The RAMpocalypse is hitting enthusiasts hard. We recently reported on the crisis seeping down to affect supplies of the decades-old DDR2 gen RAM. So it comes as no huge surprise that a well-known tech tinkerer has been inspired to look at the viability of Windows 11 on an even more ancient DDR1 platform. Step forward Omores, who demonstrates Microsoft’s newest OS running on a Core 2 Quad Q6600, using a DDR1 motherboard, supported by an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card. “The best part,” says our hacky hero. “It’s completely stable.”

Windows 11 on a DDR1 motherboard, with AGP support enabled from r/windows

DDR1 first became available to PC builders and DIYers at the turn of the century, replacing the aging SDR SDRAM. The DDR1 rollout began with data rates like DDR-200 and DDR-266, being the preferred choice over older platforms featuring PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. We don’t know the rated speed of the DDR1 sticks Omores used, as it isn’t shown, but DDR-400 was the best official non-overclocked standard (a couple of years later). It would make sense to use the best memory on a cherry-picked older system like this.

Other key components of this age-defying Windows 11 PC build include an ASRock ConRoe 865PE motherboard. This is regarded as something of a legendary board as it bridged generations and allowed folks to use the latest Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips from Intel while keeping their DDR1 RAM and AGP graphics cards. It isn’t only today that PC DIYers have cared deeply about component longevity.

The last significant component in this DDR1 system that we were told about was the ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card. This seems to have required the most wrangling to make it work with Windows 11 / modern software. However, Omores reveals that “With some 'hacking' ... AGP 8X is fully functional and H.264 hardware decoding is active.” The key was finding, then crowbarring, ATI’s Windows 7 64-bit drivers from 2012 onto the system.

Once some details of the setup were confirmed in the video using tools like CPU-Z and GPU-Z, Omores showed the ‘fresh’ Windows 11 DDR1 system running modern browsers, with embedded video and hardware decoding. A handful of games and 3D benchmarks were also shown running without glitches. Last but not least, the system did indeed run Crysis.

In a later comment on the Reddit post, Omores elaborates on how to install the ATi driver on Windows 11 and shares a more detailed video link. “I like that Windows 11 is rock stable on these older systems with no UEFI whatsoever and only ACPI 1.1,” adds the adventurer in older PC tech. “A lesser-known fact is that Windows 11 actually officially supports BIOS systems via Windows 11 IoT, so it's kind of expected to run smoothly.”

Microsoft has extended its free consumer Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program by a year, pushing the cutoff for critical security patches to October 14th, 2027. The change came without any actual announcement, appearing instead in an edit to Microsoft's Windows 10 ESU support page. Devices already enrolled roll over to the new date automatically, with no action required from users. The program was originally set to expire on October 12th, 2026, one year after Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14th, 2025. With the extension, however, users who can’t or won’t move to Windows 11 now have a second free year of patches.

Speaking to BleepingComputer, Microsoft said that the change reflects “our ongoing commitment to helping customers stay secure during the transition,” adding that the extra year gives users “more time and flexibility to find the best PC for their needs while keeping them protected.”

In terms of enrollment, nothing has changed: users can enroll for free by syncing their PC settings to a Microsoft account through Windows Backup, by redeeming 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or with a one-time payment of $30. Users in Europe can enroll at no cost simply by signing in with a Microsoft account, a concession Microsoft made after pushback from consumer advocacy groups over its original requirements. A single ESU license covers up to 10 devices tied to the same account.

Microsoft's consumer program is limited to personal devices, however. Systems joined to an Active Directory domain or to Microsoft Entra, or managed through Mobile Device Management, are corporate-controlled and therefore not eligible. Personally owned machines that are only Entra-registered — e.g., a work account added to a personal device, rather than the device itself being organization-owned — still qualify.

Windows 11 has surged to roughly 73% of desktop share against Windows 10’s 26%, so it’s clear that the broader migration is working. Those users still on Windows 10 are increasingly the difficult edge cases, with around 400 million active PCs unable to officially upgrade to Windows 11 because their hardware fails its TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, or supported-processor requirements.

Users of those machines face a choice of remaining on unsupported Windows 10 or upgrading their hardware outright. But thanks to the AI-driven memory shortage, doing so has never been more expensive: DRAM contract prices have roughly doubled since early last year (and are expected to double again) as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron divert wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators.

IDC expects PCs, tablets, and smartphone prices to rise 10% to 20% through the end of 2026, with memory now accounting for a far larger share of a system's bill of materials than it did two years ago.

For users unwilling to buy new hardware at current prices, some third-party options remain. The security firm 0patch has pledged to provide unofficial Windows 10 micropatches through 2030, and Linux migration efforts such as the End of 10 initiative continue to court holdouts whose machines can’t run Windows 11.

Copilot PCs have been around for a couple of years since Microsoft launched them in 2024, and while the company tried to push NPU-equipped laptops towards users to take advantage of these new features, it seems that it’s planning to reverse course. According to Windows Latest, an experimental Windows App SDK available on GitHub now lets you run Language Model APIs on supported GPUs, starting with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series cards with at least 6GB of VRAM. However, it also requires a Windows Insider Experimental Channel and Developer Mode switched on. Hence, you need to go through some hoops to turn on local AI inferencing on Windows, even if you don’t have an NPU-equipped device.

You still won’t get all the features found in a Copilot+ PC even if you went through all the hoops to activate this feature, but it’s a sign of things to come for local AI on Windows PCs, in general. It’s still not clear why Microsoft is seemingly abandoning the Copilot+ PC advantage it has heavily marketed in recent years, though RAM pricing might play a role, but this is good news for the millions of users who were locked out of Copilot features simply because their processors don’t have a built-in NPU (neural processing unit). This also opens Windows’ AI features to desktop users, who typically don’t have processors that support NPUs.

What’s interesting is that NPUs aren’t necessarily more powerful than GPUs for AI processing — it’s just that they’re more efficient, making them crucial for laptops with limited battery life. And because not all laptops come with a discrete GPU (which are mostly found on gaming and high-end laptops), it also allowed Microsoft to include AI features on more affordable Windows 11 PCs. Another reason Microsoft could be looking to expand Copilot+ features to non-NPU-powered devices is that AI didn’t actually take off the way it had hoped. A research firm in 2024 said that people didn’t purchase AI PCs because of their features — instead, they bought them because they’re what’s available if they need to upgrade.

The situation is worsening in 2026, as the AI data center-driven shortage of memory and storage chips is pushing computer prices to unprecedented highs. This has resulted in a collapse in sales for PCs and their components, with entry-level laptops expected to disappear by 2028. People not buying new NPU-equipped PCs would limit the adoption of Copilot+ PCs and the AI features they offer. By expanding the availability of AI features to non-Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft will increase its user base and help differentiate Windows 11 from the competition, especially as Windows is slowly bleeding users to macOS and Linux.

Ever since appearing on the cybersecurity scene, Nightmare-Eclipse (aka Chaotic-Eclipse) has probably been the largest thorn in the side of the Microsoft Security Response Center. The long-running saga between Redmond and the disgruntled cybersecurity expert got a couple of new chapters this week, thanks to the release of the RoguePlanet and GreatXML exploits.

RoguePlanet is probably the nastiest one, as it takes advantage of yet another vulnerability in Windows Defender to gain SYSTEM user access privileges, letting an attacker execute commands at a privilege level even higher than the standard Administrator. The practical mechanism is simple: just fool a user into running a script, and said script will get full access to the machine, granting the ability to syphon all data, keep exfiltration malware installed, or any other number of malicious activities.

It's worth noting that RoguePlanet is dependent on a race condition seemingly between ISO mounting and Volume Shadow Copy, meaning that it's timing-based, and the exact conditions under which it can be triggered aren't guaranteed to happen every time in the victim machine. Eclipse themselves say that while they had a 100% success rate on certain installs, the exploit "struggled to work on others."

They do remark that RoguePlanet operates on a fully patched Windows system that includes the recently released June 2026 update, and that they're fairly certain that Windows Server is likewise vulnerable, necessitating a redesign of the proof-of-concept code to work around the fact that users on Server editions can't mount ISOs by default.

As for GreatXML, it's yet another BitLocker bypass. It's far less scary than YellowKey, as the exploit conditions are much more strict, but it's still somewhat of an egg-on-face moment for Microsoft. To run the bypass, an attacker needs to write a specially crafted "unattend.xml" and a "Recovery" directory to Windows' recovery partition. Then, if a Windows Defender Offline Scan is run or has been run in the past, rebooting into the recovery environment will open the BitLocker-protected drive just fine.

The requirements are a pretty high bar to clear for an attacker, but the validity of the approach still raises questions about which backdoor-looking behaviors are still present in BitLocker and the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). Eclipse believes that it may be possible to trigger a Defender Offline Scan without logging in, but that's not a certain thing at this point. Having said that, it wouldn't be surprising if tomorrow they came up with a way to do just that.

Given that Eclipse's spat with Microsoft has resulted in Redmond banning their GitHub account, the researcher has since moved their proof-of-concept to Church of Malware, a somewhat unrestricted community and code repository for exploits. Amusingly enough, though, a secondary GitHub account of theirs remains online.

The firm previously threatened legal action against Eclipse, too, but has since backed down. From their side, Eclipse had previously threatened to mass-disclose zero-day Windows vulnerabilities on July 14. They too have since then relented, stating that writing RoguePlanet took more time than expected, and that they may take a break and seemingly won't make the July 14 date the Windowspocalypse Day after all.

A “full-feature-parity version of Notepad” has been written in x86 assembly and it weighs in at just 2,749 bytes. Windows legend Dave W. Plummer is (inevitably) the coder behind this efficiency tour de force, and he’s made RetroPad available (code and exe) on his GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

Plummer announced this latest release of RetroPad on Thursday, describing it as a feature-for-feature match of the version of Notepad that shipped with Windows XP. That’s impressive enough in 2.7KB, rather than an app of about 65KB. However, Plummer’s work rate is such that he’s since added optional line numbers and a dark mode. He also decided to add “all of the Notepad keyboard shortcuts” on Saturday which added a few bytes. It won’t be long until there’s an accompanying YouTube video for a deeper dive into RetroPad, but for now we have the GitHub notes.

A few hours ago Plummer also added the trpad.exe to GitHub, so folks who don’t want to run the code through MASM/Crinkler can just download and run this little utility. The version of trpad.exe available on GitHub wouldn’t run on my Windows 11 laptop, though.

Windows app bloat

Windows bloat has become so bad that even Microsoft noticed. Earlier this year, Microsoft promised to go back and get the basics right, things like File Explorer, the Taskbar, and other Windows staples were going to get some tuning and polish. This was a much-needed initiative, but was precipitated by a tone-deaf exec post about the operating system “evolving into an agentic OS.”

The puffing up of Notepad is a fascinating case study in Windows bloat. As mentioned previously, the Windows XP era Notepad was approximately 65KB, not much more than Windows 9X releases (~50KB). According to a web search notepad.exe would grow to around 190KB to 200KB for the Windows 7 to 10 eras.

Windows 11 is a bit different, though. The notepad.exe in my current Windows 11 install appears to weigh in at 352KB but according to the Windows Control Panel, the install size is 808KB. Looking even deeper at this, and it seems like the moderately sized .exe file is just a ‘stub’ or ‘bootstrapper’ app to point to a UWP/WinUI app that is about 5MB in size. That’s where Microsoft has stuffed all the recently added features like spell check, autosave, multiple tabs, and Copilot writing tools.

Some people are pretty excited that we are on the cusp of a new Windows PC era ignited by technologies from the mighty Nvidia and Arm. Our article on the teasers for the rumored wave of new N1X laptops makes it clear that companies like Nvidia and Microsoft are excited, at least. However, Microsoft veteran Steven Sinofsky is here to remind folks that it has been done before, with a similar level of simmering excitement, when the first Surface hybrid PC ran on Nvidia Tegra Arm silicon back in 2010/11.

Sinofsky shares some interesting media in the above embedded Tweet. There’s a slide from the promotional deck, shown at CES 2011, where the “strong partnerships” behind this Windows on Arm thrust would surely lead to unstoppable momentum. That’s what you may have believed if you swallowed the effusive presentations at the time.

This prior push for Windows on Arm didn’t exclusively support Nvidia Tegra. Sinofsky points out that Windows 8 on Arm also supported Qualcomm and TI processors. However, we saw Microsoft switch to a Qualcomm partnership focus in the years following. That collaborative effort also didn’t break through, even when the much-lauded Nuvia Oryon architecture arrived with the Snapdragon X family.

The former-President of the Windows Division (July 2009 to Nov 2012) also shares a video that should be preserved for posterity. Check it out to witness “an old school Windows Phone video of the first time Windows ran on Nvidia Tegra Arm using the desktop compositor which was a BIG deal. Sept 2010.”

The video appears to show a Tegra dev kit running Windows 7, with multi-window and Start menu manipulation, which looks rather lethargic to my eyes. However, that was a “first” achievement several months before CES 2011, and it would be over a year and a half until the Surface RT shipped to customers (October 2012).

Will the latest Nvidia and Arm thrust into Windows work out better? We’ll probably have a much better idea about that in the coming days at Computex. Sinofsky replies to some comments on his Tweet to say the result could be “a reliable platform for graphics compute,” using Windows. Pricing is also obviously going to be a sticky issue for any new platform looking to attract buyers right now.

A short video has resurfaced in which Bill Gates promotes Windows 95 with DirectX as a gaming platform set to eclipse DOS. The video is part of footage from an internal Microsoft ‘Judgment Day’ developer/gaming event. So far, so ordinary, but the typically meek Gates appears dressed in a trench coat and holding a shotgun, standing inside a Doom-style environment littered with demon carcasses. You can watch the video by expanding the tweet below.

