Windows Archive
Over 60% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, with only about 35% or so – and falling! – of them opting to use Windows 11. As we’ve talked about many times before, this is a major issue going into 2025, since Windows 10’s support will end in October of this year, meaning hundreds of millions of people all over the world will suddenly be running an operating system that will no longer receive security updates. Most of those people don’t want to, or cannot, upgrade to Windows 11, meaning Microsoft is leaving 60% of its Windows customer base out to dry. I’m sure this will go down just fine with regulators and governments the world over. Microsoft has tried everything, and it’s clear desperation is setting in, because the company just declared 2025 “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh”, stating that Windows 11 is the best way to get all the “AI” stuff people are clearly clamoring for. All of the innovation arriving on new Windows 11 PCs is coming at an important time. We recently confirmed that after providing 10 years of updates and support, Windows 10 will reach the end of its lifecycle on Oct. 14, 2025. After this date, Windows 10 PCs will no longer receive security or feature updates, and our focus is on helping customers stay protected by moving to modern new PCs running Windows 11. Whether the current PC needs a refresh, or it has security vulnerabilities that require the latest hardware-backed protection, now is the time to move forward with a new Windows 11 PC. ↫ Some overpaid executive at Microsoft What makes this so incredibly aggravating and deeply tone-deaf is that for most of the people affected by this, “upgrading” to Windows 11 simply isn’t a realistic option. Their current PC is most likely performing and working just fine, but the steep and strict hardware requirements prohibit them from installing Windows 11. Buying an entirely new PC is often not only not needed from a performance perspective, but for many, many people also simply unaffordable. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not exactly going great, financially, for a lot of people out there, and even in the US alone, 70-80% of people live paycheck-to-paycheck, and they’re certainly not going to be able to just “move forward with a new Windows 11 PC” for nebulous and often regressive “benefits” like “AI”. The fact that Microsoft seems to think all of those hundreds of millions of people not only want to buy a new PC to get “AI” features, but that they also can afford it like it’s no big deal, shows some real lack of connective tissue between the halls of Microsoft’s headquarters and the wider world. Microsoft’s utter lack of a grasp on the financial realities of so many individuals and families today is shocking, at best, and downright offensive, at worst. I guess if you live in a world where you can casually bribe a president-elect for one million dollars, buying a new computer feels like buying a bag of potatoes.
I’d like to write a full-fledged blog post about these adventures at some point, but for now I’m going to focus on one particular side quest: getting acceptable video output out of the 1000H when it’s running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. By default, Windows 3.x renders using the standard “lowest common denominator” of video: VGA 640×480 at 16 colours. Unfortunately this looks awful on the Eee PC’s beautiful 1024×600 screen, and it’s not even the same aspect ratio. But how can we do better? ↫ Ash Wolf If you ever wanted to know how display drivers work in Windows 3.x, here’s your chance. This definitely falls into the category of light reading for the weekend.
It is common knowledge that Final Fantasy could have been the last game in the series. It is far less known that Windows 2, released around the same time, could too have been the last. If anything, things were more certain: even Microsoft believed that Windows 2 would be the last. The miracle of overwhelming commercial success brought incredible attention to Windows. The retro community and computer historians generally seem to be interested in the legendary origins of the system (how it all began) or in its turnabout Windows 3.0 release (what did they do right?). This story instead will be about the underdog of Windows, version 2. To understand where it all went wrong, we must start looking at events that happened even before Microsoft was founded. By necessity, I will talk a lot about the origins of Windows, too. Instead of following interpersonal/corporate drama, I will try to focus on the technical aspects of Windows and its competitors, as well as the technological limitations of the computers around the time. Some details are so convoluted and obscure that even multiple Microsoft sources, including Raymond Chen, are wrong about essential technical details. It is going to be quite a journey, and it might seem a bit random, but I promise that eventually, it all will start making sense. ↫ Nina Kalinina I’m not going to waste your previous time with my stupid babbling when you could instead spend it reading this amazingly detailed, lovingly crafted, beautifully illustrated, and deeply in-depth article by Nina Kalinina about the history, development, and importance of Windows 2. She’s delivered something special here, and it’s a joy to read and stare at the screenshots from beginning to end. Don’t forget to click on the little expander triangles for a ton of in-depth technical stuff and even more background information.
