Windows Archive

Windows was an early adopter of Unicode, and its file APIs use UTF‑16 internally since Windows 2000-used to be UCS-2 in Windows 95 era, when Unicode standard was only a draft on paper, but that’s another topic. Using UTF-16 means that filenames, text strings, and other data are stored as sequences of 16‑bit units. For Windows, a properly formed surrogate pair is perfectly acceptable. However, issues arise when string manipulation produces isolated or malformed surrogates. Such errors can lead to unreadable filenames and display glitches—even though the operating system itself can execute files correctly. But we can create them deliberately as well, which we can see below. ↫ Zafer Balkan What a wild ride and an odd corner case. I wonder what kind of odd and fun shenanigans this could be used for.

Remember about half a year ago, when the PowerPC versions of Windows NT were made to run on certain models of PowerPC Macs? The same developer responsible for that work, Rairii, took all of this to the next level, and it’s now possible to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT on the GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and a few related development boards. NT 3.51 RTM and higher. NT 3.51 betas (build 944 and below) will need kernel patches to run due to processor detection bugs. NT 3.5 will never be compatible, as it only supports PowerPC 601. (The additional suspend/hibernation features in NT 3.51 PMZ could be made compatible in theory but in practise would require all of the additional drivers for that to be reimplemented.) ↫ Windows NT for GameCube/Wii GitHub page As you may have expected, there are some issues, such as instability and random reboots, USB hotplugging doesn’t work, and some other, smaller issues, but none of that takes away from just how awesome and impressive this really is. There’s framebuffer support for the Flipper GPU, full support for the controllers ports and a ton of compatible controllers and related input devices, including support for the N64 mouse and keyboard, although said support is untested. The GameCube and Wii (U) are PowerPC computers, after all, running IBM processors, so it shouldn’t be surprising that running Windows NT on them is possible. Still, it’s an impressive feat of engineering to get this to work at all, let alone in as complete a state as it appears to be.

There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for full use of these apps. You’ll see a new overlay that informs you of this before use. In our case, however, the respective features were simply grayed out. ↫ Laura Pippig at PCWorld It’s only the “AI” features that are being paywalled here, so I doubt many people will care. What does feel unpleasent, though, is that the features are visible but greyed out, instead of being absent entirely until you log into Windows with an account that has a Microsogt 365 subscription with the “AI” stuff enabled. Now it just feels like the operating system you paid good money for – and yes, you do actually pay for Windows – is incomplete and badgering you for in-app purchases. The gameification of Windows continues. There’s also a y in the day, so we have another Ars Technica article detailing the long list of steps you need to take to make Windows suck just a little less. The article is long, and seems to grow longer every time Ars, or any other site for that matter, posts an updated version. I installed Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 a few weeks ago to see just how bad things had gotten, and the amount of work I had to do to make Windows 11 even remotely usable was insane. Even the installation alone – including all the updates – took several hours, compared to a full installation of, say, Fedora KDE, which, including updated, takes like 10 minutes to install on the same machine. I personally used WinScript to make the process of unfucking Windows 11 less cumbersome, and I can heartedly recommend it to anyone else forced to use Windows 11. Luckily for me, a brand new laptop is being delivered today, without an operating system preinstalled. Can’t wait to install Fedora KDE and be good to go in like 20 minutes after unboxing the thing.

AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don’t particularly care about benchmarking – even less so benchmarking on Windows – but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me ↫ AIDA64 v7.60 release notes Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025, is kind of amazing.

Venture is a cross-platform viewer for Windows Event Logs (.evtx files). Built with the Tauri, it is intended as a fast, standalone tool for quickly parsing and slicing Windows Event Log files during incident response, digital forensics, and CTF competitions. ↫ Venture GitHub page Neat tool. It makes sense that it would be possible to build third-party viewers for Windows event logs, but I never stopped to think about it and just defaulted to the one built into Windows.

It seems we’re getting a glimpse at the next stick Microsoft will be using to push people to buy new PCs (we’re all rich, according to Microsoft) or upgrade to Windows 11. In a blog post extolling the virtues of a free upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, the company announced that with the end of support for Windows 10, Microsoft will also stop supporting Office applications on Windows 10, otherwise known as Office 365. Lastly, Microsoft 365 Apps will no longer be supported after October 14, 2025, on Windows 10 devices. To use Microsoft 365 Applications on your device, you will need to upgrade to Windows 11. ↫ Microsoft’s Margaret Farmer Of course, the applications won’t stop working on Windows 10 right away after that date, but Microsoft won’t be fixing any security issues, bugs, or other issues that might (will) come up. It reads like a threat to Windows users – upgrade by buying a new PC you probably can’t afford, or not only use an insecure version of Windows, but also insecure Office applications. I doubt it’ll have much of an impact on the staggering number of people still using Windows 10 – more than 60% of Windows users – so I’m sure Microsoft has more draconian plans up its sleeve to push people to upgrade.