The Doom franchise began in 1993, well before Windows was widely used for games beyond the likes of Minesweeper and Solitaire desktop distractions. Throughout much of the 1990s, PC users would run games through DOS, with Windows seen as something to use for multitasking productivity tasks. With Windows 95, Microsoft wanted to change that; hence, this promotional video to developers, starring Gates himself.

Though there were (and are) DOS gaming devotees, Windows 95 was promoted as delivering improved multimedia, Plug and Play hardware support, and, with DirectX, even better gaming performance.

Gates begins his in-Doom spiel by saying that “these games are getting really realistic” before boasting that “Windows 95 is THE BEST game platform, whether it’s the best performance, the best setup, the best integration.” He then admitted that DOS can be hard work for end users, developers, and tech support. But the key improvement being dangled in front of developers was the new DirectX API.

During this brief presentation intro, Gates touted 75 new games coming for Windows 95 in the coming year. He reckoned with this push and collaboration between Microsoft and game developers, “we’ll be able to clean up this DOS mess, and get everything focused on Windows.”

This unusual video isn’t just Bill Gates standing and spouting about Windows 95 gaming, thankfully. Halfway through this clip, he is interrupted by an enemy grunt, and quickly turns to give it both barrels, “Don’t interrupt me.” But when delivering this punchline, Bill sounds more like Kermit the Frog than Arnie.

The video closes with Microsoft’s logo, some sinister laughing soundtrack, and the tagline “Who do you want to execute today?”

Key to the background collaboration between Microsoft and a host of game developers was the work of Gabe Newell. The future Valve co-founder initiated and led the Microsoft team responsible for porting id Software’s Doom to Windows 95, which would result in the release of Doom95 in 1996. Some sources say that Doom was installed on more computers worldwide than Windows 95 was at this time (late 1995).

An IBM ThinkPad user boasts that they can install “(almost) all versions of Windows from NT 4 to 10 22H2,” with driver support, without resorting to virtual machine (VM) technology. The ThinkPad T43 from 2005, used by Redditor MatiHalek, was already a firm favorite among retro tech enthusiasts and well known for being IBM’s final design prior to the Lenovo acquisition. The confirmation that it can run 26 years of Windows OSes certainly adds to the T43’s considerable charms.

I installed (almost) all versions of Windows from NT 4 to 10 22H2 on my ThinkPad T43 with drivers! from r/windows

So, what did Mati actually do? In the post embedded above, you can see they posted a gallery with 10 Windows screenshots, most of which show an iteration of the System > About control panel as evidence of the version of Windows installed and running. This gallery will take many readers on a journey down memory lane as the Windows UI evolves through the eras.

Mati says that they didn’t use VMs to install any of these Windows versions. They were all real software-to-metal installs on the single-core Pentium M CPU, though it wasn’t always an entirely straightforward process getting Windows to behave. We’d assume most difficulties would be due to support and drivers for graphics and storage interface hardware.

The Redditor didn’t install the 26 years of OSes sequentially in a strictly experimental fashion. “When I got this laptop, XP was installed, so I decided to dual-boot Vista with that XP. Then I did the upgrade path Vista-7-8-8.1-10RTM,” they explained. Subsequently, Windows 22H2 wrinkles forced them into doing a clean install for this pretty recent OS from Microsoft. However, modern OSes don’t appear to be Mati’s passion as “after that, I wiped the hard drive and multi-booted 98, NT 4, and 2000.” They end their post by indicating they will be keeping this 20th-century OS trio on the IBM ThinkPad T43, simply out of preference. It's probably the most responsive choice, given the hardware.

IBM ThinkPad T43 hardware

As we mentioned in the intro, the ThinkPad T43 was the final laptop from IBM’s stables, before Lenovo took the reins. Mati was correct to assert that it originally shipped with Windows XP, and it launched just a few months before Vista hit the scene.

Key components of the T43 were as follows:

• Intel Pentium M processor
• ATi Mobility Radeon X300 or X300SE graphics
• 14.1-inch screen in resolutions up to 1,400 x 1,050 pixels
• Support for up to 2GB of DDR2
• Storage config between 40GB and 100GB HDD
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and modem connectivity options
• Ports included 2x USB 2.0 ports, a parallel port, VGA, S-Video, a PC Card slot, and a docking station port

Beyond the hardware tech specs, the IBM ThinkPad T43 earned a lot of praise due to its durable, perhaps legendary, build and keyboard quality. It isn’t light for a 14-incher in 2026 terms, of course, weighing in at approximately 2.3 kg (5.1 pounds).

Do any readers still cherish an IBM ThinkPad T43? If so, do you still run an older version of Windows like Mati does, or have you moved to an alternative OS like Linux?

Microsoft is finally looking into fixing automatic GPU driver downgrades on Windows 11 that have plagued users since the OS's launch in 2021. Windows Latest reports that Microsoft has finally acknowledged the issue and is preparing a partial fix that will be released by Q4 of 2026.

Specifically, Microsoft is looking to start applying this fix to Windows 11 PCs in April 2026. Only by Q4 will the update be applied to everyone.

The fix Microsoft is cooking up narrows down how many devices Windows Update can target with specific GPU driver updates. GPU drivers that are published to the Windows Update catalog using this system incorporate a two-part hardware ID (HWID) in conjunction with computer hardware IDs (CHIDs). The latter is an ID designation designed to identify a specific PC model or hardware configuration.

This two-pronged approach gives Windows Update better information on when to expose GPU drivers to Windows 11 machines. The outgoing system Microsoft is using only considers a four-part hardware ID as part of a ranking system. The worst part about this system is that it will not take into consideration the GPU driver model specifically, which is what allows Windows Update to downgrade GPU drivers in the first place. Whichever driver is ranked highest in the Windows Update catalog for systems with a specified hardware ID, Windows Update will push even if the driver itself is outdated.

However, there is a caveat with this system — only device display drivers that target new devices can get the update. Existing drivers in the Windows Update catalog may still get forcibly applied on older systems.

Windows Update has long had a problem where the service will automatically downgrade GPU drivers in the right circumstances. This is specifically problematic with OEM machines when the OEM has uploaded a GPU driver to the Windows Update catalog. One issue I've run into personally is the inability to clean install Intel Xe drivers on my Windows 11 laptop. Doing so automatically triggers Windows Update to install several older Intel graphics driver revisions.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's update won't fix the issue entirely, but it is at least a start. To clarify, this specific fix is different from the Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery feature Microsoft rolled out recently.

Microsoft has outlined a new feature of Windows called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery (CIDR). This newly introduced capability lets Microsoft remotely roll back a bad driver to a previously known good version on affected PCs. Moreover, it can work without user action or OEM intervention. It sounds like a magic bullet for a long history of Windows Update woes, but we’ll have to see if it works when the rubber hits the road. CIDR will only work with drivers distributed via Windows Update.

Windows Update can cause plenty of problems when a bad driver gets through testing and gets pushed to users. Indeed, buggy drivers have caused many a lost hour, gray hair, wrinkle, high blood pressure, and so on, among Windows veterans. Microsoft also notes that a bad driver often means a user has to manually intervene and roll back to “a low-quality driver for an extended period.” So, the new CIDR is cautiously welcomed.

Microsoft spells out the CIDR process in its Tech Community blog, and there we learn that recovery starts by the Windows developer triggering "a recovery action directly from the Hardware Dev Center (HDC) Driver Shiproom." Once a problematic driver is flagged, the system recovers the previously known-good version of a driver via the Windows Update pipeline. “This is handled through coordinated updates to the PnP driver stack and the driver flighting and publishing services,” says Microsoft.

Importantly, Microsoft notes that “recovery is delivered through the existing Windows Update infrastructure — no new client agent or partner tooling is required.” That should help CIDR work well with what we’ve already got and for it to become an established standard. Likewise, partners don’t need to get involved in CIDR, Microsoft will manage it. However, Microsoft asks that these partners “continue monitoring their driver quality metrics in the Hardware Dev Center dashboard and to respond promptly to any shiproom feedback on rejected submissions.”

CIDR is rolling out now for validation and testing, and it is expected to automatically support the Hardware Dev Center publishing process from September onwards.

Last week, news of Microsoft working on a new "Low Latency Profile" for Windows 11 was leaked by Windows Central. When enabled, it would increase CPU clock speeds momentarily to improve app opening times. This was met with widespread backlash, with the community thrashing Microsoft for essentially putting on a Band-Aid instead of addressing underlying Windows performance issues. Since then, the company has stood firmly by the decision on social media, reminding users that it's simply catching up to industry practice.

Senior developer and VP Scott Hanselman replied to a lot of concerned users on X and compared other operating systems to Windows 11, highlighting that this boosting functionality isn't anything new. That's true; every modern OS, including the bastion of efficiency, Linux, and even smartphones, already have this implemented. He went on to claim that "this isn't cheating" and implies that such a solution works in tandem with optimizing apps and code in further replies.

The Low Latency Profile (LLP) is part of Microsoft's broader "Windows K2" efforts to make Windows 11 smoother, more stable, and more efficient after years of sluggishness. As such, LLP works by boosting CPU frequencies for a quick assist in things like flyout delays for the Start Menu. Your CPU usage and clocks will spike for a fraction of a second to ensure the OS feels fast and responsive during those moments.

For all this to work on a technical level, though, you do require pretty aggressive clock parking so the CPU's prepared to shift into gear the moment it's needed to speed up an OS interaction. This is also important for mobile devices with batteries, such as laptops or handhelds that might consume more power when their cores are being utilized at a minimum for longer, compared to just idling in C-state after a quick burst at max speeds.

People across social media continue to dunk on Scott's replies, asking why Microsoft needed to wait until Windows 11 was in an intolerable state to think of this solution. That's entirely fair, too, considering just how long users have been complaining about the general reliability of the OS. Even devs who formerly worked on Windows have called out Windows 11 for its underwhelming navigation performance.

There's also the argument that perhaps Microsoft needs to optimize the operating system on a much deeper level before applying superficial patches like this, given complaints about the amount of bloatware a stock copy of Windows 11 comes with. Microsoft has even resorted to making an Xbox Mode just so games can bypass the bloat and run better.

It seems like the company is slowly realizing that the AI push it's been hiding behind for a few years at this point just isn't working out the way it was expected. Just look at Xbox — even with a new CEO that literally comes from Microsoft's AI department, it's making community-first changes like never before.

A recent update to Dell's pre-installed SupportAssist Remediation software is causing persistent blue screen of death errors and reboot loops on multiple Dell laptop models, according to user reports on Dell's community forum (spotted by Neowin).

The update, version 5.5.16.0 of Dell SupportAssist Remediation and the accompanying OS Recovery Plugin, was released on April 30th. Affected users report their PCs crash and reboot roughly every 30 minutes, with the cycle continuing indefinitely until the software is removed.

SupportAssist Remediation is a background service that Dell bundles on its Windows PCs to automate system recovery and repair tasks. Dell hasn’t acknowledged the issue or released a fix, but the problem has been confirmed across at least two Dell product lines so far: the XPS 15 9530 and the Dell Pro Plus 14.

Multiple users have independently analyzed their Windows crash dump files using WinDbg, Microsoft's debugging tool, and arrived at the same conclusion: The crash dumps show a bugcheck code of 0xEF (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED), with the faulting process identified as DellSupportAssistRemedationService.exe, part of the SupportAssist Remediation package installed at C:\Program Files\Dell\SARemediation\agent\.

Forum user Sygent, who owns an XPS 15 9530 running Windows 11 with BIOS version 1.29.0, posted a detailed dump analysis on Sunday, showing the failure pointing directly to the Dell process. A second user, MartinHBS2026, reported the same findings on a Dell Precision 3571 and confirmed the crashes stopped after removing all SupportAssist components. A third user, Waddo, confirmed identical crash dump results on a Dell Pro Plus 14 the following day.

Users in the Dell forum thread have identified two workarounds. The first and less disruptive option is to disable only the Dell SupportAssist Remediation service by running sc.exe config "Dell SupportAssist Remediation" start= disabled from an elevated command prompt, then restarting the PC, thereby preserving the rest of Dell's update and diagnostic tools.

The second option is to uninstall SupportAssist Remediation and the Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin for Dell Update entirely. Both approaches have stopped the crashes for users who have tried them.

This isn’t the first time that SupportAssist Remediation has caused similar crashes. A Dell forum thread from January last year described the same BSOD pattern on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines after a SupportAssist Remediation update, with WinDbg analysis again identifying the Dell software as the cause. That earlier thread went unresolved by Dell support.

Aside from causing blue screen crashouts, Dell’s SupportAssist suite has previously been found to contain significant vulnerabilities, allowing remote attackers to gain administrative privileges on Dell PCs.

A top Microsoft exec has admitted that Windows 11 still relies on a bunch of old code from the 1990s. It is refreshing for Microsoft Azure Chief Technical Officer Mark Russinovich to highlight this fact on social media, but it might not surprise as many folks as he thinks.

As Russinovich eloquently puts it, those of us invested in the computer scene in the 90s “were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026, not Win32.” The admission that such old software tech is still the "bedrock" of Windows today may be the CTO strategically sharing a cold, hard truth, providing a 'let's be real' moment as part of Microsoft’s latest charm offensive. Sharing a candid confession indicates that the corporation is actually aware of the issues in its OS.

Remember, the firm is currently in the midst of a major transformation, targeting enthusiast hot button areas like Windows performance, overhead, and reliability. This drastic pivot was cautiously welcomed in contrast to Microsoft being widely slammed for boasting about Windows “evolving into an agentic OS” last November. Currently, Microsoft seems to be flailing around, trying to stop folks straying to pastures greener like Mac and Linux.

However, Win32 isn’t inherently labeled as ‘bad’ by the Microsoft CTO. Though it is ancient, it has probably stuck around for good reason. “I think one of the reasons it’s got this staying power is just a fundamental layer inside of Windows that so many apps have built on,” notes Russinovich. “So many technologies and ecosystems have been built on top of it that it’s kind of a bedrock.”