Rare, hard to come by, but now available on the Internet Archive: the complete book set for the Windows CE Developer’s Kit from 1999. It contains all the separate books in their full glory, so if you ever wanted to write either a Windows CE application or driver for Windows CE 2.0, here’s all the information you’ll ever need. The Microsoft Windows CE Developer’s Kit provides all the information you need to write applications for devices based on the Microsofte Windowso CE operating system. ↫ Windows CE Developer’s Kit The Microsoft Windows CE Programmer’s Guide details the architecture of the operating system, how to write applications, how to implement synchronisation with a PC, and much more that pertains to developing applications. The Microsoft Windows CE User Interface Services Guide can be seen as an important addition to the Programmer’s Guide, as it details everything related to creating a GUI and how to handle various input methods. Going a few steps deeper, and we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Communications Guide, which, as the name implies, tells you all you need to know about infrared connections, telephony, networking and internet connections, and related matter. Finally, we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Device Driver Kit, which, as the name implies, is for those of us interested in writing device drivers for Windows CE, something that will surely be of great importance in the future, since Windows CE is sure to dominate our mobile life. To get started, you do need to have Microsoft Visual C++ version 6.0 and the Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ version 6.0 up and running, since all code samples in the Programmer’s Guide are developed with it, but I’m sure you already have this taken care of – why would you be developing for any other platforms, am I right?
AI Shell is an interactive shell that provides a chat interface with language models. The shell provides agents that connect to different AI models and other assistance providers. Users can interact with the agents in a conversational manner. ↫ Microsoft Learn Basically, what Microsoft means with this is a split-view terminal where one of the two views is a prompt where you can ask questions to an “AI”, like OpenAI or whatever. The “AI” features are not actually integrated into your shell, which instead lives in the other view and acts like a completely normal, standard shell. Instead of opening up an “AI” chatbot in a browser window or whatever, you now have it in a split view in your terminal – that’s really all there’s to it here. I’m going to blow your mind here and say that in theory, this could be an actually useful addition to terminals and shells, as a properly vetted and configured “AI” that has been trained on properly obtained source material could indeed be a great help in determining the right terminal commands and options. Tons of people already blindly copy and paste terminal commands from websites even though they really shouldn’t anyway, so it’s not like this introduces anything new here in terms of dangers. Hell, tutorial writers still add -y to dnf or apt-get commands, so it can really only go up from here.
I didn’t have the time to post this one before Christmas, but it’s so funny and sad at the same time I don’t want to keep this from you. It turns out that in the days leading up to Christmas this year, users of ASUS computers – or with ASUS motherboards, I guess – were greeted with a black bar covering about a third of their screen, decorated with a Christmas wreath. I am making this post for the sake of people like me who will have a black box show up at the bottom of their screen with a Christmas wreath labeled “christmas.exe” in task manager and think it’s Windows 10/11 malware. It is not. It is from the ASUS Armoury Crate program and can be safely closed and ignored. It looks super sketchy and will hopefully save you some time diagnosing the problem. ↫ Slow-Macaroon9630 on reddit So yes, if you’re using an ASUS computer and have their shovelware installed, you may have been greeted by a giant black banner caused by an executable called “christmas.exe”, which sounds exactly like something shitty malware would do. The banner would disappear after a while, and the executable would vanish from the list of running processes as well. It turns out there’s a similar seasonal greeting called “HappyNewYear.exe”, so if you haven’t done anything to address the first black bar, you might be getting a second one soon. The fact that shitty OEM shovelware does this kind of garbage on Windows is nothing new – class is not something you can accuse Windows of having – but I was surprised to find out just how deeply embedded this ASUS shovelware program called Armoury Crate really is. It doesn’t just come preinstalled on ASUS computers – no, this garbage program actually has roots in your motherboard’s firmware. If you merely uninstall Amoury Crate from Windows, it will automatically reinstall itself because your motherboard’s firmware tells it to. I’m not joking. To prevent Armory Crate from reinstalling itself, you have to reboot your PC into its UEFI, go to the Advanced Mode, go to Tool > ASUS Armoury Crate, and disable the option Download & Install ARMOURY CRATE app. I had no idea Windows hardware makers had sunk to this kind of low, but I’m also not surprised. If Microsoft shoves endless amounts of ads and shovelware on people’s computers, why can’t OEMs?
Microsoft’s Recall feature recently made its way back to Windows Insiders after having been pulled from test builds back in June, due to security and privacy concerns. The new version of Recall encrypts the screens it captures and, by default, it has a “Filter sensitive information,” setting enabled, which is supposed to prevent it from recording any app or website that is showing credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other important financial / personal info. In my tests, however, this filter only worked in some situations (on two e-commerce sites), leaving a gaping hole in the protection it promises. ↫ Avram Piltch at Tom’s Hardware Recall might be one of the biggest own goals I have seen in recent technology history. In fact, it’s more of a series of own goals that just keep on coming, and I honestly have no idea why Microsoft keeps making them, other than the fact that they’re so high on their own “AI” supply that they just lost all touch with reality at this point. There’s some serious Longhorn-esque tunnel vision here, a project during which the company also kind of forgot the outside world existed beyond the walls of Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. It’s clear by now that just like many other tech companies, Microsoft is so utterly convinced it needs to shove “AI” into every corner of its products, that it no longer seems to be asking the most important question during product development: do people actually want this? The response to Windows Recall has been particularly negative, yet Microsoft keep pushing and pushing it, making all the mistakes along the way everybody has warned them about. It’s astonishing just how dedicated they are to a feature nobody seem to want, and everybody seems to warn them about. It’s like we’re all Kassandra. The issue in question here is exactly as dumb as you expect it to be. The “Filter sensitive information” setting is so absurdly basic and dumb it basically only seems to work on shopping sites, not anywhere else where credit card or other sensitive information might be shown. This shortcoming is obvious to anyone who think about what Recall does for more than one nanosecond, but Microsoft clearly didn’t take a few moments to think about this, because their response is to let them know through the Feedback Hub any time Recall fails to detect and sensitive information. They’re basically asking you, the consumer, to be the filter. Unpaid, of course. After the damage has already been done. Wild. If you can ditch Windows, you should. Windows is not a place of honour.