Over 60% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, with only about 35% or so – and falling! – of them opting to use Windows 11. As we’ve talked about many times before, this is a major issue going into 2025, since Windows 10’s support will end in October of this year, meaning hundreds of millions of people all over the world will suddenly be running an operating system that will no longer receive security updates. Most of those people don’t want to, or cannot, upgrade to Windows 11, meaning Microsoft is leaving 60% of its Windows customer base out to dry. I’m sure this will go down just fine with regulators and governments the world over. Microsoft has tried everything, and it’s clear desperation is setting in, because the company just declared 2025 “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh”, stating that Windows 11 is the best way to get all the “AI” stuff people are clearly clamoring for. All of the innovation arriving on new Windows 11 PCs is coming at an important time. We recently confirmed that after providing 10 years of updates and support, Windows 10 will reach the end of its lifecycle on Oct. 14, 2025. After this date, Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security or feature updates, and our focus is on helping customers stay protected by moving to modern new PCs running Windows 11. Whether the current PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC. ↫ Some overpaid executive at Microsoft What makes this so incredibly aggravating and deeply tone-deaf is that for most of the people affected by this, “upgrading” to Windows 11 simply isn’t a realistic option. Their current PC is most likely performing and working just fine, but the steep and strict hardware requirements prohibit them from installing Windows 11. Buying an entirely new PC is often not only not needed from a performance perspective, but for many, many people also simply unaffordable. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not exactly going great, financially, for a lot of people out there, and even in the US alone, 70-80% of people live paycheck-to-paycheck, and they’re certainly not going to be able to just “move forward with a new Windows 11 PC” for nebulous and often regressive “benefits” like “AI”. The fact that Microsoft seems to think all of those hundreds of millions of people not only want to buy a new PC to get “AI” features, but that they also can afford it like it’s no big deal, shows some real lack of connective tissue between the halls of Microsoft’s headquarters and the wider world. Microsoft’s utter lack of a grasp on the financial realities of so many individuals and families today is shocking, at best, and downright offensive, at worst. I guess if you live in a world where you can casually bribe a president-elect for one million dollars, buying a new computer feels like buying a bag of potatoes.

I’d like to write a full-fledged blog post about these adventures at some point, but for now I’m going to focus on one particular side quest: getting acceptable video output out of the 1000H when it’s running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. By default, Windows 3.x renders using the standard “lowest common denominator” of video: VGA 640×480 at 16 colours. Unfortunately this looks awful on the Eee PC’s beautiful 1024×600 screen, and it’s not even the same aspect ratio. But how can we do better? ↫ Ash Wolf If you ever wanted to know how display drivers work in Windows 3.x, here’s your chance. This definitely falls into the category of light reading for the weekend.

Rare, hard to come by, but now available on the Internet Archive: the complete book set for the Windows CE Developer’s Kit from 1999. It contains all the separate books in their full glory, so if you ever wanted to write either a Windows CE application or driver for Windows CE 2.0, here’s all the information you’ll ever need. The Microsoft Windows CE Developer’s Kit provides all the information you need to write applications for devices based on the Microsofte Windowso CE operating system. ↫ Windows CE Developer’s Kit The Microsoft Windows CE Programmer’s Guide details the architecture of the operating system, how to write applications, how to implement synchronisation with a PC, and much more that pertains to developing applications. The Microsoft Windows CE User Interface Services Guide can be seen as an important addition to the Programmer’s Guide, as it details everything related to creating a GUI and how to handle various input methods. Going a few steps deeper, and we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Communications Guide, which, as the name implies, tells you all you need to know about infrared connections, telephony, networking and internet connections, and related matter. Finally, we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Device Driver Kit, which, as the name implies, is for those of us interested in writing device drivers for Windows CE, something that will surely be of great importance in the future, since Windows CE is sure to dominate our mobile life. To get started, you do need to have Microsoft Visual C++ version 6.0 and the Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ version 6.0 up and running, since all code samples in the Programmer’s Guide are developed with it, but I’m sure you already have this taken care of – why would you be developing for any other platforms, am I right?

AI Shell is an interactive shell that provides a chat interface with language models. The shell provides agents that connect to different AI models and other assistance providers. Users can interact with the agents in a conversational manner. ↫ Microsoft Learn Basically, what Microsoft means with this is a split-view terminal where one of the two views is a prompt where you can ask questions to an “AI”, like OpenAI or whatever. The “AI” features are not actually integrated into your shell, which instead lives in the other view and acts like a completely normal, standard shell. Instead of opening up an “AI” chatbot in a browser window or whatever, you now have it in a split view in your terminal – that’s really all there’s to it here. I’m going to blow your mind here and say that in theory, this could be an actually useful addition to terminals and shells, as a properly vetted and configured “AI” that has been trained on properly obtained source material could indeed be a great help in determining the right terminal commands and options. Tons of people already blindly copy and paste terminal commands from websites even though they really shouldn’t anyway, so it’s not like this introduces anything new here in terms of dangers. Hell, tutorial writers still add -y to dnf or apt-get commands, so it can really only go up from here.