The CTO explains that Win32 has persisted even when facing targeted existential threats from within Microsoft, particularly in the Windows 8 era. “There’s been various times in Microsoft’s history where we thought we’d reboot the Windows API surface, like WinRT, that actually didn’t play out the way a lot of people expected it to.”

In closing, Russinovich highlights that Win32 was also the bedrock for tools like Sysmon and ZoomIt, which he actually wrote back in 1996. These tools are now “more relevant than ever in 2026,” as parts of Windows 11 and PowerToys, respectively, reckons the CTO.

Microsoft recently published a new support document for gaming on Windows, serving as a guide for what hardware people should choose in 2026. Just a day later, that post has already been deleted because it recommended 16GB of RAM as the "practical starting point," while suggesting users go for 32GB if they want to future-proof their system. That means 32GB is no longer overkill according to the Windows maker.

Despite the grim outlook of the market, if you follow recent hardware trends, the data actually backs up this argument. Last year, before the RAMpocalypse ushered in, we covered September 2025's Steam Survey that showed 16GB configs falling behind in popularity while 32 GB systems were gaining notoriety. The lines still haven't overlapped, though, and 16 GB remains more common than 32GB, especially with the current situation in mind.

RAM has gotten significantly more expensive in the past few months, thanks to the AI boom snatching production lines. Manufactures are trying to come up with solutions to alleviate the crisis, such as the HUDIMMs proposed by ASRock, Intel, and TeamGroup. Despite prices flatlining as of late, DDR5 in particular is still out of reach for most DIY builders.

The company does lay out its reasoning for this — it says that more RAM will help in running apps like Discord alongside your game, while AAA blockbuster titles also benefit from the extra breathing room. That's true in essence because, of course, having more RAM will always be nice; it'll allow the system to rely less on the page file, which is much slower, while keeping more things in memory.

GPUs with limited VRAM, such as those with only an 8GB pool, will also appreciate the higher system RAM capacity as assets spill over during intense workloads. If you're using an APU like the new Ryzen AI 400 series, a high-speed, high-capacity memory config is pretty much essential to squeezing out as much performance as possible from the integrated graphics.

All that being said, Microsoft is not "recommending" 32GB for gaming since most developers still outline 16GB as the actual baseline; it's just claiming that 32GB is the new norm we're working toward. Now, some titles actually do require 32GB of RAM, but many are edge-case scenarios tied to very high-fidelity presets (such as 4K Ultra in Stalker 2). Microsoft's own Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 lists 64GB as the ideal RAM config, so the Redmont giant is definitely an exception to the rule.

Alongside memory, the company also recommends a much more reasonable upgrade: an SSD. It outright shuts down using any hard drive for either gaming or running Windows in 2026, saying that "active games and the OS should live on an SSD for the best experience." Moreover, the guideline states that "HDDs are best reserved for bulk storage." That much has been universally true for about a decade.

The SSD advice goes hand in hand with the memory advice, since your CPU will swap to system storage once the RAM fills up, so it's good to have a fast drive. Also, with features like DirectStorage poised to become the standard going forward, SSDs truly are a zero-compromise component. Unfortunately, we're in the middle of a global shortage right now, so even though the 32GB RAM recommendation is technically valid, it still comes off as tone-deaf for a company that's reportedly spending $190 billion on AI this year, which is the reason the shortages and high pricing exist.

A PC gaming enthusiast and tinkerer has shared a video demo of the new DS5Dongle. As its name suggests, this is a Windows PC dongle for users of the Sony DualSense controller. Its raison d'être is that it allows users of Sony’s well-regarded controller to enjoy wireless connectivity without the lack of adaptive triggers and haptic feedback that this connectivity choice on Windows PCs previously entailed. We would also give bonus points for the low cost (<$20) and purported low latency of this generously MIT-licensed dongle design.

PSA: Since Sony won't make a PC dongle for the DualSense, you can build your own for less than $20 using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W. Wireless Adaptive Triggers and Haptic Feedback finally work natively. from r/pcmasterrace

The brains behind this project are provided by a developer known as awalol on GitHub, linked above. However, the video and Reddit announcement from SlaveKnightSoman neatly encapsulate the experience of using a DS5Dongle. The Redditor explains that they were attracted to this GitHub project as they had “spent way too much time trying to get the ‘PS5 Experience’ on PC without being tethered by a 3-meter cable.”

There are some technical reasons behind the reduced DualSense features on Windows PCs using wireless connectivity. Windows Bluetooth can’t handle the full non-standard use of Bluetooth bandwidth that Sony leverages to make its controllers work so well on the PS5. In contrast, the full gamut of controller features is available if Windows users use a wired version.

This is where the new DS5Dongle comes in, and it is also succinctly described as a “Pico2W DualSense 5 Bridge” by the developer. In brief, the dongle pairs with the DualSense over Bluetooth, receives the full gamut of haptic, trigger, audio, and other controller data, then exposes itself to its Windows host as a wired DualSense, and neither side is the wiser.

As what might be described as a ‘handshake spoof’ rather than some kind of emulation or translation layer, the latency should stay low. The experience of Redditor SlaveKnightSoman goes a long way to confirming that important factor, and they assert that “I didn't feel any difference to wired. But I only play single player games.” See the Reddit embedded Days Gone gaming footage to help judge for yourself.

DS5Dongle plans, details, and other useful resources are available via GitHub, so you can make your own. SlaveKnightSoman says they built one for under $20, including the cost of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, central to the dongle’s functionality. That could be worth it if you feel that the DualSense is one of the best controllers out there.

Microsoft announced in a blog post yesterday that it would allow users to pause updates in Windows 11 indefinitely. This would be the first time the company officially allowed indefinite update pausing for everyday users since the launch of Windows 10 in 2015. The change is in response to countless user complaints over the years about its “mandatory update” policy.

Updates are necessary for the seamless functionality of the Windows OS and for security. However, users have had limited control over when and how these updates happen. You could postpone updates, but never for more than 35 days. There have been reports of forced update restarts right in the middle of meetings or gaming sessions after the extension period expires.

The upcoming changes, currently being tested in the Windows Insider Program before a wider public release, seek to give users much more control in four key ways: Delaying updates on new devices, indefinite update pausing and scheduling, restoring normal shutdown and restart options, and clearer update information.

First, new device owners would no longer be forced to install updates immediately after taking their devices out of the box. They have the option to go straight to the desktop and hold off on updates until a more convenient time.

Secondly, and most likely the answer to most complaints, users can now schedule updates for specific days or pause them indefinitely, in increments of up to 35 days. The initial 35-day extension limit remains, but this time, upon expiration, you can extend for another 35 days, and you can keep doing this as many times as you like.

“With a new calendar experience, you can choose a specific day of the month you want to pause until, up to 35 days, enabling you to plan around expected travel, conferences, exams, or even just busy weeks,” explained Microsoft’s Aria Hanson in the blog post. “When 35 days just isn’t long enough, we are also enabling you to extend the pause end date as many times as you need.”

The next change is the ability to shut down or restart your PC normally, even when updates are pending. Previously, whenever updates were due, the usual power options would change to “Update and shut down” or “Update and restart,” often accompanied by the familiar yellow notification dot beside the Shut down icon. This meant you couldn't simply perform a quick restart or power off your system without first installing pending updates. This change fixes that, allowing you to shut down or restart on your own terms, without being held hostage by a pending update.

“With this change, the Power menu will always show the standard Restart and Shut down options, meaning you will always have a choice to just restart or shut down your device without having to install the pending update. At the same time, update‑specific choices like Update and restart and Update and shut down will still be available when applicable,” said Hanson.

As the final key change, Microsoft would provide more insights on available updates, ensuring you know exactly what's being updated.

“Often, driver updates would have similar, if not identical, titles. To help provide you with more insights, we have added the device class to the driver title – ensuring pending or installed driver updates clarify whether they apply to display, audio, battery, extension, HDC, or other applicable driver update classes,” explained Hanson.

In addition to these changes, Microsoft said it will try to unify updates so that users won't have to deal with multiple system updates in a month.

With these changes, Microsoft is simply giving you more control and making updates far less disruptive to your workflow. That said, Microsoft is clear that updates remain critical for security, performance, and system stability — so the intention isn't to skip them altogether, but to plan them around your schedule rather than be ambushed by them at the worst possible moment.

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, who has worked on iconic projects like adding ZIP file support to Windows and the Windows NT Start Menu, revealed how the Task Manager actually reads CPU usage. Plummer built the original Task Manager, and made the tool so simple (in programming and engineering terms) to ensure that it does not use up your computer’s resources unnecessarily. However, there have also been some complaints that it sometimes felt that the numbers it showed were a bit off, so he explained why looking up CPU usage is quite complicated, how Task Manager gets the CPU utilization numbers, and why it might show results that are a bit different from what you see and feel on your PC.

“But measuring CPU usage sounds like it ought to be one of the easiest jobs in computing — I mean, either the CPU is busy, or it’s not, right? It’s silicon, not interpretative dance. Surely, you just ask Windows, ‘Hey, how busy are you?’ and it tells you 73%, and then we all go home early — except none of that is true,” Plummer said. “Because the first uncomfortable question is ‘Busy doing what, exactly?’ Busy on one core or all of them? Busy right now, or averaged the last second or two seconds, or however often your UI happens to wake up? Busy is user mode or kernel mode or interrupt time or deferred procedure calls or the idle loop or some weird accounting bucket that only exists because the scheduler needed somewhere to hand the bill? And once you start asking those questions, what looks like a simple speedometer starts looking more like forensic accounting.”

Dave says that Task Manager is timer-driven in that it refreshes every so often to give you an updated figure. This shows that the machine is showing an interpretation of what happened to your PC between each refresh, not a real-time view of your CPU’s actual usage. The easy answer to this would have been to divide the CPU usage by the time elapsed between refreshes, but Plummer says that this depends on the GUI timer firing precisely. He compared this to “trusting a metronome to stay perfectly steady while it’s riding the back of a pickup truck on a pothole-filled dirt road.”

Instead, he programmed the Task Manager to ask for the total time, i.e., the sum of the kernel time and the user time, of each process since it started. It then subtracts the last total it received during the last refresh from that particular process from that value to get its CPU consumption for that period. This number is then divided by how much total CPU time was accounted for and consumed by all processes in between refreshes. While it may sound complicated versus just dividing the total CPU usage by the time elapsed between refreshes, this solution is far more precise.

However, technological advances made this feel inaccurate. Since the accounting is just an average number, between refresh states, it does not take into account the actual work happening at a particular moment. “Modern CPU usage is more like how full the freeway was, rather than how many miles were actually traveled. A half-full freeway with Ferraris on it can move a lot more traffic than a jammed freeway full of old cement trucks,” Plummer explained. “Now, the old Task Manager was built in an era where the time used was a pretty decent proxy for what work got done. But on today’s processors with dynamic frequency scaling, turbo boost, thermal throttling, deep idle states, that connection has gotten a lot looser. So, when the numbers feel a little slippery, it’s not because the tool is broken so much as the hardware stops being simple enough for a single percentage to tell you the whole story.”

He also added a note on the screen saying, “If I were king… CPU usage should be a measure of the amount of work accomplished versus the theoretical maximum work that COULD have been accomplished.” But because he’s already retired from Microsoft, he probably has no say anymore in how Windows should work.

You can find several more interesting stories and explanations on how one of Windows’ most basic tools works on the Dave’s Garage video embedded above.

Installing this month's Windows Server security update has knocked some enterprise domain controllers into continuous reboot cycles, Microsoft confirmed in a release health dashboard entry.

The company says the April 2026 patch, KB5082063, triggers crashes in the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) on non-Global Catalog domain controllers used in Privileged Access Management (PAM) deployments, leaving Active Directory authentication and directory services unavailable on affected servers.

Microsoft's dashboard lists Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, 23H2, and 2025 as vulnerable to the fault, with the LSASS crash occurring during the startup sequence, which is what turns the failure into a loop: each automatic reboot re-enters the same faulty authentication codepath rather than recovering into a stable state.

The problem is only affecting managed enterprise environments that run PAM for Active Directory privilege delegation, and Microsoft said personal devices outside IT-managed domains aren’t exposed. The company hasn’t yet published a patch and has instead directed affected administrators to Microsoft Support for Business for mitigation guidance that can be applied if KB5082063 is already deployed.

KB5082063 now has three acknowledged bugs within a week of release, and Microsoft has warned separately that the same update prompts some Windows Server 2025 machines for a BitLocker recovery key after installation. The company is investigating reports that KB5082063 fails to install entirely on a subset of Windows Server 2025 systems.

April security updates have disrupted Windows Server domain controllers for three consecutive years. In March 2024, Microsoft shipped an emergency out-of-band fix after that month's Patch Tuesday caused DC crashes outright. The April 2024 patch cycle then broke NTLM auth across Windows Servers and forced unplanned DC restarts, which Microsoft corrected in a May 2024 rollout.

In June last year, the company released another correction for Active Directory authentication problems introduced by the April 2025 security update. This month's LSASS crash follows the same MO for the third year running: a general Patch release followed by post-deployment failure reports from enterprise admins, and a scramble for mitigation while the fix is prepared.

With KB5082063 still on the release channel and no patch date published, admins have three choices: delay the April update, isolate a test DC to validate patch behavior before wider rollout, or escalate through the Microsoft Support form Business to obtain the mitigation steps the company is providing case-by-case.

Veteran Windows developer Dave Plummer is back in his computer-stuffed garage, this time hoping to demystify AI by exposing its “dirty little secret.” This secret is largely revealed in the first line of the video description: “Dave uses a PDP-11 to train a real Neural Network complete with Transformers and Attention so you can see them at their most basic.” For context, the retired dev demos his 47-year-old PDP-11 system with a 6 MHz CPU and 64KB RAM. This runs a transformer model called ATTN-11 written in PDP-11 assembly language by Damien Boureille.

