Windows Archive
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.
A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait. Too bad the whole story is nonsense. But how could that be? It’s widely reported by reputable news websites all over the world, shared on social media like a strain of the common cold, and nobody seems to question it or doubt the veracity of the story. It seems that Southwest Airlines running on an operating system from 1992 is a perfectly believable story to just about everyone, so nobody is questioning it or wondering if it’s actually true. Well, I did, and no, it’s not true. Let’s start with the actual source of the claim that Southwest Airlines was unaffected by CrowdStrike because they’re still using Windows 3.11 for large parts of their primary systems. This claim is easily traced back to its origin – a tweet by someone called Artem Russakovskii, stating that “the reason Southwest is not affected is because they still run on Windows 3.1”. This tweet formed the basis for virtually all of the stories, but it contains no sources, no links, no background information, nothing. It was literally just this one line. It turned out be a troll tweet. A reply to the tweet by Russakovskii a day later made that very lear: “To be clear, I was trolling last night, but it turned out to be true. Some Southwest systems apparently do run Windows 3.1. lol.” However, that linked article doesn’t cite any sources either, so we’re right back where we started. After quite a bit of digging – that is, clicking a few links and like 3 minutes of searching online – following the various reference and links back to their sources, I managed to find where all these stories actually come from to arrive at the root claim that spawned all these other claims. It’s from an article by The Dallas Morning News, titled “What’s the problem with Southwest Airlines scheduling system?” At the end of last year, Southwest Airlines’ scheduling system had a major meltdown, leading to a lot of cancelled flights and stranded travelers just around the Christmas holidays. Of course, the media wanted to know what caused it, and that’s where this The Dallas Morning News article comes from. In it, we find the paragraphs that started the story that Southwest Airlines is still using Windows 3.1 (and Windows 95!): Southwest uses internally built and maintained systems called SkySolver and Crew Web Access for pilots and flight attendants. They can sign on to those systems to pick flights and then make changes when flights are canceled or delayed or when there is an illness. “Southwest has generated systems internally themselves instead of using more standard programs that others have used,” Montgomery said. “Some systems even look historic like they were designed on Windows 95.” SkySolver and Crew Web Access are both available as mobile apps, but those systems often break down during even mild weather events, and employees end up making phone calls to Southwest’s crew scheduling help desk to find better routes. During periods of heavy operational trouble, the system gets bogged down with too much demand. ↫ Kyle Arnold at The Dallas Morning News That’s it. That’s where all these stories can trace their origin to. These few paragraphs do not say that Southwest is still using ancient Windows versions; it just states that the systems they developed internally, SkySolver and Crew Web Access, look “historic like they were designed on Windows 95”. The fact that they are also available as mobile applications should further make it clear that no, these applications are not running on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Southwest pilots and cabin crews are definitely not carrying around pocket laptops from the ’90s. These paragraphs were then misread, misunderstood, and mangled in a game of social media and bad reporting telephone, and here we are. The fact that nobody seems to have taken the time to click through a few links to find the supposed source of these claims, instead focusing on cashing in on the clicks and rage these stories would illicit, is a rather damning indictment of the state of online (tech) media. Many of the websites reporting on these stories are part of giant media conglomerates, have a massive number of paid staff, and they’re being outdone by a dude in the Arctic with a small Patreon, minimal journalism training, and some common sense. This story wasn’t hard to debunk – a few clicks and a few minutes of online searching is all it took. Ask yourself – why do these massive news websites not even perform the bare minimum?
