the summit, Microsoft and partners discussed the requirements and key challenges in creating a new platform which can meet the needs of security vendors. ↫ David Weston at the Windows Blogs This is easier said than done, as moving things from kernel to userspace tends to incur a performance penalty, as well as making it harder to detect software with bad intentions early enough. Microsoft is going to have do some serious reworking of both the kernel and userspace when it comes to security before it’ll be able to completely close up the kernel and make it impossible for security software to mess around in kernelspace. Microsoft doesn’t offer any concrete steps or measures quite yet, so we’ll have to wait and see just how far they’re willing to go. There’s really not much else to say at this point – empty platitudes, vague promises, and tons of marketing speak don’t secure an operating system, after all.
The MAS project, a group of people working on an open source Windows and Office activator featuring HWID, Ohook, KMS38, and Online KMS activation methods, discovered quite a neat and interesting bug in the code responsible for licensing in Windows. In our ongoing work to bypass Windows licensing checks, we occasionally stumble upon bugs that we choose to keep secret. This decision allows us to preserve potential future activation methods by avoiding bug fixes, while also giving us valuable tools for testing or developing new methods. One such discovery, which we’ve named “Keyhole”, turned out to be a highly effective DRM bypass. It gave users the ability to license any Microsoft Store app or any modern Windows edition with ease. ↫ The MAS project There were quite a number of roadblocks to overcome here, such as Microsoft’s code obfuscation tool, called Warbird, which was already done by someone else, after which they could really start digging into the code responsible for handling Microsoft Store and Windows licenses. They then discovered that circumventing the license blocks that hold the actual license information was dead simple – every license block is followed by a signature block covering all the data that comes before it. It turns out that messing with the licensing system was as simple as… Adding data after that signature block. That was it. As it turns out, data after the signature block isnt checked at all… and it can even override data that came before it. Whenever two blocks of the same type are stored together, the last one overrides all the others before it. So, if we want to change any license data, we can just make a block for it and put it after the signature block! This method lets us make licenses for anything sold on the Microsoft Store, including Windows, from any other Microsoft Store license. And since there are so many free apps with licenses, we now had the ability to make as many as we wanted for whatever we wanted. This bug essentially punched a hole straight through CLiP’s DRM, so we decided to name it “Keyhole”. ↫ The MAS project This opened up a massive hole in Microsoft’s licensing tools and DRM, and allowed the MAS project to pretty much do whatever they wanted. They could even do things that used to be impossible, such as “activating Enterprise LTSC with a digital license, or even activating a legitimate KMS server with a generic key”. Sadly, the fun didn’t last long, as right around the same time, Cisco TALOS discovered this same bug, reported it to Microsoft, who then proceeded to fix it. the MAS project also discovered something else incredibly interesting, something which further highlights the seemingly terrible lack of quality assurance and code quality inside Microsoft. They noted that the kernel driver responsible for licensing looked incredibly shoddy, full of what they call “odd choices and compromises”. In fact, they soon realised that they had seen this code before: it was a straight-up copy/paste job from the licensing DRM found on the Xbox One. And there’s the same bug that’s in CLiP, but in Xbox code. In fact, we weren’t too surprised to find this, as we found that almost all of CLiP, from the XML format of the licenses to the TLV-based license blocks, is copy-pasted straight from the Xbox One’s DRM system. ↫ The MAS project Code reuse obviously makes sense in some situations, but the fact Microsoft even copy/pasted entire sections of code from the Xbox One straight into the Windows kernel as a kernel driver seems rather irresponsible. Shouldn’t code added to the Windows kernel and installed on billions of devices be vetted a little better than this?
We are proud to announce that version 1.6 of the Windows App SDK is now available! Whether you’re looking for the incredible performance boost and footprint reduction of Native AOT support, enhancements for deploying your package, or quality of life improvements for controls like PipsPager and RatingControl, WinAppSDK 1.6 offers a raft of new features, performance boosts and structural changes that enable you to make your native Windows apps better than ever before. The Windows App SDK provides a rich set of APIs and tools to help you build beautiful and fast Windows desktop apps, including any C++ Win32 or C# .NET app. You can harness the modern controls and polish of WinUI 3, which ships as part of the WinAppSDK, or if you have an existing app that uses Win32 such as WPF, you can take advantage of only the parts of the SDK that you need. The WinAppSDK also stays up to date with frequent and OS-independent releases so your app can always access the latest innovations. ↫ Duncan MacMichael at the Windows Blogs There’s actually quite a few nice and welcome updates in version 1.6, most prominently the aforementioned Native AOT. This stands for native Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and, as the name suggests, compiles your application ahead of time for the architecture it’s going to run on. This reduces the size of the application package and greatly improves the startup time. Another welcome improvement is that the embedded Edge WebView2 SDK is no longer hard-coded, but a NuGet reference, so developers can choose to use any version of the webview they want, preferably the newest version. There’s a lot more in here, so if you’re a Windows developer trying to use the latest set of tools from Microsoft – this one’s for you.
Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all. Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer? ↫ Maya Posch I like the Windows Control Panel, and approaches like it. They’re easy to use, they allow you to have multiple settings panels open at the same time, they can be easily extended by third parties – for better or worse – and they make it easy to find things with colourful, recognisable icons. The current Windows Settings application is a massive regression, as is the change from macOS’ iconic and incredibly user-friendly System Preferences to the new System Settings application. KDE also moved to a sidebar design I’m not a fan of, and GNOME has had a similar unpleasant, monochrome sidebar, too. It’s not big enough of an issue to make a huge deal out of, and the KDE sidebar settings application is at least marginally usable, but I really do wish someone would have the guts to undo this general trend, because it’s getting harder and harder to find the settings I want at a glance, and not allowing you to open multiple settings panels at the same time is a huge loss. And a small note: this article uses the Windows 3.x Control Panel as its starting point, but both Windows 1.x and 2.x had a Control Panel as well. It’s an old concept, for sure.
Despite reports to the contrary, Microsoft has stated that Recall will not be uninstallable after all. The feature did show up in the Windows Features dialog, but apparently, that was a bug. “We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,” says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. “This will be fixed in an upcoming update.” ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge The company is not committing to saying it will not ever be uninstallable, probably because the European Union might have something to say about that. At the very least you’ll be able to turn Recall off, but it seems actually removing it might not be possible for a while.
After spending a few months in complete radio silence about Recall, Microsoft finally emerged with a statement that its controversial feature will make a comeback later this year, in October, to be more precise. In preparation for the release, Microsoft quietly made a big change in Windows 11 version 24H2 on Copilot+ PCs, namely, adding the ability to uninstall Recall (via Deskmodder). ↫ Taras Buria Recall, a half-baked security nightmare of a feature trying to catch the AI hype train, uninstallable using a Windows 95-era Windows Features dialog, is a better summary of the current state of Windows than anything anyone could put into words. Nobody cares about Windows, least of all Microsoft, and I have the sneaking suspicion that could Microsoft get away with it, they would put the source code to large parts of the Windows platform on GitHub to “outsource” its development to the community and fire even more employees. Is anyone excited about new Windows releases? Is anyone looking forward to new features? Because it feels like every new releases, every new feature, just causes more dread, more exasperation, more what is it this time? than genuine excitement and happiness. Everything coming out of Microsoft when it comes to Windows ever since the release of Windows 11 is just… Sadness.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the “Account Manager” is coming to Windows 10 users. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin Yes, this is a really small ad int he grand scheme of things, but the mere concept of my operating system showing me all kinds of ads and upsells, as both Windows and macOS have been doing aggressively for years now, is so deeply offensive to me. It shows such utter disrespect to me as a user, and shows that Microsoft and Apple see me not as an end user, but as a ripe plum ready to be bled dry at every turn. It’s revolting. As the latest release, Windows 11 has always been the most ad-ridden of the Windows releases still in use, but it seems Windows users can’t escape the onslaught either. I’m especially expecting ever more aggressive ads and upsells for Windows 11 to appear in Windows 10 now that the 2025 cutoff date for Windows 10 support is nearing, of course appearing at the most inopportune times – because everybody loves a giant fullscreen ad on your operating system when you’re trying to give a presentation or meet that tight deadline you forced yourself yo stress about by playing a bit too much League of Legends. If you want an ad- and upsell-free operating system, your options are legion – there’s countless Linux distributions and the various BSDs to choose from.
Virtually every tech media outlet has been reporting that Microsoft is deprecating the Control Panel in Windows as if that’s some sort of big revelation we should be outraged about. They’re basing this on the following, now changed, paragraph someone found buried deep in a Windows support site somewhere: The Control Panel is a feature that’s been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. ↫ Windows support website It seems the sudden avalanche of articles about this spooked Microsoft, because when you open the same website now, that last line instead reads: Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. ↫ Windows support website The idea that the Control Panel is being “deprecated” is not exactly a new one; it’s been an ongoing process since the release of Windows 8, twelve years ago now. With every new Windows release, more Control Panel applets are removed in favour of expanding the Settings application, to a point where few regular users have a need to open it directly. Settings still does rely on old Control Panel applets, though, and it won’t take you many clicks through Settings to end up at a classic applet. So, while directly opening the Control Panel might not be a common thing people do, using classic applets sure is. Microsoft may be changing the verbiage of its support page to remove the word “deprecated”, but that ain’t fooling anyone: the Control Panel has already been gutted beyond recognition, and it’s definitely in the process of being deprecated – in true Microsoft fashion, it’s just taking them a really long time, because nobody inside Microsoft seems to really care about Windows anymore.