On the surface, the task that the PDP-11 will ‘learn’ to do seems elementary - reverse a sequence of eight digits. However, the model must learn a structural rule to succeed for every given input, which Dave argues captures the soul of how modern LLMs like ChatGPT work.

“This is one person taking a class of algorithms that the world currently treats like sacred fire and proving that at least their essence can be reduced, understood, implemented, and trained on a machine old enough to remember when software came with toggle switches and three ring binders,” said Dave. “…now you know what that process actually is. It's not AI magic. It is the machine repeatedly updating the strength of thousands of little weighted links so that the next answer will be slightly less wrong than the last one.”

Despite using Attention 11, a single-layer, single-head transformer written entirely in PDP-11 assembly language, Dave still has to optimize for the system constraints. “Constraints are not the enemy of engineering. Constraints are what force creative engineering to happen.” But it may be surprising how little scaffolding is required for intelligence to emerge. For example, the model used has just 1,216 parameters; it uses fixed-point math, precision is pruned to 8-bit for the forward pass, and every cycle is optimized to ensure the machine can finish training before “the heat death of the universe.”

Dave comments that “We're watching the stripped-down anatomy of learning itself. The model begins dumb. The loss begins high. Accuracy stumbles around like a man trying to assemble IKEA furniture in the back of a moving van. And then somewhere along the way, the weights settle into a pattern. And the attention discovers the reversal map. And the machine crosses that invisible line from guessing into knowing.”

The results of the AI training experiment on an ancient 6 MHz computer were pleasing. Dave managed to get the model to achieve 100% accuracy in the number reversing task after about 350 training steps. To achieve this training level took about 3.5 minutes on the PDP-11/44, aided by a cache board. Quite a success, and Dave insists that modern AI is just the same mechanical – not mystical – technique with massively scaled-up error correction and arithmetic. “This old machine is not thinking in some mystical sense. It's just grinding through arithmetic to update a few thousand carefully stored numbers. And that's the whole game. The glamour of modern AI mostly comes from doing that on a staggering scale. But the essential act of learning is already here fully in miniature,” explained the legendary Windows dev.

Lastly, Plummer concludes that, with the compute resources crunch becoming a limiting factor, any company that can embrace the old-school obsession with efficiency and optimization could gain a significant advantage.

Dave Plummer, the engineer behind many of Windows iconic features like ZIP file support, shared how he built the Task Manager to be so efficient. According to his YouTube video, the current Windows Task Manager is about 4MB, but the original version that he built was just 80K. Plummer’s main concern when he built the Windows utility was that hardware during that time was so limited, and that the tool that was used to recover the PC after everything had failed still needs to feel crisp and responsive, even if everything else had hung.

“Every line has a cost; every allocation can leave footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent,” said Plummer. “And so, when I ended up writing Task Manager, I didn’t approach it like a modern utility where you start with a framework, add nine layers of comfort, six layers of futureproofing, and then act surprised when the thing eats 800MBs and a motivational speech to display just a few numbers.”

One of Plummer’s favorite features on the Task Manager is how it handles startup. Unlike other apps that just check if another instance of the app is already running and activates it if there’s already one, this Windows tool goes one step further. It checks if the already existing instance, if there is one, is not frozen by sending it a private message and waiting for a reply. If it gets a positive response, then it’s a sign that the other Task Manager instance is fine and dandy, but if all it gets is silence, then it assumes that the other instance is also lost and would launch to help get you out of a rut.

Another thing that the engineer did was to load frequently used strings into globals once instead of fetching them over and over again, while rare functionalities, like ejecting a docked PC, are only loaded when needed. The process tree also saves resources by asking the kernel for the entire process table instead of querying programs one by one. This removes numerous API calls, and if its buffer is too small, it would resize the buffer and try again. Plummer also shared several tips and tricks that he used to ensure that Windows Task Manager did not take on more resources than necessary, allowing it to run smoothly on the limited computing power available at that time, even on systems that were already facing issues.

The processing and resource limitations of 90s computers forced Plummer to make the Windows Task Manager as lean as possible. “Task Manager came from a very different mindset. It came from a world where a page fault was something you felt, where low memory conditions had a weird smell, where if you made the wrong thing redraw too often, you could practically hear the guys in the offices moaning,” he said. “And while I absolutely do not want to go back to that old hardware, I do wish we had carried more of that taste. Not the suffering, the taste, the instinct to batch work, to cache the right things, to skip invisible work, to diff before repainting, to ask the kernel once instead of a hundred times, to load rare data rarely, to be suspicious of convenience when convenience sends a bill to the user.”

Microsoft’s Clippy was put out to pasture a quarter century ago. This hapless, and some would say ‘irritating,’ productivity assistant would no longer be enabled by default in Office, starting April 11, 2001. Nowadays, it is easy to remember Clippy with some fondness through rose-tinted retro spectacles. But, in its era, Clippy’s repetitive catch-all catch phrases such as “It looks like you’re writing a letter” and “Would you like help with that?” would soon erode any tolerance you might have for cute character-based digital assistants.

Clippy (more properly called Clippit) was a digital assistant introduced with Microsoft Office 97. The plan was to bring a friendly agent to the screen to interface with Office help content, as explained by Wikipedia. Several characters were designed to offer this help, with Clippy (Clipit) as the default choice. Among the alternatives were caricatures of Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, and Rocky the dog, as well as several animated inanimate objects (like the unpopular paperclip).

Some esteemed figures in the computer industry think that the introduction of Clippy might have been a "tragic misunderstanding" of research conducted at Stanford University on breaking barriers in human-machine interaction. Indeed, there must have been something seriously wrong with a ‘helpful’ project like this for it to attract so much ire and ridicule among users and tech commentators.

As per our headline, Clippy was officially retired on April 11, 25 years ago, when Microsoft announced it would be disabled in Office by default. In Office XP, it would still be there as a dormant and optional feature. However, with Microsoft Office 2007, there was no longer any way to summon help from Clippy or his friends.

Rose-tinted retro spectacles

Clippy’s infamy has been sealed with its place in Time magazine’s 50 worst inventions. However, the mists of time have taken the edge off the pain of working with such a useless assistant, as it is now often viewed as being part of an amusing, heart-warming era in computing.

Microsoft has played on this softening of public opinion, or even nostalgia, for Clippy in several marketing campaigns since the animated paperclip and his friends were discarded. Most recently, it resurrected Clippy as an Emoji in Microsoft 365 – after overwhelming popular demand.

Last year, as the wave of new AI assistants began to grate on the public nerves, we also observed some fondness for Clippy being rekindled in a project by software engineer Felix Rieseberg – a locally hosted, LLM-based, AI-enhanced Clippy, complete with Office 97-era-appropriate UI.

Despite the sting of Clippy's clear failure, Microsoft keeps coming back to digital assistants as the future of computing. We had Windows Cortana foisted upon us from 2014 to 2023.

Now we have Copilot everywhere, in every corner of our Windows 11 PCs and Microsoft apps. A recent count indicates that there are at least 80, and probably over 100 Copilot apps…

As optimists, we hope Copilot will be reined in, as far as Windows goes, thanks to Microsoft’s latest stated initiative to focus on OS performance, reliability, and RAM usage. This telegraphed change is also supposed to lead to fewer Copilot interactions.

Microsoft's promises of a better Windows are moving one small step closer to fruition, starting with the Windows Insider Program. In a blog post authored by Microsoft product manager Alec Oot, the company promised a simpler channel structure and more control over which features Insiders get to try.

The channel structure is being simplified down to two primary channels. The previous Beta Channel will go into the more simply named "Beta" branch, while what was previously the Dev Channel will go the "Experimental." These are where you go for first access to the newest features. Though Oot explains that in the Experimental channel, "what you see may change, get delayed, or not ship at all."

If you're in the existing Canary Channel, things will get slightly more complicated, with 29500-series builds going to Experimental (Future Platforms), while 28000-series builds will transition to Experimental (26H1). Future Platforms will be the earliest preview build you can get, and one Oot writes that it is "not aligned to a retail version of Windows."

Features and gradual rollouts

On the Beta channel, there's another big quality of life change for Insiders. Microsoft is stopping gradual feature rollouts. If Microsoft announces a feature and you download the update, you'll get it. This differs from the previous practice of gradual rollouts. While the company says the gradual rollouts are designed to assess how features perform before releasing widely, they acknowledge that it made the program "unpredictable," and it could mean that "you don't get the new features that motivated many of you to join the Insider program to begin with."

For the Experimental channel, there will be flags for new features, so Insiders can enable the ones they want to try and disable those they don't.

Windows Insider for Business will see the same changes as the consumer program, while the Windows Server version will continue unchanged. Release Preview will hang around as an advanced option for those who want to try production builds shortly prior to their general release.

Upgrading in place

Moving between Windows Insider channels or leaving the program has been historically different, with very few points to stop and get off the ride without needing to wipe your PC and clean install Windows.

Microsoft now says it is working on the ability to hop between versions without losing all of your software and settings.

"This will allow, in most cases, Insiders to move between Experimental, Beta, and Release Preview on the same Windows core version, or leave the program without a clean install," Oot writes. "An [in-place upgrade] takes a bit more time than your normal update but migrates your apps, settings, and data in-place."

The Experimental (Future Platforms) build will still require a clean install, as it doesn't line up with any retail production builds of Windows.

Oot writes that these changes are set to begin in "the coming weeks."

Last month, Microsoft promised a slew of features to improve Windows 11, including a more flexible taskbar, a less aggressive Windows Update, improvements with RAM issues, and a better File Explorer. To assess upcoming fixes, Microsoft will need its slew of Insiders. Hopefully, a streamlined program makes it easier for enthusiasts to join the program and leave feedback before changes come to everyone else.

France is accelerating its digital sovereignty plans. In an official press release this week, the country’s DINUM announced its “exit from Windows in favor of workstations running on the Linux operating system.” (machine translation).

The DINUM is an important section of the French state, headed by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs, so this will mark a key changeover in the machinations of government, eliminating U.S.-based commercial interests from workstation computers. We assume some French flavor of Linux will be adopted to satisfy the stated objective of migrating to sovereign solutions. Joining the DINUM in this mission for digital sovereignty are France’s Directorate General for Enterprises (DGE), the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI), and the State Procurement Directorate (DAE).

Moving to Linux is described as one of three “concrete initial steps” that have recently been committed to, to reduce France’s extra-European digital dependencies. The plan is expected to be formalized in the fall. By then, stakeholders should know what “workstations, collaborative tools, antivirus software, artificial intelligence, databases, virtualization, and network equipment” will be needed to move ahead with this digital sovereignty initiative.

On the topic of applications, not just the underlying OS, France recently announced that it had moved 80,000 National Health Insurance Fund employees to open-source alternatives to platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Dropbox. These commercial platforms have been put into forced retirement by the new Tchap, Visio, and FranceTransfert services (and others), delivering a set of modern collaborative productivity tools dubbed La Suite.

Last month, the French government also “announced the migration of the health data platform to a trusted solution by the end of 2026,” says the source press release.

We know why – but why?

French Ministers are very keen on reducing reliance on technologies that depend on or are controlled by outside interests. “We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny,” wrote David Amiel, a Minister of Public Action and Accounts, in a statement pinned to the above-linked PR. “We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control.” It is interesting to see Amiel single out the U.S. for his statement about how the French state “must break free.”

Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology, echoed Amiel’s sentiments by asserting that “Digital sovereignty is not an option, it is a strategic necessity."

One wonders whether the growing cultural rift between the U.S. and its traditional European allies has added momentum to the digital sovereignty movement in France.
The implications for software and services businesses across the Atlantic don’t look great. As a leading member of the EU, France’s decisions and direction can exert a strong influence on others in the bloc. Moreover, if the move to Linux is seen as a success, it could also influence other government departments, and organizations that work closely with the government, and so on, all the way down to individual users.
Perhaps 2026 is set to be l’année de Linux?

An artificial intelligence (AI) aficionado has put together a chart featuring all the Copilot things that Microsoft has released since AI became the next big thing. At the latest count, Ty Bannerman notes that there are 80 different, separately marketed Copilot products and tools. Charting these Copilot things wasn’t a trivial task; even Microsoft doesn’t appear to maintain a definitive list. When I first noticed this story, there were 78 Copilots in Bannerman’s charts, but now it has expanded to 80.

The AI strategy, design, and implementation expert says that the idea of charting the expanse of the Copilot universe came to him when someone asked what Microsoft Copilot is. He knew it meant at least 75 different things, in so many contexts, at the time. “Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots,” tallied Bannerman in his blog. “All named ‘Copilot’.” His chart contends this is "What happens when you name everything Copilot."

Last week, the AI aficionado charted the number of Copilots as 78. However, since yesterday, I note the number has increased to a nice round 80. Thanks to the power of the internet / social media, Bannerman had learned of the existence of Gaming Copilot and Microsoft Dragon Copilot. The latter of those isn’t designed for residents of Westeros, but an AI clinical assistant.

Copilot says there are ~95 to 120+ Copilots

So, we have a chart of 80 Copilots, and who knows what the final figure may be, and how many more Bannerman can uncover?

Since I’m typing on a laptop with a Copilot key, I prodded it and asked the thing itself. Who better to ask? The answer was that “the ecosystem is well north of 100,” if you include things like every app-embedded Copilot, enterprise, and Azure-adjacent tools, etc. I then asked it to add them all up, and it concluded there were “~95 to 120+ Copilots.”

Is that too many? Well, even on this PC, I was surprised to find two Copilot apps in my system tray a few weeks ago. One pops up the usual chatbot box, the other was actually Copilot 365, which, when clicked, asked me to sign in with my (non-existent) Microsoft 365 credentials before I could use it. It has been eliminated.

The corporation's promise of major improvements to Windows 11 performance, reliability, and fewer Copilot interactions can't come soon enough.

Microsoft is force-updating devices running Windows 11 24H2 to the latest 25H2 update. With support for version 24H2 officially ending on October 13, 2026, the move seems to be a part of the company’s effort to keep all devices updated to the latest version of its operating system, at the same time make the entire update experience more streamlined.