Microsoft has again quietly updated its Validation OS ISOs. In case you are not familiar with it, Validation OS is an official lightweight variant of Windows and it is designed for hardware vendors to test, validate and repair hardware defects. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin I had no idea this variant of Windows existed, but it kind of makes sense when you think about it. OEMs or other companies making devices that run or work with Windows may need to test, reboot, test, reboot, and so on, endlessly, and having a lightweight and fast version of Windows that doesn’t load any junk you don’t need – or just loads straight into your company’s hardware testing application – is incredibly valuable. According to Microsoft, the Windows Validation OS boots to a command line that allows you to run Win32 applications. This has made me wonder if I can use it for the one thing I am forced to use Windows for: playing League of Legends (I cobbled together a spare parts machine solely for this purpose). My guess is that either the Validation OS will lack certain components or frameworks League of Legends requires, or is so different from regular Windows that it will trip Riot Games’ rootkit, or both. Still, I’m curious. I might load this up on a spare hard drive and what’s possible.
The most fascinating time for Windows NT were its first few years on the market, when the brand new operating system supported a wide variety of architectures, from default x86, all the way down to stuff like Alpha, MIPS, and exotic things like Intel i860, and even weirder stuff like Clipper (even a SPARC port was planned, but never released). One of the more conventional architectures that saw a Windows NT port – one that was actually released to the public, no less – was PowerPC. The last version of Windows NT to support exotic architectures was 4.0, with Windows 2000 only supporting x86, dropping everything else, including PowerPC (although Windows 2000 for Alpha reached RC1 status). The PowerPC version of Windows NT only supported IBM and Motorola systems using the PowerPC Reference Platform, and never the vastly more popular PowerPC systems from Apple. Well, it’s 2024, and that just changed: Windows NT 4.0 can now be installed and run on certain Apple New World Power Macintosh systems. This repository currently contains the source code for the ARC firmware and its loader, targeting New World Power Macintosh systems using the Gossamer architecture (that is, MPC106 “Grackle” memory controller and PCI host, and “Heathrow” or “Paddington” super-I/O chip on the PCI bus). NT4 only, currently. NT 3.51 may become compatible if HAL and drivers get ported to it. 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.) ↫ maciNTosh GitHub page This is absolutely wild, and one of the most interesting projects I’ve seen in a long, long time. The deeply experimental nature of this effort does mean that NT 4.0 is definitely not stable on any of the currently supported machines, and the number of drivers implemented is the absolute bare minimum to run NT 4.0 on these systems. It does, however, support dual-booting both NT 4.0 and Mac OS8, 9, and X, which would be quite something to set up. I’m not definitely going to keep an eye on eBay for a supported machine, because running NT on anything other than x86 has always been a bit of a weird fascination for me. Sadly, period-correct PowerPC machines that support NT are extremely rare and thus insanely expensive, and will often require board-level repairs that I can’t perform. Getting a more recent Yikes PowerMac G4 should be easy, since those just materialise out of thin air randomly in the world. I’m incredibly excited about this.
The article’s from 2021, but I think it’s still worth discussing. A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly hooked up to operating system interfaces that most portable or mostly-portable software — programs which work perfectly elsewhere — are subtly broken on Windows, particularly outside of the English-speaking world. The reasons are almost certainly political, originally motivated by vendor lock-in, than technical, which adds insult to injury. This article is about what’s wrong, how it’s wrong, and some easy techniques to deal with it in portable software. ↫ Chris Wellons As someone who doesn’t know how to code or program, articles like these are always difficult to properly parse. I understand the primary problem the article covers, but what I’m curious about is how much of this problem is personal – skill issue – and how much of it is a widely held belief by Windows developers and programmers. I know there’s quite a few of you in our audience, so I’d love to hear from you how you feel about this. The author also authored his on fix, something called libwinsane, which I’m also curious about – is this the only solution, or are there more options out there?
Microsoft Defender is the endpoint security solution preinstalled on every Windows machine since Windows 7. It’s a fairly complex piece of software, addressing both EDR and EPP use cases. As such, Microsoft markets two different products. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud based endpoint security solution that combines sensor capabilities with the advantages of a cloud processing. Microsoft Defender Antivirus (MDA), on the other hand, is a modern EPP enabled by default on any fresh Windows installation. MDA is the focus of this analysis. ↫ Retooling If you’ve ever wanted to know how Microsoft Defender works, this article contains a wealth of detailed information.
Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released. In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren’t present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. ↫ Raymond Chen Another Raymond Chen story, and this one involves hearts, snowmen, different editing controls, codepages, and more. In other words, just another Tuesday for Chen.
So I learned something new today: there are companies that provide security patches for Windows that aren’t Microsoft. I never even considered this could be a thing, but it turns out that a paid service called 0patch seems to have been around for a long time, and the consensus seems to be that not only can it be trusted, it also sometimes provides patches sooner than Microsoft does. Today, 0patch announced it’ll also be providing this service for Windows 10 after the end of support next year. With October 2025, 0patch will “security-adopt” Windows 10 v22H2, and provide critical security patches for it for at least 5 more years – even longer if there’s demand on the market. We’re the only provider of unofficial security patches for Windows (“virtual patches” are not really patches), and we have done this many times before: after security-adopting Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 in January 2020, we took care of 6 versions of Windows 10 as their official support ended, security-adopted Windows 11 v21H2 to keep users who got stuck there secure, took care of Windows Server 2012 in October 2023 and adopted two popular Office versions – 2010 and 2013 – when they got abandoned by Microsoft. We’re still providing security patches for all of these. ↫ Mitja Kolsek on the 0patch blog This service implements patching through what it calls “micropatches”, which are very small sets of CPU instructions injected into running code in memory without modifying – in this case – Microsoft’s own code. These micropatches are applied by briefly stopping the offending program, injecting the fix, and continuing the program – without having to close the program or reboot. Of course, they can be unapplied in the same, non-disruptive way. The 0patch service will provide patches for 0days that Microsoft hasn’t fixed yet, patches for issues Microsoft won’t fix, and sometimes patches for third party code. As the headline clearly states, this service isn’t free, but honestly, at roughly 25 dollars plus tax per computer per year, it’s not exactly expensive, and definitely cheaper than Microsoft’s own Windows 10 Extended Security Update program it’s going to offer for Windows 10 after the end of support date next year. Diving a bit deeper into who is providing this service, it comes from a company called ACROS Security, a small company out of Slovenia. The company details its micropatches on its 0patch blog if you want more information on how each individual ones works. I still don’t know exactly what to make of this, and I definitely wouldn’t rely on something like this for mission-critical Windows computers or servers, but for something like a home PC that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 but still works just fine, or perhaps some disposable virtual machines you’re using, this might be a good stopgap solution until you can upgrade to a better operating system, like Linux or one of the BSDs. Are there any people in the OSNews audience who’ve used 0patch, or perhaps a service similar to it?
Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it. Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos. Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation. ↫ Taras Buria at NeoWin Just further confirmation that Windows 11 is not ready for the desktop.
Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode introduced the ability to run MS-DOS programs in a virtual machine. This by itself was already quite an achievement, but it didn’t stop there. It also let you put the MS-DOS session in a window, and run it on the screen along with your other Windows programs. This was crazy. Here’s how it worked. ↫ Raymond Chen When Raymond Chen speaks, we all shut up, listen, and enjoy.