In October last year, we covered a very simple bypass trick that involved just a single command when running the Windows 11 Setup. While this passthrough got popular in the tech community during this time as a result of the media coverage from Neowin as well as others, it was actually something even older. To use this, all a user had to do was add “/product server” when running the setup, and Windows would just skip the hardware requirements check entirely. As it turns out, Microsoft has blocked this bypass method on the latest Canary build 27686 as discovered by X user and tech enthusiast Bob Pony. When trying to use the Server trick now, the hardware requirements check is not bypassed. ↫ Sayan Sen It’s such an own goal to limit Windows 11 as much as Microsoft is doing. Windows 11 runs pretty much identically, performance-wise, to Windows 10 on the same hardware, so there’s no reason other than to enable the various security features through TPMs and the like. The end result is that people simply aren’t upgrading to Windows 11 – not only because Windows 10 is working just fine for them, but also because even if they want to upgrade, they often can’t. Most people don’t just buy a brand new PC because a new version of Windows happens to be available. There’s been a variety of tricks and methods to circumvent the various minimum specifications checks Microsoft added to the regular consumer versions of Windows, and much like with the activation systems of yore, Microsoft is now engaging in a game of whack-a-mole where as soon as it kills on method, ten more pop up to take its place. There’s a whole cottage industry of methods, tools, registry edits, and much more, spread out across the most untrustworthy-looking content farms you can find on the web, which all could’ve been avoided if Microsoft just offered consumers the choice of disabling these restrictions, accompanied by a disclaimer. So Microsoft is now in the unfortunate situation where most of its Windows users are still using Windows 10, yet the end of Windows 10’s support is coming up next year. Either Microsoft extends this date by at least another five years to catch the wave of ‘natural’ PC upgrades to a point where Windows 10 is a minority, or it’s going to have to loosen some of the restrictions to give more people the ability to upgrade. If they don’t, they’re going to be in a world of hurt with security issues and 0-days affecting the vast majority of Windows users.
Even though FAT32 supports disk sizes of up to 2TB, and even though Windows can read FAT32 file systems of up to 2TB, Windows can’t actually create them. The maximum file system limit Windows can create with FAT32 is 32GB, a limitation that dates back to Windows 95 which has never been changed. It seems Microsoft is finally changing this with the latest Insider Preview build of Windows 11, as the format command can now finally create FAT32 file systems of up to 2TB. When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc Sadly, this only works through the format command; it’s not yet reflected in the graphical user interface, which is just so typically Microsoft. Of course, most of us will be using exFAT at this point for tasks that require an interoperable file system, but not every device accepts exFAT properly, and even those that do sometimes have issues with exFAT that are not present when using FAT32. A more interesting new addition in this preview build is the Windows Sandbox Client Preview. This build includes the new Windows Sandbox Client Preview that is now updated via the Microsoft Store. As part of this preview, we’re introducing runtime clipboard redirection, audio/video input control, and the ability to share folders with the host at runtime. You can access these via the new “…” icon at the upper right on the app. Additionally, this preview includes a super early version of command line support (commands may change over time). You can use ‘wsb.exe –help’ command for more information. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc Windows Sandbox is a pretty cool feature that provides a lightweight desktop environment in which you can run applications entirely sandboxed, separate from your actual Windows installation. Changes and files made in the sandbox do not persist, unless the sandbox is shut down from within the sandbox itself. There’s a whole variety of uses this could be good for, and having it integrated into Windows is awesome. Windows Sandbox is available in Windows Pro or Enterprise – not Home – and is quite easy to use. Open up its window, copy/paste an executable to the sandbox, and run it inside the sandbox. As said, after closing the sandbox, all your changes will be lost. That process is still a bit clunky, but with a bit more work it should be possible for Microsoft to smooth this out, and, say, add an option in the right-click menu to just launch any executable in the sandbox that way.