According to Microsoft’s Windows 11 25H2 support page, the automatic rollout specifically targets systems running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 version 24H2. However, devices that are managed by organizations or IT departments are excluded at the moment. Notably, the rollout will be handled by an “intelligent” update system that leverages machine learning to determine when a device is ready to receive the update.

Curiously, there seems to be a lack of transparency around how Microsoft’s machine learning system decides when a device is ready to receive the automatic update. The company has not shared any specifics about the criteria or any data points that are being used, which does raise some questions, especially for users who prefer greater control, especially at the system-level.

As this is a forced update, users will not have an option to completely opt out. There is, however, limited control over when the update is installed, as Microsoft will let users postpone for a specific period of time. For those who prefer taking matters into their own hands, the update can also be installed manually by heading to Settings > Windows Update and clicking on “Check for updates,” provided the device meets the eligibility requirements.

Since we are on the subject, Microsoft pushed an emergency update for Windows 11 earlier this week following a faulty preview update that failed to install on a large number of systems. The original update (KB5079391) was released in late March, which reportedly triggered widespread installation issues with error code 0x80073712, which typically indicates missing or corrupted files. Microsoft acknowledged the issue and has since pulled the broken update and replaced it with a new out-of-band patch (KB5086672). This updated release not only resolves the installation problems but also includes all the improvements and features originally intended for the March update.

A former president of Microsoft’s Windows Division has been reminiscing about the lean and efficient coding regime at Microsoft in the 1980s. Steven Sinofsky surprised some commenters, who were talking about modern software’s RAM and resource use, by recalling that from 1980 to 1990 “every Microsoft eng got a stop watch,” adding that “Extras were in the supply room.” Stopwatches were used for “everything,” Sinofsky went on to explain. “Scroll speed. Boot. Exit. Save. Compilation. Print.”

Core products of the ‘stopwatch era’ would be MS‑DOS, Windows, Word, Excel, and Office – as well as programming languages and tools. Windows work would involve versions one through three, but of course, this period predates Windows 95; the clue is in the name. Sinofsky indicates that the same resrouce efficieincy based ethic continued to at least the year 2000, though. “From 1980-2000 half of software engineering was managing resource (clock time, disk, and RAM) usage,” he said on social media.

Do people prefer ‘whizzy spinning’ things to raw speed?

However, the ex-president of Windows told of one retrograde action implemented in software purposefully. Despite his stopwatch indicating otherwise, user feedback the dev team received was that the compile speed under Windows for VC++ 1.0 was slower than prior releases. Implementing a “whizzy spinning line counter made of random numbers… slowed the compile speed down a few pct points but perception improved,” noted Sinofsky. Moreover, despite not liking reworking purely for perception, and actually slowing raw performance, he reluctantly kept the whizz in.

Interestingly, another well-known Microsoft / Windows veteran, Dave W. Plummer, responded to say that he was denied a free stopwatch in 1993. Actually, that is outside the freebie window, as told by Sinosfsky. Microsoft told Plummer that a stopwatch would be “too expensive,” he recalls. Humorously, Plummer says that “While I clearly resent it enough to bring it up 30+ years later, it went a long way toward setting the fiscal accountability I brought to the career.”

Microsoft’s new performance pledge

Sinofsky’s tale comes at an interesting point for Microsoft, particularly its Windows OS, which has been under heavy criticism for losing focus. Specifically, there’s a growing wave of resentment regarding the OS’s poor core performance, general resource hungriness, and devs throwing too much AI in the mix.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft’s managers finally decided to face up to this reality and penned a surprisingly detailed blog post, promising that the situation would change over the course of this year. It has now pledged to implement performance, overhead, and reliability improvements across a swathe of core services like Explorer and Windows Update. It will also improve resource use and be more purposeful about where Copilot integrates.

Microsoft’s signaling regarding its newfound efficiency thrust is still fresh, so we can only wait and see if any or many of these improvements materialize. But we’d like to know if, as part of the plans, devs will be given free stopwatches.

A retro computing connoisseur has installed and booted Microsoft Windows 3.1X on a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti PC system. That’s a 1992 OS working on a bare-metal 2024 Zen5 CPU and 2025 Blackwell GPU. The full story contains a few nuances, but basically, a system and OS separated by over 30 years of huge advances kind of play nicely together.

In the video by Omores, above, you can see we start by inspecting a Spanish-language Windows 3.1X backup floppy disk set, which the TechTuber had access to. But there’s some important background to understand, before the first 3.5-inch installer disk starts ticking away in its drive.

A key part of this system, not yet mentioned, is its motherboard. This Asus motherboard’s ‘classic BIOS’ functionality doesn’t get in the way of users tinkering with old OSes like Windows 3.1X when the built-in Compatibility Support Module (CSM) is enabled. Moreover, we noticed Omores initially prepared the system using a Windows 95 boot floppy to create the bootable DOS FAT16 partition necessary for setup.

With that done, the retro enthusiast began the Win3.1X install from his USB-attached floppy. There was no problem using this drive, as it was recognized as Drive A: by the installer, and the 1992 media hadn’t suffered from any kind of deterioration, even hidden bit rot.

The first hurdle shows up after the transition from the DOS prompt to Windows 3.1X startup, as the GUI system crashes straight away. It is explained that this is because there is a clash between the OS’s Enhanced Mode and Omores’ modern hardware.

There is an easy workaround, though, as Win 3.1X could be run in Standard Mode. Intended for pre-i386 systems, Standard Mode is useful for this project due to its greater compatibility. A mode switch was all that was needed to get Win 3.1X up and running on this modern system.

Poking around the freshly booted Win 3.1X UI operating in a rather low resolution, Omores commented that the graphics were a bit “glitchy,” but there are supplementary patches and drivers that can improve it.

Adding the graphics driver VBESVGA from PluMGMK on GitHub made a big difference. The UI was scaled up to the display’s native 1920 x 1080 pixels properly. Moreover, the RTX 5060 Ti graphics card now worked without any irksome issues. The tinkerer had used this driver with previous projects, but sounds surprised by how well the driver has matured. It was previously “picky with Nvidia cards” and slightly glitchy, he comments. The driver has seen 44 releases, observes Omores, but it remains in beta.

With graphics fixed, the TechTuber’s attention switched to trying to get Enhanced Mode working for benefits such as virtual memory and improved multitasking. Omores’ chosen sound card also required Enhanced Mode.

So AHCIFIX.386 (from the same GitHub source as VBESVGA) was also installed. Installation was a simple file copy plus the adding of a line to System.ini. With that done, Omores fits his Ensoniq ES1370 audio PCI card. Though other cards he’s tried have Windows 3.1 drivers, this is the only one the TechTuber knows that works on modern hardware with original drivers and MIDI support. Please note that other brand cards using the same chip aren’t compatible, in the TechTuber’s experience.

If you are interested in following in these retro footsteps, the video description includes a link to a Windows 3.1 update script, which will help you go from floppies to a fully working Enhanced Mode system running on bare metal.

After rolling out an optional non-security update for Windows 11 last week, Microsoft was forced to pull it due to widespread installation issues. The cumulative update KB5079391 included several quality improvements; however, users reported that it failed to install, showing error code 0x80073712. To replace the faulty preview update, the company has now issued an out-of-band KB5086672 emergency update for affected Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 systems.

According to Microsoft, the latest update (KB5086672) for Windows 11 “supersedes all previous updates and includes all protections and improvements from the March 2026 Windows security and non-security preview updates, as well as this installation fix.” It is available for devices running Windows 11, including those that have already installed KB5079473 or a later update. Users can also manually download the new update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Some key features of the optional KB5079391 update (which should now be available with the latest KB5086672 fix) include enhanced Narrator capabilities with improved image descriptions and Copilot integration. It also brings a refreshed design for account-related dialog boxes that align with Windows 11’s modern look and dark mode, as well as enhancements to File Explorer with reliable file unblocking and support for voice typing during file renaming. There are several display-related updates too, such as support for monitors with refresh rates going beyond 1000 Hz, improved auto-rotation and HDR reliability, and improved power efficiency for USB 4-connected monitors during sleep.

Microsoft has faced repeated criticism over problematic Windows 11 updates in the past, with the company promising to make changes and improve the OS. Earlier this year, the January security update KB5074109 caused widespread issues for gamers, particularly those using Nvidia GPUs. With reports of frame rate drops, visual artifacts, and instability, Nvidia itself advised users to uninstall the update as a temporary fix.

The same update also introduced a more serious issue for some users, with reports of systems failing to boot altogether. According to an AskWoody forum post, some devices encountered an “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” error after installing the security update. The affected devices ended up with a message that said “Your device ran into a problem and needs a restart. You can restart.” Additionally, some PCs refused to shut down or hibernate, and another bug resulted in Cloud-based apps, like Outlook, OneDrive, and Dropbox, not working.

Microsoft's tenacity in imposing AI across its product stack has cornered Windows into a tough spot. Mac and Linux are catching up in terms of software compatibility, and Windows' longstanding flaws have begun to outweigh its universality. Even though the company has promised to fix the OS and has initiated a course correction, the mistakes just keep slipping through the cracks. The latest in the line of discrepancies is a new Windows update that, funnily enough, won't install for a lot of users.

Microsoft pushed the KB5079391 non-security update on March 26, 2026, featuring "production-quality" improvements, which means it's part of the efforts to make the OS more stable/reliable. It's ironic then that the update refuses to install, throwing up the 0x80073712 error code in a loop. This code means something is broken or missing in the update files, which is preventing Windows from piecing together the update.

The only fix to this is rerolling the update with fixed components, so Microsoft has pulled it from the release channel for now. If someone got the update installed anyway, no reports have shown it actually breaking anything — it's just the installation process itself that's broken. No harm, no foul; but it's still a waste of time and, more importantly, the optics of another broken Windows update are inopportune. "Rollout of this update is temporarily paused due to installation error 0x80073712," Microsoft's website now reads. "To prevent additional impact while the issue is investigated, Microsoft has temporarily limited the availability of this update. As a result, the update temporarily might not be offered through Windows Update."

KB5079391 is not just a minor update, either, as it brings a lot of new features like support for monitors beyond 1,000 Hz. There's a new About page in Settings, and a brand-new Narrator built around Copilot, among other refinements such as a better File Explorer experience. It's an optional update, and it was released in preview, so maybe some of the blame can be absolved, but there's still no workaround for installing it thus far.

Microsoft has blocked the registry trick that allowed Windows 11 users to enable native NVMe support on their PCs, according to members of the My Digital Life forum, who first noticed the change in recent Windows 11 Insider builds.

The trick, which ported a Windows Server 2025 feature to consumer PCs running Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, had delivered up to 85% higher random write performance in earlier benchmarks. Unfortunately, the four FeatureManagement registry overrides that previously activated the native NVMe stack no longer function.

The native NVMe driver (nvmedisk.sys) replaces the legacy storage path that has routed NVMe commands through a SCSI translation layer since before NVMe SSDs existed. Microsoft originally shipped the driver in Windows Server 2025 last December, claiming up to 80% higher IOPS and 45% lower CPU utilization under high I/O loads. The driver binary was already present in Windows 11 but disabled by default.

Within days of the Server 2025 announcement, enthusiasts discovered that toggling specific registry keys forced Windows 11 to load the native driver. Benchmarks varied by drive and CPU, but gains in random I/O were consistent. AS SSD testing by Neowin also showed substantial write speed improvements, and StorageReview's server-side FIO benchmarks measured up to 64.89% faster 4K random reads.

The registry trick came with caveats, though. Third-party SSD management tools like Samsung Magician and Western Digital Dashboard were not compatible with the new driver, and BitLocker could trigger recovery prompts after the driver swap.

While the registry method is dead, users can still enable native NVMe through ViVeTool, according to Deskmodder, a third-party utility that toggles hidden Windows features. The relevant feature IDs are 60786016 and 48433719. This does require an elevated command prompt, and a reboot is still necessary for the change to take effect. The same compatibility risks naturally apply, and users running BitLocker should suspend protection before attempting the change.

It’s not yet known when native NVMe support will be rolled out to Windows 11 25H2 and 26H2 users.

Although we haven't asked for an official survey, it's a safe enough statement that trust in Windows — and, by extension, Microsoft — is at its lowest point since the crash-prone, insecure Windows 98/Me. Despite a strong initial release, Windows 11's subsequent enshittification turned users away, many of whom see the OS as a direct downgrade from the now-unsupported Windows 10.

The company published a surprisingly detailed blog post, promising that the situation will change over the course of this year. In contrast to the usual buzzword-laden corporate promises, the article goes over quite a fair number of upcoming technical and interface improvements for Windows 11. These range from performance, overhead, and reliability improvements to efforts to make the main user interface less annoying.

The list of tweaks is extensive, but we'll go over the main ones, starting with Explorer. For the uninitiated, Explorer isn't just the File Explorer; it comprises elements like the taskbar, desktop, context menus, and many other sundries. Microsoft says that File Explorer will launch faster, with "substantially lower" delays during normal navigation, searching, and bringing up context menus. Common file operations and large file transfers should get a speed and reliability boost.

Microsoft is also taking steps to improve Windows Update. The new target is to curb forced reboots to once a month, let the user pause updates for an indeterminate time, and allow shutdown or reboot without running pending updates. The company says the updates themselves ought to be faster and more reliable, though it didn't go into more detail.

The above changes to Update are welcome, but they're still a band-aid compared to the rebootless hot-patching that's already in use on enterprise-managed machines. The firm made hot-patching the default for enterprise PCs a couple of weeks ago, so there's a glimmer of hope that this will make its way to Home and Professional users at some point.

One of Windows 11's most-repeated criticisms is its RAM usage and performance unevenness. There are far too many and too active background processes that cause CPU usage spikes and lag in desktop usage and games, and are particularly bad for latency-sensitive work like audio production.