It should be no secret to anyone reading OSNews that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about four or so years ago. However, I also strongly believe that in order to be able to fairly criticise or dislike something, you should at least have experience with it. As such, I decided it was time for what I expected was going to be some serious technology BDSM, and I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and force myself to use it for a few weeks to see if Microsoft’s latest operating system truly was as bad as I make it out to be in my head. Installing Windows 11 Technically speaking, my workstation is not supported by Windows 11. Despite packing two Intel Xeon E5 V4 2640 CPUs for a total of 20 cores and 40 threads, 32 GB of ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro w5700, and the usual stuff like an M.2 SSD, this machine apparently did not meet the minimum specifications for Windows 11 since it has no TPM 2.0 security chip, and the processors were deemed too old. Luckily, these limitations are entirely artificial and meaningless, and using Ventoy, which by default disables these silly restrictions, I was able to install Windows 11 just fine. During installation, you run into the first problem if you’re coming from a different operating system – even after all these years, Windows still does not give a single hootin’ toot about any existing operating systems or bootloaders on your machine. This wasn’t an issue for me since I was going to allow Windows to take over the entire machine, but for those of used to have control over what happens when we install our operating systems, be advised that your other operating systems will most likely be rendered unbootable. The tools you have access to during installation for things like disk partitioning are also incredibly limited, and there’s nothing like the live environments you’re used to from the Linux world – all you get is an installer. In addition, since Windows only really supports FAT and NTFS file systems, your existing ext4, btrfs, UFS, or ZFS partitions used by your Linux or BSD installs will not work at all in Windows. Again – be advised that Windows is a very limited operating system compared to Linux or BSD. Once the actual installation part is done, you’re treated to a lengthy – and I truly mean lengthy – out of box experience. This is where you first get a glimpse of just how much data Microsoft wants to collect from its Windows users, and it stands in stark contrast to what I’m used to as a Linux user. On my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, there’s really only KDE’s opt-in, voluntary User Feedback option, which only collects basic system information in an entirely anonymous way. Windows, meanwhile, seems to want to collect pretty much everything you do on your machine, and while there’s some prompts to reduce the amount of data it collects, even with everything set to minimum it’s still quite a lot. Once you’re past the out of box experience, you can finally start using your new Windows installation – but actually not really. Unlike a Linux distribution, where all your hardware is detected automatically and will use the latest drivers, on Windows, you will most likely have to do some manual driver hunting, searching the web for PCI and vendor IDs to hopefully locate the correct drivers, which isn’t always easy. To make matters worse, even if Windows Update installs the correct drivers for you, those are often outdated, and you’re better off downloading the latest versions straight from the vendors’ websites. This is especially problematic for motherboard drivers – motherboard vendor websites often list horribly outdated drivers. Updating Windows 11 Once you have all the drivers installed and updated, which often requires several reboots, you might notice that your system seems to be awfully busy, even when you’re not actually doing anything with it. Most likely, this means Windows Update is running in the background, sucking up a lot of system resources. If you’re used to Linux or BSD, where updating is a quick and centralised process, updating things on Windows is a complete and utter mess. Instead of just updating everything all at once, Windows Update will often require several different rounds of updates, marked by reboots. You’ll also discover that Windows Update is not only incredibly slow both when it comes to downloading and installing, but that it’s also incredibly buggy. Updates will randomly fail to install for no apparent reason, and there’s a whole cottage industry of useless ML and SEO content on the internet trying to “help” you fix these issues. On my system, without doing anything, Windows Update managed to break itself in less than 24 hours – it listed 79 (!) driver updates related to the two Xeon processors (I assume it listed certain drivers for every single of the 40 threads), but every single one of them, save for one or two, would fail to install with a useless generic error code. Every time I tried to install them, one or two more would install, with everything else failing, until eventually the update process just hung the entire system. A few days later, the listed updated just disappeared entirely from Windows Update. The updates had no KB numbers, so it was impossible to find any information on them, and to this day, I have no idea what was going on here. Even after battling your way through Windows Update, you’re not done actually updating your system. Unlike,
I have a feeling Microsoft is really starting to feel some pressure about its plans to abandon Windows 10 next year. Data shows that 70% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, and this percentage has proven to be remarkably resilient, making it very likely that hundreds of millions of Windows users will be out of regular, mainstream support and security patches next year. It seems Microsoft is, therefore, turning up the PR campaign, this time by publishing a blog post about myths and misconceptions about Windows 11. The kind of supposed myths and misconceptions Microsoft details are exactly the kind of stuff corporations with large deployments worry about at night. For instance, Microsoft repeatedly bangs the drum on application compatibility, stating that despite the change in number – 10 to 11 – Windows 11 is built on the same base as its predecessor, and as such, touts 99.7% application compatibility. Furthermore, Microsoft adds that if businesses to suffer from an incompatibility, they can use something call App Assure – which I will intentionally mispronounce until the day I die because I’m apparently a child – to fix any issues. Apparently, the visual changes to the user interface in Windows 11 are also a cause of concern for businesses, as Microsoft dedicated an entire entry to this, citing a study that the visual changes do not negatively impact productivity. The blog post then goes on to explain how the changes are actually really great and enhance productivity – you know, the usual PR speak. There’s more in the blog post, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more and more of this kind of PR offensive as the cut-off date for Windows 10 support nears. Windows 10 users will probably also see more and more Windows 11 ads when using their computers, too, urging them to upgrade even when they very well cannot because of missing TPMs or unsupported processors. I don’t think any of these things will work to bring that 70% number down much over the next 12 months, and that’s a big problem for Microsoft. I’m not going to make any predictions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft will simply be forced by, well, reality to extend the official support for Windows 10 well beyond 2025. Especially with all the recent investigations into Microsoft’s shoddy internal security culture, there’s just no way they can cut 70% of their users off from security updates and patches.