Way back in the early before time, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to brand Windows 10 entirely around the label “creators”, and one distinctly odd consequence of that was an application called “Paint 3D”, a replacement for the traditional Paint application that Microsoft had been shipping one way or another since 1985, when it included a simple bitmap editing program called “Doodle” with its mouse drivers for DOS. Doodle would be replaced shortly after by a whitelabel version of ZSoft Corporation’s PC Paintbrush, and once Windows 1.0 rolled around, it was rebranded as Paint, a name that has stuck until today. Paint 3D was supposed to replace the regular Paint, with a focus on creating and manipulating 3D objects, serving as an extension to Microsoft’s failed efforts to bring VR and AR to the masses. Microsoft even went so far as to list the regular Paint as deprecated, but after a lot of outcry, has since reneged and refocused its efforts on improving it. Paint 3D, however, is not officially going to be deprecated, and has been added to Microsoft’s list of deprecated Windows features. Paint 3D is deprecated and will be removed from the Microsoft Store on November 4, 2024. To view and edit 2D images, you can use Paint or Photos. For viewing 3D content, you can use 3D Viewer. ↫ Microsoft’s list of deprecated Windows features I don’t think anyone is going to shed a tear on this, but at the same time, as with everything Microsoft changes or removes from Windows, there’s bound to be at least a few people whose entire workflow heavily depends on Paint 3D, and they’re going to be pissed.
Microsoft has published a post-mortem of the CrowdStrike incident, and goes into great depths to describe where, exactly, the error lies, and how it could lead to such massive problems. I can’t comment anything insightful on the technical details and code they show to illustrate all of this – I’ll leave that discussion up to you – but Microsoft also spends considerable amount of time explaining why security vendors are choosing to use kernel-mode drivers. Microsoft lists three major reasons why security vendors opt for using kernel modules, and none of them will come as a great surprise to OSNews readers: kernel drivers provide more visibility into the system than a userspace tool would, there are performance benefits, and they’re more resistant to tampering. The downsides are legion, too, of course, as any crash or similar issue in kernel mode has far-reaching consequences. The goal, then, according to Microsoft, is to balance the need for greater insight, performance, and tamper resistance with stability. And while the company doesn’t say it directly, this is clearly where CrowdStrike failed – and failed hard. While you would want a security tool like CrowdStrike to perform as little as possible in kernelspace, and conversely as much as possible in userspace, that’s not what CrowdStrike did. They are running a lot of stuff in kernelspace that really shouldn’t be there, such as the update mechanism and related tools. In total, CrowdStrike loads four kernel drivers, and much of their functionality can be run in userspace instead. It is possible today for security tools to balance security and reliability. For example, security vendors can use minimal sensors that run in kernel mode for data collection and enforcement limiting exposure to availability issues. The remainder of the key product functionality includes managing updates, parsing content, and other operations can occur isolated within user mode where recoverability is possible. This demonstrates the best practice of minimizing kernel usage while still maintaining a robust security posture and strong visibility. Windows provides several user mode protection approaches for anti-tampering, like Virtualization-based security (VBS) Enclaves and Protected Processes that vendors can use to protect their key security processes. Windows also provides ETW events and user-mode interfaces like Antimalware Scan Interface for event visibility. These robust mechanisms can be used to reduce the amount of kernel code needed to create a security solution, which balances security and robustness. ↫ David Weston, Vice President, Enterprise and OS Security at Microsoft In what is surely an unprecedented event, I agree with the CrowdStrike criticism bubbling under the surface of this post-mortem by Microsoft. Everything seems to point towards CrowdStrike stuffing way more things in kernelspace than is needed, and as such creating a far larger surface for things to go catastrophically wrong than needed. While Microsoft obviously isn’t going to openly and publicly throw CrowdStrike under the bus, it’s very clear what they’re hinting at here, and this is about as close to a public flogging we’re going to get. Microsoft’s post-portem further details a ton of work Microsoft has recently done, is doing, and will soon be doing to further strenghthen Windows’ security, to lessen the need for kernelspace security drivers even more, including adding support for Rust to the Windows kernel, which should also aid in mitigating some common problems present in other, older programming languages (while not being a silver bullet either, of course).
Blue screens of death are not exactly in short supply on Windows machines lately, but what if you really want to cause your own kernel panic or complete system crash, just because you love that shade of crashy blue? Well, there’s a tool for that called NotMyFault, developed by Mark Russinovich as part of Sysinternals. NotMyFault is a tool that you can use to crash, hang, and cause kernel memory leaks on your Windows system. It’s useful for learning how to identify and diagnose device driver and hardware problems, and you can also use it to generate blue screen dump files on misbehaving systems. The download file includes 32-bit and 64-bit versions, as well as a command-line version that works on Nano Server. Chapter 7 in Windows Internals uses NotMyFault to demonstrate pool leak troubleshooting and Chapter 14 uses it for crash analysis examples. ↫ Mark Russinovich Using this tool, you can select exactly what kind of crash you want to cause, and after clicking the Crash button, your Windows computer will do exactly as it’s told and crash with a lovely blue screen of death. It comes in both a GUI and CLI version, and the latter also works on minimal Windows installations that don’t have the Windows shell installed. A tool like this may seem odd, but it can be particularly useful in situations where you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue, and to learn how to properly diagnose crashes. Or, you know, you can use it to create a panic at your workplace.