Microsoft claims that baseline RAM usage will be reduced and that performance should be more consistent, even under load. This could presumably arrive in the form of much-needed improvements to CPU scheduling and I/O, like the recently-revealed new NVMe driver. Additionally, the company hopes to reduce crashes and improve driver quality/app stability. Both are particularly difficult tasks since they depend on third-party developers.

In a move that should elicit many a gesture of appreciation to the deities, users will once again be able to position the taskbar at the top or sides of the monitor, among other added customization options. Likewise, the atrocious CPU-spiking Start Menu will go under the knife to improve latency and make it better at finding programs and icons (arguably, properly). Some of those improvements will come viaf a rewrite to use the contemporary, 2021-vintage WinUI3 framework.

In short, Windows 11's UI is currently a Cthulhu-madness of new and old frameworks, including the controversial UWP. The move to WinUI3 also includes "shared UI infrastructure" and "core Windows experiences," likely referring to Settings and other apps and dialog boxes. This ought to improve responsiveness and consistency across the entire user interface, thanks to WinUI3's better-structured design. The fact that this API is being open-sourced is also a positive indicator.

The operating system's sloppiness is also under review. Microsoft specifically calls out the intrusiveness of Copilot and promises to "be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows," starting by curbing it in Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad.

Last but by no means least, there are improvements to Bluetooth and USB discovery and connection reliability, more consistent device wake, and developer-oriented improvements to WSL's cross-filesystem performance and network throughput.

To say that these are bold promises is an understatement, given Microsoft's recalcitrant behavior of ignoring user feedback in favor of apparently pleasing whichever marketing executive had a hissy fit that particular day. The fact that the company is making more money than ever also means it has little incentive to change its course.

Perhaps the staggering success of the MacBook Neo and the rise of Linux gaming have forced the execs to reconsider. Here's to hoping these improvements actually materialize.

An unusual new bug that prevents Windows 11 users from accessing their main C: drive on Samsung devices has been identified following a recent system update. A preliminary investigation by Microsoft and Samsung has placed the blame on a Samsung-specific app, rather than an issue with the Windows 11 update itself.

The message “C:\ is not accessible – Access denied” became visible when trying to launch apps or access files on affected devices after installing February 2026 security updates (KB5077181) on certain Samsung devices, including some Galaxy Book 4 laptops and Samsung Desktop models, according to Microsoft in a notice posted online.

The notice confirms that the issue prevents users from launching certain apps, “including Outlook, Office apps, web browsers, system utilities, and Quick Assist.” The report also notes that affected users are unable to access files on the C: drive or perform some administrative tasks. It also prevents users, in some cases, from removing updates, accessing certain system logs, or elevating their user access privileges.

Microsoft confirms that an investigation of the reports, alongside Samsung, identified an issue with the Samsung Galaxy Connect app. The app itself has been removed temporarily from the Microsoft Store, while Samsung has rolled back to a previous version of the app to stop it from appearing on other devices.

Unfortunately, Microsoft also confirms that “recovery for devices already impacted remains limited,” but the company is working with Samsung to “develop and validate solutions” for those who face problems.

No further information is available at the moment, although reports on Reddit suggest the problem relates to broken Access Control Lists in Samsung’s factory image for Windows that trigger when the Samsung Galaxy Connect and Galaxy Share Folder apps are updated. The same Reddit post in the r/sysadmin subreddit also suggests some potential workarounds, although these haven’t been tested or verified by Microsoft, and require some extensive changes to your drive permissions that change the ownership of your entire drive, which isn’t recommended in the long term.

If you’re running one of these devices, including models NP750XGJ, NP750XGL, NP754XGJ, NP754XFG, NP754XGK, DM500SGA, DM500TDA, DM500TGA, and DM501SGA, you may want to remove the affected app from your device or roll back to the currently recommended version as soon as possible. Should your device be affected by a loss of access to your files, however, you’ll have to hold tight for an official solution.

Update: 12.51 EST: The developer of Vib-OS, viralcode, has reached out to say that the video concentrated on "x86 64, which is buggy and mentioned in readme." It is further suggested the content of the video was largely negative "just to get views." If readers want to test out Vib-OS properly "QEMU in Mac is the best place to run it without bugs," encourages the developer.

A new vibe-coded operating system was found to be a woeful attempt at building a PC operating system. This revelation comes via TechTuber Tirimid, who put an AI-coded OS through his regular set of nine quality checks. Unfortunately, Vib-OS v2.2.1 - Multi-Architecture OS with Full GUI, was found to be difficult to set up, and was stuffed with a mix of serious and/or weird bugs. Even some of its headlining features, like running Doom, simply didn’t work, as evidenced by the video embedded below.

Checking out the Vib-OS GitHub resources, the operating system seems to cover all the bases for a useful modern OS. The blurb insists this custom Unix-like OS “features a custom kernel, a modern macOS-inspired graphical user interface, a full TCP/IP networking stack, and a Virtual File System (VFS).” Moreover, it works natively on real hardware like Raspberry Pi 4/5, x86_64 PCs, and Apple Silicon – as well as in emulators like QEMU, according to the author (or possibly AI also wrote the readme).

At version 2.2.X, one might expect a project to have gotten past teething issues such as major advertised features having obvious bugs, or not even working. Tirimid’s testing of the system using QEMU on Linux x86 (as specifically stated to be compatible) shows that Vib-OS still needs a few fixes to bring it up to the level of being competent.

For example, installation issues foreshadowed the bugginess that was to follow. After several hours of ‘suffering,’ Tirimid finally managed to get the OS to boot, though.

The OS starts with a familiar-looking desktop, displaying a File Manager, Terminal, a central apps bar at the bottom of the screen, and some status icons appearing to show things like network connection status and time. It was promising to see the OS boot up with these familiar windows open and ready to do as instructed. However, the OS failed at several basic tasks:

• Trying to connect to the internet – failed
• The New Folder button and context menu in File Manager don’t do anything
• The Notepad app doesn’t seem to load or save, and doesn’t recognize arrow key input
• There’s no Python support apparent, despite GitHub assertions to the contrary
• Games don’t appear to be installed and/or don’t work properly
• The calculator doesn’t work using the on-screen keypad, but is OK (except for decimals) when inputting using the keyboard
• The Clock app doesn’t update unless you activate (click) its window, and the time isn’t the same as the system time in the status bar
• The ‘Browser’ app is an image viewer

The operating system allegedly supports Doom. The readme includes screens marked “Classic Doom running natively with full graphics, input, and sound support.” And it is claimed, independently, that there is a “Full Doom port with graphics, input, and sound” in the OS. Nevertheless, Tirimid’s clicking of the Doom icon in the launcher did nothing.

Giving up on Doom, a pre-installed version of Snake ran, but had serious issues with screen updates and pacing. This poorly executed game managed to get Vib-OS a tick on Tirimid’s 9-point checklist as it technically ran.

Finally, the TechTuber couldn’t even ‘destroy’ this OS from within. It was very limited in understanding Terminal commands, meaning that “even something like a file deletion won’t be possible.”

Tirimid has previously tested other interesting operating systems like RetrOS, Hannah Montana Linux, and Windows XP.

Windows 11 continues to accrue more users, with Microsoft’s latest operating system now installed on nearly 3 out of 4 desktop PCs across the world. StatCounter currently reports that Windows 11 has a market share of 72.78%, jumping from just over 50% from late 2025. In line with this, we also saw a drop in active Windows 10 installs, with the older operating system now only at 26.27% — down from around 45% in the same period and a far cry from the more than 80% it commanded during its heyday.

Microsoft launched Windows 11 in October 2021, but it took several years for it to overtake Windows 10 in popularity. In fact, it wasn’t until several months after the company announced that it was ending support for the older operating system that it finally gained the majority from its predecessor. The biggest issue that stopped many users from upgrading was its stringent hardware requirements, which stopped millions of still working PCs from upgrading. Another issue is Windows 11’s insistence on using a Microsoft account for setting up your computer, with many users balking at giving the company their information.

Many users are exploring workarounds for these hardware and account limitations, but Microsoft is actively making it much more difficult to do so. Because of this, some feel that they’re losing control over their own machines as big tech continues to erode ownership. It could be that this jump in Windows 11 use is more from people upgrading their computers rather than a conscious decision to upgrade their operating system. We’ve even seen a phenomenon where former Windows 10 users are moving towards macOS, or to Linux, instead of buying the Copilot+ PCs that Microsoft and Qualcomm have been pushing hard since it launched in the summer of 2024.

Another thing Windows 11 users have to deal with is the various buggy updates that Redmond has been releasing with frustrating frequency. This ranges from annoying but harmless issues, like a missing sign-in password icon or reduced gaming performance on some Nvidia discrete GPUs, to potentially losing data due to unintended BitLocker recovery, the inability to control your PC in Windows Recovery Environment, and your PC outright refusing to boot after a security update. Things have gotten so bad that Microsoft promised that it would fix Windows 11’s most annoying flaws earlier this year, but we’ll have to wait and see how this will turn out in the coming weeks.

Dave Plummer, the creator of the original Task Manager, has created a dashboard for his personal AI project designed to beat the old Atari classic game Tempest. He shared a picture of it on X, saying that this is what the Windows utility would look like now if he were still at Microsoft. You can see it on Tempest AI's dashboard for yourself live, alongside the code for Tempest AI, on Plummer’s GitHub.

The reimagined Task Manager comes with a retro-futuristic aesthetic, complete with RGB flairs, a couple of speedometer-style dial gauges, and a banger soundtrack running in the background. This looks far different from the Task Manager we see on Windows 11 and definitely caters to niche tastes, so we're not sure Microsoft would allow this design aesthetic even if Plummer were still at the company.

Nevertheless, this small exercise is a fun “what-if” for many Windows enthusiasts, which is a nice reprieve amidst all the bugs that have recently been appearing in updates. Users have recently encountered several major issues, including a broken Windows Recovery Environment, unintentional BitLocker activation, and even one that made affected PCs unable to boot.

But despite the cool aesthetics, this isn’t designed to run in the background to display how your Windows PC is performing. When asked about the dashboard’s impact on the processor and memory while it's running, Plummer said that it “burns about 75% of the GPU at 30 fps on my M2 Mac Pro, so it’s ‘not insubstantial’ with its GPU demands!”

Plummer originally built the Windows Task Manager during his free time, but it was so good that it eventually became a part of the of Windows NT. Many of the components of the Task Manager app we’re familiar with today appeared in Windows 2000, and Microsoft has continued to update the program across multiple versions of Windows.

A recent-ish update to the Task Manager was when the company switched RAM speed units from MHz to MT/s in May 2024. Microsoft also revamped the app's design in 2022, which gave it a new look for Windows 11.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a cybersecurity alert warning the public of the increasing malware attacks on ATMs. According to the FBI FLASH document (PDF), threat actors are breaking into these machines using generic keys to open their maintenance cabinets. They remove the storage drive, load malware onto it—or replace it with a compromised one—and then reboot the machine to load the payload.

Ploutus is one malware used in these types of attacks, in which it exploits the eXtensions for Financial Services (XFS) software. ATMs use XFS to communicate with the bank network to authorize every transaction, but Ploutus overrides this and issues its own commands to XFS. This allows attackers to take over the machines and make withdrawals without a card or account, essentially forcing the machine to just dispense money.

This type of attack is called “jackpotting,” and the agency said that out of the 1,900 reported attacks since 2020, 700, or more than a third, happened last year alone. Furthermore, losses from just 2025 are already over $20 million.

The agency said that the attack isn’t tied to a specific bank, financial network, or ATM brand as it targets the Windows operating system commonly used in these machines. So, if there’s a vulnerability in the OS, bad actors can take advantage of this across many cash terminals even before they can be patched. We’ve even seen one busted ATM showing a Windows 7 login page, showing us how old these cash-dispensing appliances can get (Windows 7 was released in 2009 and discontinued in 2020, with paid extended security updates lasting until 2023).

There are several suggestions on what financial institutions can do to mitigate these attacks, including monitoring their machines for unauthorized files and executables, disabling all USB ports, replacing generic locks with keypads, and adding a secondary alarm/security system on top of the already existing one.

But given that there are hundreds of thousands of ATMs deployed within the U.S. alone, we expect these recommendations will take time to be implemented. Thankfully, the general public isn’t directly affected by these attacks, unlike Bitcoin ATM fraud, which reported losses of $333 million to private individuals. However, this still needs to be addressed as soon as possible, as it makes everything more expensive for everyone, as the banks or insurance companies will eventually have to pass on these losses to the everyday consumer.

For the release of Windows XP, Microsoft picked out a default wallpaper featuring a then-random rolling green hill and named it "Bliss." Almost immediately, it became a worldwide sensation, largely due to the operating system's prevalence, turning common terrain into an icon. Decades later, it's hard to find that hill in the same condition because it's usually covered in dead grass, but one lucky Redditor managed to capture it at the perfect time of the year.

windows from r/windows/comments/1r8iper/windows_xp_bliss_hill_looking_almost_identical_to

In the picture above, the hill looks almost identical to the original wallpaper, and that's because OP was very lucky. This is actually a privately owned hill in Sonoma County, in the small town of Napa, and it's usually covered in vineyards all year round. When the original wallpaper was taken back in 1996, photographer Charles O'Rear had caught it at a rather fortunate time. The vineyards had been removed from the area due to pest control, allowing the grass to grow emerald and picturesque.

Redditor u/SuperPJG123 basically replicated that luck and managed to travel past the hill when it was at its peak — uninterrupted by human intervention. The vineyards and resulting dead grass are gone, and nature has reclaimed its property. Over the years, many people have visited this area and remarked on how the "Bliss Hill" is no longer the same; left to rot unattended, without understanding the nuances of the situation. Even in vineyard season, the hill doesn't look bad, per se, just not as visually striking.