Microsoft’s Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a “Filter sensitive information,” setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises. ↫ Avram Piltch at Tom’s Hardware Recall might be one of the biggest own goals I have seen in recent technology history. In fact, it’s more of a series of own goals that just keep on coming, and I honestly have no idea why Microsoft keeps making them, other than the fact that they’re so high on their own “AI” supply that they just lost all touch with reality at this point. There’s some serious Longhorn-esque tunnel vision here, a project during which the company also kind of forgot the outside world existed beyond the walls of Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. It’s clear by now that just like many other tech companies, Microsoft is so utterly convinced it needs to shove “AI” into every corner of its products, that it no longer seems to be asking the most important question during product development: do people actually want this? The response to Windows Recall has been particularly negative, yet Microsoft keep pushing and pushing it, making all the mistakes along the way everybody has warned them about. It’s astonishing just how dedicated they are to a feature nobody seem to want, and everybody seems to warn them about. It’s like we’re all Kassandra. The issue in question here is exactly as dumb as you expect it to be. The “Filter sensitive information” setting is so absurdly basic and dumb it basically only seems to work on shopping sites, not anywhere else where credit card or other sensitive information might be shown. This shortcoming is obvious to anyone who think about what Recall does for more than one nanosecond, but Microsoft clearly didn’t take a few moments to think about this, because their response is to let them know through the Feedback Hub any time Recall fails to detect and sensitive information. They’re basically asking you, the consumer, to be the filter. Unpaid, of course. After the damage has already been done. Wild. If you can ditch Windows, you should. Windows is not a place of honour.

Back in December 2019, Microsoft finally killed off Windows 10 Phone as it announced the end of support. The company’s grand plans with Lumia and Windows Phones sadly never became the success it needed to be in order to be able to compete with the likes of Android or iOS. Thus Windows 11 Phone never became a real official thing outside of concepts. However, there is a free unofficial way that makes it possible, albeit the experience may not totally be free from flaws. Dubbed Project Renegade, the mod enables users to try Windows 11 on Qualcomm Snapdragon phones, among other devices. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Windows Phone 7 and 8 were amazing, and probably my favourite mobile platform of all time. I’m still sad that the duopoly made it impssible even for Microsoft to gain a foothold, because their efforts definitely deserved it. They didn’t just blindly copy Android or iOS, but came up with a truly original, unique, and in my view, superior mobile operating system, and in a fair market, they would’ve been rewarded for it, and Windows Phone would have a perhaps small, but profitable segment of the market. In the vein of Bernie can still win, I still have this faint belief that Microsoft hasn’t completely given up on the smartphone market. Now that they’re serious about Windows on ARM, they might use it as sneaky way to get application developers on board, so that their applications are ready for the big Surface Phone a few years from now, complete with Windows Phone-inspired features and UI. I know this won’t happen, but let me enjoy my non-existent future, please. I don’t want to rely on big tech anymore, but I might make an exception for an up-to-date Windows Phone. I’m only human.

Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at image/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space. ↫ Mark Harmstone An amazing piece of software that works on both Linux and Windows, and even, as described above, comes with the option of undoing the conversion if you so desire and haven’t removed the original image yet. Its developer, Mark Harmstone, of course stresses that while he thinks the tool is quite stable, he obviously makes no guarantees or claims about its stability. In other words, please don’t use this on sensitive data or in a production environment. What makes this tool even more amazing is that you can combine it with two of Harmstone’s other tools to really pull some rabbits out of your hat. First, there’s his Btrfs driver for Windows, which, as the name implies, allows Windows to work with Btrfs-formatted drives. Second, and here’s where things get really spicy, there’s Quibble, his custom bootloader consisting of open source reimplementations of Windows’ own bootloader. Using these three tools together you can, if you’re lucky, boot and run Windows off a Btrfs drive. That’s quite cool, and while perhaps not particularly useful due to its experimental nature, it’s still an awesome weekend project.

Windows 10’s free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica That deadline sure feels like it’s breathing down Microsoft’s neck. Most Windows users are still using Windows 10, and all of those hundreds of millions (billions?) of computers will become unsupported less than a year from now, which is going to be a major headache for Microsoft once the unaddressed security issues start piling up. CrowdStrike is fresh in Microsoft’s minds, and the company made a ton of promises about changing its security culture and implementing new features and best practices to stop it from ever happening again. That’s going to be some very tough promises to keep when the majority of Windows users are no longer getting any support. The obvious solution here is to accept the fact that if people haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 by now, they’re not going to until forced to do so because their computer breaks or becomes too slow and Windows 11 comes preinstalled on their new computer. No amount of annoying fullscreen ads interrupting people’s work or pleasure are going to get people to buy a new PC just for some halfbaked “AI” nonsense or whatever – in fact, it might just put even more people off from upgrading in the first place. Microsoft needs to face the music and simply extend the end-of-support deadline for Windows 10. Not doing so is massively irresponsible to a level rarely seen from big tech, and if they refuse to do so I strongly believe authorities should get involved and force the company to extend the deadline. You simply cannot leave this many users with insecure, non-maintained operating systems that they rely on every day to get their work done.