After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature, Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders. Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon. ↫ Pavan Davuluri on the Windows blog It’s incredible just how much Microsoft has bungled the launch of this feature, as it’s now almost overshadowing everything else that comes with these new ARM laptops. They rushed to shove machine learning into a major feature, and didn’t stop to think about the consequences. Typical Silicon Valley behaviour.
Microsoft recently announced some big changes to the Recall feature in Windows, and now it’s pulled the Release Preview version which contained Recall entirely. It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica The company doesn’t actually mention why the release was pulled, but the reason is pretty obvious if you connect the dots. I’m at least glad Microsoft is taking the complaints seriously, and while I don’t personally think Recall is a good idea, if a user gives their consent and uses it knowingly and willingly, I don’t see any problems with it.
It turns out that the storm of criticism Microsoft’s recently unveiled Recall feature has actually pushed Microsoft to change its mind and make some very significant changes to the feature. Today, after over a week of sustained criticism and worries, Redmond announced it’s going to implement Recall very differently. First and foremost, instead of Recall being enabled by default and only configurable after installation and the out-of-box experience, it will not be disabled by default, and the user will be prompted during the OOBE if they want to enable the feature or not. This in and of itself should alleviate quite a few worries, since having this on by default without most users really realising it was a recipe for disaster and privacy issues. Second, Recall will not be taking advantage of Windows Hello, and using Window Hello will be a requirement before you can use Recall. On op of that, Recall will use Windows Hello presence detection, so that it will only show any collected and saved data if you’re the one sitting behind the computer. It’s wild to me that they didn’t think of this one sooner, but alas – I have a feeling a lot of this “AI” stuff has been implemented in a bit of a hurry. Last but definitely not least, the Recall database, where information extracted from the screenshots is stored as well as the search index will now be properly encrypted. They will only be decrypted once the user in question is authenticated. Here, too, one really has to wonder why it wasn’t implemented this way from the very beginning, and the fact that it wasn’t makes me think we’ll be finding more questionable security and implementation details as the feature becomes widely available in a few weeks.
Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up. A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fail, you end up directly with the creation of a local account and can thus avoid creating an official account with Microsoft. ↫ Laura Pippig at PCWorld Microsoft has now “fixed” this trick, and it’s no longer possible to use it. The other popular method of circumventing the Microsoft account requirement, by opening the command prompt during installation and running OOBE\BYPASSNRO, still works, but one has to wonder how long it’s going to take before Microsoft plugs that method, too. It seems the company is hell-bent on getting every consumer onto the Microsoft Account train, come hell or high water, so I wouldn’t be surprised seeing local accounts eventually being positioned as a “pro” or even “enterprise” feature that will simply no longer be available on consumer PCs. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with offering an online account option, but the keyword here is option. You should always be able to set up any computer to run with a regular old local account, even if only because internet access isn’t always a given in many places around the world. Add the obvious privacy concerns to that – an issue amplified by Recall – and I doubt users’ desire to run a local account and jump through hoops to do so will fade any time soon.