The original picture was captured on a Mamiya RZ67 medium-format film camera, while this modern one was likely snapped in the auto mode of a smartphone, so there's a bit of a drop in sophistication, but we digress. The clouds also look a bit different, understandably so. And the iconic blue sky isn't as punchy, which Charles O'Rear claimed was never altered. Nostalgia aside, it's great to catch up with an old friend.

Last year, we reported on a speed test feature coming to Windows, built right into the taskbar, where you could gauge your internet connection without venturing out to a browser. In reality, it was more like a shortcut that would still open Bing and take you to a miniaturized version of Ookla's Speedtest. Today, that feature is finally here in the Insider program, as part of Build 26100.7918 and 26200.7918.

In these updates pushed to the Release Preview channel, you'll now see an option to "Perform speed test" when you right-click on the network icon or open the Wi-Fi/cellular quick settings. Upon clicking, your default browser will open up Bing, where you'll see a simplified Ookla interface with a meter in the middle, and three stats below: Latency, Download, and Upload.

That means this is technically not a "native" feature, rather just a website link in your taskbar. Still, for the uninitiated, it can be a convenient way to check their internet speed. Let's say you're in a game and suddenly start experiencing packet loss; instead of Alt-tabbing into a browser for a speed test, you can just right-click on your Ethernet icon and go there directly.

This feature will save you a click or two; however, some users may be disappointed by yet another web wrapper implemented inside Windows. Windows has enjoyed a poor run of stability recently, with even Microsoft recognizing its slack, so a built-in taskbar speedtest is probably not high on most users' list of priorities.

The new Insider builds also come with a host of other improvements, such as new emojis, new backup & restore capabilities, enhanced camera controls for supported devices, and more. System Monitor (Sysmon) is also now natively implemented within Windows for greater threat detection and monitoring. Make sure to check out the release notes for the full list of changes.

A recent change to Microsoft's Windows 11 downloads is reportedly stopping some users and third-party sources from downloading Windows 11 ISOs from its servers. Originally reported by Neowin, multiple Windows Insider users report they are unable to download Microsoft's latest Insider ISOs. The team behind Rufus also chimed in, saying it is having the same issue and Rufus is unable to install the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview ISOs.

These download issues don't appear to be bugs or glitches. All of the Windows Insiders who have complained about this issue say they can't download the latest Insider ISOs because Microsoft is blocking their IP addresses. It's also happening with users on multiple ISPs and through VPNs, confirming that this isn't an ISP problem.

One of Rufus' developers backed up these users' reports, claiming that Microsoft is intentionally breaking the application's Fideo scripts, preventing Rufus from downloading the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview builds through the app directly. Apparently, there is no direct evidence that Microsoft is the culprit, but the developer, Pete Batard, noted that breaking the script requires active involvement. If you are unaware, Fido scripts are part of PowerShell and are used to automate Windows ISO downloads.

There's still no confirmation from Microsoft that it has implemented some type of blocker to prevent users and third-party applications from downloading its latest Insider previews. It is also reportedly affecting at least some Windows Server Insider preview builds as well.

If this isn't a bug, but a purposeful block, Microsoft might be attempting to steer users clear of third-party applications such as Rufus. Neowin theorizes that Microsoft might be trying to steer users towards using its Media Creation Tool, a tool that Microsoft is now updating on a monthly basis to provide users with the latest Windows 11 builds. This theory makes sense in light of what Rufus is dealing with, but it doesn't really explain why Windows Insiders are having this problem, who are downloading the latest Insider Preview ISOs through Microsoft directly and not through a third party.

There's also nothing ruling out the chance that Microsoft could be blocking the entire Insider Preview platform for legitimate reasons. There could be a major bug affecting its servers or the builds themselves. Either way, thankfully, for now this issue is only seemingly affecting the Windows Insider program, and not the official versions of Windows 11. You can still download those ISOs without any problems.

Microsoft is switching gears with its update model for 2026 and is offering a first-half-of-the-year update for Windows 11 for the first time since 2021. The trillion-dollar software giant confirmed in a Windows IT Pro blog post that the newly-released Windows 11 26H1 update is designed to only support devices featuring "new silicon". Devices running Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 ARM SoCs are the only devices that support 26H1 for the time being.

Windows 11 26H1 isn't any ordinary update; Microsoft also revealed that 26H1 runs on a different (newer) codebase than Windows 11 25H2, codenamed Bromine. Because of this code disparity, devices running 26H1 will be stuck on that version for the foreseeable future and won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11 26H2 when it debuts later this year. However, Microsoft did confirm that 26H1 devices will have "a path to update in a future Windows release," confirming that the existing germanium builds of Windows (24H2/25H2) will likely be updated to Bromine, probably next year. Microsoft already ruled out swapping to Bromine for 26H2.

26H1's release is very similar to Windows 11 24H2, as both were and are launched to support bleeding-edge ARM devices before the mainstream Windows codebase could catch up. Windows 11 24H2 was launched in June of 2024 and strictly only worked on ARM-exclusive Copilot+ PCs until October, when Microsoft finally released the update to all systems. 26H1 is different, however, in that it appears to be strictly aimed at supporting next-generation hardware and doesn't have any noteworthy features (if any features) over 25H2.

This is also the first time Microsoft has released a "major" Windows update since Windows 10 21H1 in 2021. 26H1 and 21H1 have their own similarities in that 21H1 was also a minor update that only brought a handful of updates to Windows 10.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft will continue to split its development branches in the future strictly to stay on top of future hardware support. This is the second time Microsoft has been apparently forced to provide dedicated Windows 11 builds for specific hardware. For now, Snapdragon X2 is the only SoC that supports (and requires) 26H1, but Microsoft's wording suggests there will be more hardware soon that will need 26H1's codebase to run. Leaks, rumors, and educated guesses claim that Nvidia's upcoming N1X chip will also be strictly supported through 26H1.

For now, though, what is important to know is that Windows 11 26H1 is a device-specific update, so you won't have to worry about upgrading to it. If you already have a device that needs 26H1, it will have 26H1 out of the box. If you're on Windows 11 25H2, 24H2, or any older update, you can skip 26H1 and focus on 26H2, which will be Microsoft's "actual" feature update geared towards all mainstream Windows devices coming out in the second half of this year.

Microsoft is issuing new Secure Boot certificates to Windows PC users, as the initial certificates are reaching the end of a planned lifespan after 15 years and are set to expire in June 2026.

The company has been issuing new certificates as part of Windows updates for personal users, businesses, and schools that let Microsoft manage their updates.

Secure Boot is a process that runs at startup, prior to Windows loading, and uses cryptographic keys to verify that only trusted software can run. In a blog post, Nuno Costa, the partner director for Windows servicing and delivery, writes that "Retiring old certificates and introducing new ones is a standard industry practice that helps prevent aging credentials from becoming a weak point and keeps platforms aligned with modern security expectations."

But if you bought a PC in 2025, you're probably already set. Costa writes that Microsoft has been working with OEM partners, which have been obtaining new certificates since 2024. Machines from OEMs starting from 2024 and "almost all" systems shipped in 2025 already have new Secure Boot certificates. So if you bought one of the best ultrabooks or best gaming laptops, you should be in the clear.

If you let Microsoft to handle your PC updates, your certificates will be installed through the standard Windows update process. Microsoft is also recommending ensuring you have the latest firmware from vendor support pages. Microsoft points out that some servers or IOT devices may have different processes, and that a "fraction of devices" may require firmware updates from manufacturers before new Secure Boot certificates can be applied through Windows Update.

If your certificate expires, your PC should function as expected, though its security will be compromised.

"As new boot‑level vulnerabilities are discovered, affected systems become increasingly exposed because they can no longer install new mitigations," Costa writes. “Over time, this may also lead to compatibility issues, as newer operating systems, firmware, hardware, or Secure Boot–dependent software may fail to load."

Of course, if you're running an unsupported version of Windows, including Windows 10, which ended support in October 2025, you won't get Windows updates, including the new Secure Boot certificates. (That is, with the exception of people and businesses taking part in the Extended Security Updates program).

That also gives Microsoft another chance to encourage its customers to switch to Windows 11, but this time for security's sake: "We continue to encourage customers to always use a supported version of Windows for best performance and protection."

IT professionals have been on top of the certificates for quite some time. Back in November, the Windows IT Pro blog put up a "Secure Boot playbook."

While some recent Windows updates have caused system instability or other issues, you're still better off keeping your system up to date, especially if it's affecting your computer's security for years to come.

Microsoft is preparing a major change to how printers are supported in Windows 11, pulling the plug on drivers that primarily support older hardware. Beginning with a non-security update that was released on January 15, Microsoft will no longer support legacy V3 and V4 printer drivers, which were announced as deprecated in September 2023, Windows Central reports.

The policy is part of broader plans to modernize the Windows print platform following the release of Windows 10 21H2, which removed the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers. Under these plans, users on Windows 11 or Windows Server 2025 and later will no longer be able to install new printer drivers via Windows Update.

Microsoft says existing drivers on Windows Update can still be updated, but only on a case-by-case basis. As of January 15, new print driver submissions are being blocked by default and routed through a manual review workflow that requires explicit justification for why a legacy driver should still be serviced.

Now that support has officially ended, users of printers that rely on V3 or V4 drivers may find that their printers fail to install or stop working altogether. Microsoft, however, notes that most users will be unaffected because most newer printers use driver architectures. For those who do run into problems, Microsoft recommends that users contact their printer manufacturer and update to a supported driver or upgrade to a more modern printing solution.

This is ultimately a servicing and security decision. The traditional Windows print driver ecosystem has long since been a thorn in the side of Microsoft, with issues such as the print spooler vulnerability ‘PrintNightmare’ and the burden of supporting thousands of vendor-specific drivers making the entire ecosystem increasingly difficult to maintain. By narrowing what can be distributed via Windows Update, Microsoft is putting responsibility for legacy hardware support back in the hands of manufacturers.

From July 1, 2026, Windows will change its internal driver ranking order rules to “prefer” the built-in Microsoft IPP class driver when multiple options are available. A year later, on July 1, 2027, third-party printer driver updates delivered via Windows Update will be restricted to security-related fixes only.

With these changes, Microsoft also appears to be laying the groundwork for a harder lean on Windows Protected Print Mode, which was introduced with recent Windows 11 24H2 releases. When enabled, it removes third-party printer drivers entirely and restricts printing to Microsoft’s class drivers. While this is an optional feature for now, it hints at where Microsoft intends for the platform to go in the future.

If you've recently updated your Windows and are experiencing gaming instability despite owning one of the best graphics cards, the Windows 11 KB5074109 January update may be to blame. Amid reports of framerate drops, gaming artifacts, and black screens, Nvidia has recommended uninstalling the update as a temporary workaround while the chipmaker investigates the issues.

"Even though it started after a Windows 11 update, we are looking into it. As far as I know, the only way to resolve it appears to be uninstalling KB5074109," wrote Manuel, a Nvidia representative, on the official GeForce forums.

The January 2026 security update is a mandatory one because it addresses 114 security vulnerabilities and resolves multiple issues, including battery drain on systems with NPUs. However, the major update has done more harm than good, particularly leaving owners of GeForce graphics cards on the short end of the stick. There don't appear to be any reports of AMD Radeon users struggling in the meantime.

The first user feedback focused on performance issues, with multiple GeForce gamers reporting framerate drops of 15 to 20 FPS. The performance hit was only the tip of the iceberg. As the month progressed, reports of instability began to build in the GeForce forums, with users expressing frustration with gaming artifacts and random black screens. Initially, many believed Nvidia's GeForce driver was the culprit, as the chipmaker released two driver updates (582.28 and 591.86) in the same month as the problematic KB5074109 security update.

However, many affected users reported that uninstalling the KB5074109 update restored their gaming systems to top condition. Nvidia appears to back the finding, as Manuel has recommended the same workaround while the company continues its investigation.

The KB5074109 update was problematic all around. Microsoft acknowledged that the update impeded some systems from booting correctly, and consequently, affected users had to resort to Windows Recovery to restore regular operation. Since then, Microsoft has released a couple of updates, one of which (KB5074105) fixes the black-screen issue. However, it's optional, so you may have to install it manually if you want to try that fix.

KB5074109 is a critical security update and mandatory; your system likely already has it installed unless you've disabled Windows updates. If you're not sure, you can check by navigating to Settings > Windows Update > Update history. You can also find the option to remove the irritating update in the same section. The performance hit and instability issues don't affect every single GeForce-powered gaming system. If you're in the clear, you should leave the update alone since it makes your system more secure.

Complaints surrounding Windows 11's buggy updates and glitchy UI have apparently finally reached the ears of Microsoft, and the company wants to do something about it in 2026. The Verge reports that Microsoft is now focusing on fixing Windows 11's core issues for the rest of the year, in a process known as "swarming".

The Verge received a statement from Windows and devices president Pavan Davuluri, who claims that feedback from Windows Insiders to fix Windows 11's core issues has been loud and clear. Davuluri further claimed that Microsoft needs to improve Windows "in ways that are meaningful for people", and this year will see Microsoft improving performance, reliability, and the "overall experience" of Windows.

Windows 11 has faced backlash since its launch for having "bloated UI", inconsistent performance, and stricter system requirements than Windows 10. Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 module to exist on the host computer to officially work (without workarounds).

Lately, Windows 11 users have had to deal with severe problems affecting the OS's basic functionality, including boot failures after installing the latest (January 2026) security update. Last year, we also saw other security updates break Windows 10 and Windows 11's recovery tools, preventing users from saving their files when reinstalling Windows through some methods.

Performance has been another concern users have had; a Windows enthusiast benchmarked all editions of Windows, dating back to Windows XP, and found that Windows 11 could not win a single test he ran, thanks to the OS's larger footprint compared to Windows 10 and older versions.

Pavan Davuluri's comments don't reflect the first time we have heard Microsoft promise to improve Windows 11 performance. Microsoft promised to fix Windows 11 gaming performance specifically last December, and promised to accelerate BitLocker storage performance in the same month, too.

