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Almost nine gigabytes in size: Windows update 24H2 creates an undeletable cache file
(www.digitec.ch)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.
They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.
I’m honestly waiting for a crowdstrike level BSOD from one of their updates at some point. At that level, corporations would recover in the same way they did from crowdstrike, but consumers who didn’t understand how to roll back, or restore from backup, restore windows, etc would be livid and hopefully it would create some awareness on better understanding and control of the products you buy and use
Microsoft has largely mitigated this concern by pushing all their fresh updates to the consumers for testing before pushing them to their sensitive business customers.
Except most of those people who don't know enough to recover most likely also use the default "all your data are belong to OneDrive" and thus won't lose absolutely everything and no one group of livid people will both be livid enough and big enough at the same time for a lot to change...
They also released an update that broke dual boot Linux installations. Still feeling that one
Oh right! Forgot about that one! FOUR major screw ups.
i think that one is not a screw up...
They've done that periodically for years.
I don't dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.
In this case it didn't matter how it's installed
If windows is on a separate drive it's hard for it to actually ruin the Linux install. The fix was to use a USB boot drive to launch Linux and fix the boot manager.
Part of my job is keeping all of the endpoints my work manages up to date with patch compliance. I've had to create exceptions for the past two windows 11 updates because they won't run on most machines for no reason. It's been a pain in the ass. I can't just add the machines to the exception list without doing basic troubleshooting because "procedure" and I've spent so much time doing absolutely unnecessary shit.
Remember the dozens of times a Windows 10 update could potentially wipe your personal data?
Your files are EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT THEM
I have avoided Win 11 by disabling TPM in BIOS. Because I expect MS would eventually figure out some way to install 11 otherwise.
Just so you know, if your UEFI isn't password protected, Windows can change settings in there. I haven't heard of that ever happening but I wouldn't be surprised if it would some day.
That's not even counting the ones that make your user experience worse on purpose
I'd say they started the misstepping after they "fixed" Vista with windows 7. After that, they tried to hard instead of slow rolling. Windows 10 was good but 11 is just....windows 8 again.
Windows ME was the original mistake edition. It was terrible.
Lol look who forgot about Win 98, the version so bad they made an SE version with a free upgrade.
MS has been alternating good releases and bad releases for most of my life.
Well yes. But in more recent times for the examples I was giving
The 17th anniversary of vistas release is coming up in January of next year.
Wonder what's next for Microsoft to fuck up. I was the equivalent of Linux minimal but for windows 11.... I guess I want server core.
Its all mostly moot to me. I have a windows 10 drive in my computer. Its full of old games I might move back over and play again. I haven't booted it at all this year. I work on winblows at work and come home to Linux. Its been that way since for twenty years.
At work I block a lot of 'telemetry' including microsoft. I've considered a full asn block of microsoft for user machines since I use WSUS. Microsoft has decided to depreciate it. Probably due to me stopping them from installing office 365 trials and copilot garbage. I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that. Far too much garbage for me to trust them at home.
Duuude, my WSUS has been miserable to work with. I switched most of what I can get away with to PDQ deploy. My office setting will not allow copilot or 365. Im doing my W11 deployment this week and last, it's been fine. But WSUS going down is gonna make things way harder. But apparently it'll still work, it just won't be developed anymore.
Microsoft won though ...I'm pricing out intune and azure hybrid systems now.
Windows has always had broken versions. The old advice was to always skip every other version.
NT, Millennium, Vista, 8... 10... 11... More misses than hits really. And the bad updates are turning hits into misses.
That list mixes NT kernel OS's with Win95 OS's to support a bad hypothesis.
The NT line is:
NT 3.1, NT 3.51, NT 4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, 7,8, 10.
NT 4, 2000, and XP were all great. Vista was good on good hardware. 7 was good. 8 was bad, 10 good, 11 bad.
If you take the 95 path it's 95 good, 98 good, Me bad.
The only pattern is 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good, 11 bad.
Anyone who says NT was ever bad is out of their mind. That was the thing that saved Windows since 95’s kernel wasn’t modern. Anything that crashed took the entire system down. Yeah, that was fun times kiddos.
Well 11 is NT as was 8. Although it's only problem was the UI.