A few Windows 11 users have been affected by a bug from the latest Windows 11 security update, which resulted in their PCs refusing to turn on. According to an AskWoody forum post, there were reports that some devices encountered an “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” error after installing the January 2026 Windows security update. The affected computers came up with a black screen and a message that says “Your device ran into a problem and needs a restart. You can restart.”\

This isn’t the first issue that came out of Microsoft’s latest Windows security update, with some PCs refusing to shut down or hibernate, and another bug resulting in Cloud-based apps, like Outlook, OneDrive, and Dropbox, not working, as reported by Windows Central. The company has since released emergency updates to address these problems, but it seems that there is no fix for the unbootable error just yet. This is also the most catastrophic error yet, and the only workaround for this is to enter the Windows Recovery Environment and uninstall the latest security patch.

These security updates are supposed to keep Windows users secure, but it seems that they’re causing more harm than good at the moment. This also isn’t the first time that an update wreaked havoc on the popular operating system, with the August 2025 security update breaking recovery tools on both Windows 10 and 11. Another security update in October brought another issue, with USB keyboards and mice not working in Windows Recovery Environment, meaning users cannot actually do anything to troubleshoot their PC.

It’s unclear what caused the latest issue, and we’re still waiting on Microsoft to release an emergency update that will fix the problem. However, this is probably easier said than done, especially given that millions of PCs with a nearly infinite number of different hardware configurations out there have Windows 11 installed. But even if only a small number of Windows 11 users are affected by this catastrophic error, it’s still an issue that needs to be addressed quickly.

An ATM in England has replaced its Welcome screen with the Windows 7 Professional login screen, asking for a username and password instead of your PIN. According to The Register, this particular machine is located in Manchester, which is known for its bars and music scene, and often required cash transactions back in the day. However, anyone who tries to get their Pounds from this particular machine will be in for a surprise, as the display seemingly wants you to log into your Windows account before you can enter the four- or six-digit code you need to get money from your debit card.

Windows 7 is arguably one of the best versions of the ubiquitous operating system, cleaning up the mess left by Windows Vista, and second only to Windows XP. However, this OS is 17 years old right now, meaning it should be old enough to drive. It was launched in 2009 to the general public but was succeeded by Windows 8 in 2012. Still, it soldiered on for a few more years, losing mainstream support in 2015, before Microsoft finally dropped extended support in 2020.

But even though it’s been six years since Windows 7 was out of circulation, that does not mean that it’s already completely erased from commercial and industrial applications. Some businesses follow the ethos of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” which apparently stands true for these cash dispensing machines. Using an old operating system that no longer receives updates might feel dangerous, especially for an ATM. However, the bank likely didn’t bother replacing the system because it’s probably not connected to the public internet.

The Windows login screen isn’t supposed to reveal itself on an operating ATM, but this likely happened because of an update (likely not from Microsoft, but from a third-party provider) or a software crash that forced the machine to reboot without the bank’s IT services noticing it. The bank’s administrator needs to log in to Windows first, either remotely or through the terminal at the bank's ATM, before customers can start withdrawing money from it. Unfortunately, that means you won’t be getting cash from that particular machine, even if you’re desperate and have tried logging in with your username and password.

Microsoft has quietly removed ‘find album information’ and ‘update album info online’ tools from the Media Player apps supplied with Windows 11. We checked both Windows Media Player Legacy, and the latest Media Player app, and neither could connect to retrieve album artwork, track names, and other useful data like genre/composer, when an audio CD was popped in to play. Several music CDs were tried.

It might be understandable that Microsoft let this feature wither away from Windows Media Player Legacy – as it is a legacy tool. The removal of this feature in the Legacy app was confirmed by The Register earlier this week. Microsoft PR didn’t respond to that site’s queries about whether the service has been retired intentionally.

When we tested the Legacy app with a few audio CDs, we observed that musicmatch-ssl.xboxlive.com wasn’t reachable by the ‘Find Album Information’ service that is built-in.

Our efforts shifted to the new Media Player app that is the default tool for consuming video and audio, as well as handling playlists, on the latest Windows 11 packing PCs. Sadly, this app suffered from a very similar issue. The error message when I tried to update album info online read, “We couldn’t connect to the service. Check your internet connection, then try again.” There was no issue with my internet connection.

Alternative CD audio media players and rippers are available, but it is a shame those built-into the latest Windows OS distributions have been neutered in this way.

Not many computers ship with optical drives nowadays. We have reported on just a handful of PC releases in 2025 which involved optical drive hardware, ready to handle media like Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs.

Some movie, music, and computer enthusiasts are still very fond of their optical media. Even though we are firmly in the ‘age of streaming,’ movie and music aficionados still prefer physical media due to the quality they offer, and the shifting-sands upon which streaming providers like Netflix, Amazon Prime Movies, Spotify, and others, build their offerings.

Microsoft just released a new feature to Windows Insiders that some people are going to love. According to the Windows Insider Blog, administrators who install Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) from the Dev & Beta Channels can now uninstall the Microsoft Copilot App on managed devices. This policy, called RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp, would uninstall the Microsoft Copilot app for users.

However, the device to which this is applied must meet the following criteria: it must have both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot installed on the system; the Microsoft Copilot app wasn’t installed by the user; and the Microsoft Copilot app wasn’t launched in the past 28 days. This means that even though admins can now remove the Microsoft Copilot app, users would still have the Microsoft 365 Copilot app installed on their system. The former is the free app preinstalled on Windows 11, while the latter is a paid service included with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Aside from that, the last condition — not having launched the Microsoft Copilot app in the past 28 days — might be a bit difficult for the average user to meet. That’s because the Microsoft Copilot app has “Auto start on log in” turned on by default. And even if you were able to turn that off and disable the app on Task Manager’s list of Startup Apps, it’s easy to accidentally launch the app with its Windows + C, Alt + Space, or the Copilot shortcut keys.

Nevertheless, administrators can still try removing the Microsoft Copilot app in the Group Policy Editor. To do so, you need to go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows AI > Remove Microsoft Copilot App. But if you want to explore Microsoft Copilot and its AI capabilities, and your administrator uninstalled it on your PC, you can easily reinstall it — no need to ask your administrator to reverse what they did.

Nevertheless, this might be a welcome change for those who do not use AI tools, and even those who prefer using competing AI models. After all, even though AI is a great tool when used with intention, we really don’t need it everywhere — and Intel has shown this in its keynote at CES 2026. Even Dell has admitted that consumers don’t really care about AI PCs, which is something that Microsoft pushed with the launch of Copilot+ PCs in 2024.

Windows 11 gets a bad rep in the community because of its higher baseline overhead, stringent hardware requirements, UI regressions, and more - not to mention the forced Microsoft hooks that keep getting worse by the day. Moreover, when placed in a rather unscientific test by TrigrZolt, comparing six different generations of Windows with each other, it placed dead last in pretty much every individual test, though the situation is a bit more nuanced.

Six Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptops were used in the test, featuring a Core i5-2520M CPU and 8GB of RAM, with a 256GB hard drive — running the latest versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11. That setup alone should tell you how the methodology employed here is skewed toward favoring older software. Windows 11 isn't even officially supported on these components.

Regardless, the experiment begins with a startup test, where Windows 8.1 booted up the quickest, while Windows 11 was the slowest. Both of these versions (and Windows 10) have Fast Boot capability that older Windows editions lack. In the video, we also see that Windows 11 struggles to load the taskbar for a bit, an infamous quirk of the OS that's been heavily scrutinized ever since launch.

Then comes the storage test, where it's Windows XP that takes the cake, with only 18.9GB of space taken up for all the apps installed. The same number of programs, along with Windows itself, took 37.3GB of hard drive real estate on Windows 11, so there's definitely a lot of extras there. But Windows 11 actually came third here, behind Windows Vista, at 37.8GB, and the revered Windows 7, at a whopping 44.6GB.

Next up is RAM management where Windows XP is the winner once again, consuming only 0.8GB of system memory at idle, while Windows 11's appetite grew to 3.3GB on average; it jumped to 3.7GB at one point. This is because of the added resources the OS loads in the background, including persistent telemetry.

Older hardware with less RAM, therefore, will be more susceptible to sluggishness on Windows 11. Keep in mind, TrigrZolt is also running a system with a hard drive, which are outdated at this point regardless of your operating system loyalties. Any modern system with a decent CPU and NVMe SSD will likely mask over the general inefficiency Windows 11 shows, plus options like debloat tools and Xbox FSE can further help here.

Now we move on to the second part of the RAM management test, where the YouTuber loaded as many browser tabs as possible before the memory hits 5GB of utilization. Since Firefox and Chrome don't load webpages properly anymore on archaic Windows versions, a more widely-compatible browser called Supermium was used across all devices.

Once again, Windows 11 places dead last here, only being able to load a measly 49 tabs. Compare that to the insane 252 tabs Windows 8.1 was able to load. Even the older Windows XP managed 50 tabs, and that's because it kept crashing past that number because of its paging file failing to keep up, not because it had hit the 5GB memory ceiling.

Our fourth test is for battery life and, of course, Windows 11 died first here, while Windows XP walked away with the best endurance. Though, the delta between all the devices was only about two minutes so it won't make a difference in real-world usage. All the laptops had 100% battery health, too, and the same program was run to drain them as quickly as possible.

Moving on, exporting an audio file in Audacity once again put Windows 11 at fifth place, only ahead of Windows Vista which was experiencing an unusual delay, otherwise all laptops finished around the same time. The same fate follows Windows 11 when it came to rendering a video, finishing in last, with Windows 10 taking first place. Here, Windows XP and Vista couldn't load the OpenShot Video Editor that was used, so they were disqualified.

In application opening times, Windows 11 got last place across all five programs that were tested: File Explorer, MS Paint, Calculator, Adobe Reader, and VLC Media Player. Older versions of Adobe Reader and VLC were used to ensure compatibility with all six operating systems, so there's a bit of performance left on the table, but still the native apps didn't win any awards either.

After so many consecutive losses, Windows 11 actually secured third place in one half of the web browsing test where it had to load an image, but fell to last place again when visiting the Google Images and Microsoft Account login websites. When transferring files, though, Windows 11 snatched second place, only behind Windows 10, while placing fourth in the malware scan test using MalwareBytes — Windows 7 won this one.

Finally, we arrive at our last test, which are benchmarks. Windows XP took the crown in CPU-Z's single threaded load while Windows 7 topped the multithreaded charts, and Windows 11 was fourth in both. Geekbench was also tested, but the versions are different for Windows 10/11 and the rest. Between those two, Windows 11 scored higher in single-core but lower in multicore. Among the older operating systems, Windows Vista walked away with the highest score.

TrigrZolt also tested CrystalDiskMark and Windows 11 netted a decent third place here, tied with Windows 10, while Windows XP won. In Cinebench R10 single-core, Windows 8.1 got its second victory of the day, pushing Windows 11 down to fourth place. Multicore was even worse for Windows 11 because it only beat Windows 10 by a few points to save itself from scoring last; Windows Vista walked away as the fastest.

All in all, this was a pretty devastating showing for Windows 11 where it couldn't even win a single test. However, the hardware is just so outdated at this point that it doesn't represent the Windows 11 experience faithfully. The laptops were never designed to run a modern operating system, neither does Microsoft's latest OS support this hardware.

If you were to use modern laptops that came out in the Windows 10/11 era, the results would likely be skewed the other way. The omission of an SSD, especially, is strange since that's a component every edition of Windows will benefit from, and something that truly does hold back Windows 11 here. Though, it's still a little embarrassing, considering Windows 10 didn't suffer nearly as much without it.

The YouTuber himself mentions that this test represents historic value more than practicality. He ended up giving the overall win to Windows 8.1, saying how fluid and fast it felt, despite being ridiculed at the time of its release. It's also more visually consistent with Windows 10/11 than it is with Windows 7/Vista, so it doesn't look outdated.

A better methodology would've been to use flagship — or even midrange, for that matter — laptops from every generation: custodians of that era of Windows, so that each version had the best shot at performing at its full potential. As it stands right now, while it's quite funny to see Microsoft's increasingly AI-riddled OS loose against legacy offerings, the test just wasn't set up fairly to begin with.

Microsoft has been gradually making it harder to activate Windows (and other products) without an internet connection. Most recently, it started clamping down on local accounts that could bypass OOBE sign-in, and now we're seeing reports that another legacy method has been retired. Phone activation, where you could call Microsoft to activate Windows & Office, no longer works, as Ben Kleinberg demonstrates in a new YouTube video.

Now, it'd be reasonable to assume that something as archaic as calling to activate your license had probably been sunset long ago. However, you'll be surprised to learn that Microsoft still lists it as a viable method in its support docs. This is particularly important for people on older operating systems like Windows 7, who expect an offline alternative to Microsoft’s now-online-only activation systems.

Moreover, this ordeal was necessary for Ben because he was using an OEM key that could not be activated directly within Windows 7, as the activation servers for that version are effectively dead. The video shows that calling the listed number plays an automated message saying “support for product activation has moved online.”

After the call, he also received a text message containing a link to the modern Microsoft Product Activation Portal we know today. Upon visiting the site, Ben was required to sign in with a Microsoft account, which immediately defeated the purpose of activating the call.

Initially, he couldn’t get the confirmation ID on his iPhone using Firefox, but switching to Safari on his laptop resolved the issue. This wasn’t a device-specific problem, just a browser-related hiccup. Eventually, Ben acquired the numbers he needed, and both his copy of Windows 7 and Office 2010 were successfully activated.

The video concludes on a bittersweet note, highlighting that call activation is effectively dead. However, users can still access the portal on a computer or phone to complete the process. Ironically, the entire reason for calling Microsoft in the first place was that Ben couldn’t activate Windows 7 from within the OS, but now that a website exists, there’s no need to call anyway.

Unfortunately, a Microsoft account is required, which Ben complained about and mirrors the concern many users have, even in the latest Windows 11 builds today.