Anything past 98 was/is NT. My point is NT’s kernel is actually quite good, it’s the rest that people complain about.
Me came after 98 and wasn't NT. There was also 98 SE.
But I agree with you.
I don’t count ME, that was basically 98SE as a hot garbage patch. I’ll concede on 98SE, that was the best of that kernel and I do have found memories of it in the good old Unreal (not engine) days.
Also realize that I HATE Windows. Too much legacy that no one allows them to dump and then complains that it’s got a bad UI. Personally, my favorite is 11. I’m a macOS/*nix lover but I’m forced to use 11 at work. I appreciate Microsoft unifying the UI into something that doesn’t look and work like a decade old system. But then it still has problems like system search being abysmal, the registry still getting clogged with garbage, wake from sleep being 10 seconds or more long (even on high end equipment). It’s just, ancient at this point. There’s no good reason our personal devices give a much better experience these days.
If Me is a 98 patch then 8 is a patch too.
11 is bad primarily because of privacy. There are also problems like Control Panel and Settings are still separate with overlapping controls. You never know where to look. It's been 12 years of confusion.
There are also minor annoyances like the start bar can't be moved to the sides. They coded that into Windows 95 in a few months decades ago but can't add it after 3 years now.
Windows 98 sucked. Windows 98SE was... well I won't say good, but it was ok.
That's a hell of a caveat for an OS meant to be run on consumer hardware. You might get away with that kind of caveat if MS only offered in on good hardware and people went and put it on non-recommended hardware on their own accord. But that's not the case, Vista sucked when running on hardware that met MS's specs, so it sucked.
So the real pattern is Win 3.0 sucked, 3.1 ok, 95 sucked, 95B ok, 98 sucked, 98SE ok. Windows Me? OMG let's just move everyone over to NT and never talk about this again!
2000 was good. XP wasn't great but improved after awhile. Vista sucked. Windows 7 was peak windows, it was downhill from here. 8 sucked, 10 was ok, and 11 is shaping up to be complete dogshit.
So it's not precisely every other release is bad, but close enough to see a pattern. I guess you could say 2000-> XP doesn't follow the pattern, but Me->XP does. And since 2000 and previous NT versions were meant for servers, not home PCs, while XP was meant for home PCs. It would make more sense to look at the pattern of releases for PC releases rather than mixing in server releases.
When MS has an OS that works decently they tend to try to cram in a bunch of shit into the next release which causes problems. Then they either remove the shit (or at least make it work better) for the release after that so they have something that works ok again. Then it's back to adding a bunch of shit into the next one.
Win95 did not suck. 3.1 was trash compared to 95. 95 has a real desktop UI, tcpip built in and a 32 bit preemptive kernel.
98 was great. It wasn't any more buggy than 95.
You ignored NT 4.
I'm speaking from experience in using theses OSes, not from a list of features they had. I didn't use NT 4 personally (and that's way outside the scope of personal computer OSes), so I didn't talk about it.
So you continued to run 3.1 after Win95 came out? I listed the features because it's why it was so much better for me and everyone.
Trumpet was amazing because it worked, not because it was reliable. Win95 was far more stable than 3.1 because the tcpip stack, along with much of the OS was preemptively multitasked.
The desktop UI feature was far more usable than Win3.1 progman. You needed to install Norton or Symantec Desktop to get an equivalent experience.
If you claim that the desktop UI doesn't matter because it's a feature, then Windows 8 becomes a great version. Because it's only problem was the UI. It's speed and stability was better than 7.
If NT is out of scope because it's not consumer then you can't have Windows 2000 in your list. Consumer NT kernel OS's started with XP.
People used 3.1 and 3.1.1 for years even though it was running on top of MSDOS but show me someone who used 3.0? Or 1.x, 2.x? Unheard of. Version 3 started off with some problems that needed a more or less immediate large update.
Yes people used 3.1. I used 3.1. Windows 2.1 was very popular because of Excel and Word. The Windows/386 version of 2.1 gave 32bit preemptive multitasking to DOS. It was a big enough hit that MS gave up on OS/2 which was 286 only.
But Win95 was on a whole new level. That's why I said Win3.1 was trash compared to Win 95.
Yea I still follow that advice.