Back in December 2019, Microsoft finally killed off Windows 10 Phone as it announced the end of support. The company’s grand plans with Lumia and Windows Phones sadly never became the success it needed to be in order to be able to compete with the likes of Android or iOS. Thus Windows 11 Phone never became a real official thing outside of concepts. However, there is a free unofficial way that makes it possible, albeit the experience may not totally be free from flaws. Dubbed Project Renegade, the mod enables users to try Windows 11 on Qualcomm Snapdragon phones, among other devices. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Windows Phone 7 and 8 were amazing, and probably my favourite mobile platform of all time. I’m still sad that the duopoly made it impssible even for Microsoft to gain a foothold, because their efforts definitely deserved it. They didn’t just blindly copy Android or iOS, but came up with a truly original, unique, and in my view, superior mobile operating system, and in a fair market, they would’ve been rewarded for it, and Windows Phone would have a perhaps small, but profitable segment of the market. In the vein of Bernie can still win, I still have this faint belief that Microsoft hasn’t completely given up on the smartphone market. Now that they’re serious about Windows on ARM, they might use it as sneaky way to get application developers on board, so that their applications are ready for the big Surface Phone a few years from now, complete with Windows Phone-inspired features and UI. I know this won’t happen, but let me enjoy my non-existent future, please. I don’t want to rely on big tech anymore, but I might make an exception for an up-to-date Windows Phone. I’m only human.
If you were secretly hoping Microsoft would lower the system requirements for Windows 11 so you could upgrade your or your family’s Windows 10 machines to Windows 11, you’re going to be in for some bad news. In a blog post, Microsoft detailed that its most stringent Windows 11 requirement – the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 – is here to stay and crucial to the future of Windows. By instituting TPM 2.0 as a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows, we elevate the security benchmark. It allows you and us to better align with the growing need for formidable data protection in the modern digital sphere. In conclusion, TPM 2.0 is not just a recommendation—it’s a necessity for maintaining a secure and future-proof IT environment with Windows 11. And it’s an important part of the larger Zero Trust strategy, alongside Secure Boot, Credential Guard, and Windows Hello for Business. ↫ Steven Hosking at the Windows IT Pro Blog So no, if you had the hope Microsoft would lower Windows 11’s system requirements in the face of the oncoming end of support deadline for the 60% of Windows users still using Windows 10, your hope has just been dashed. A more likely outcome here is that as the deadline grows closer, Microsoft will extend the deadline by another year, and if needed another, because leaving 60% of users without security updates and little to no path to upgrade is not going to be a good look for the marketing and legal departments. If you really do want to upgrade to Windows 11, there’s a few options. There’s the enterprise-focused Windows 11 LTSC 2024 release, which does not require a TPM 2.0, regarding it as an optional feature instead. On top of that, LTSC is much more bare-bones, shipping without much of the stuff many of us more nerdy users aren’t interested in anyway. The big downside is that getting your hands on a legal copy of LTSC will be difficult, as it’s only available to volume licensing customers, which you most likely are not. Of course, you shouldn’t give a shit about Microsoft’s rules, so you can always use unapproved methods of getting a license. Another option is the one I took for my parts-bin Windows 11 PC which I only use for League of Legends: I bought a cheap TPM 2.0 module from eBay, slotted it into my motherboard, and was on my merry way. Due to League of Legends’ required rootkit, a TPM 2.0 module is needed, so a few euros and days waiting later, I was ready to go. Do make sure you get the right type of TPM 2.0 module for your motherboard, as they’re not universally compatible. The final option is to use one of the few remaining ways to circumvent Windows 11’s system requirements, which are sadly dwindling with every major update. Right now that means using a tool like Flyby11, which uses the Windows Server installer to bypass Windows 11’s system requirements. We’ll have to wait and see for how long that trick remains possible.
Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at image/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space. ↫ Mark Harmstone An amazing piece of software that works on both Linux and Windows, and even, as described above, comes with the option of undoing the conversion if you so desire and haven’t removed the original image yet. Its developer, Mark Harmstone, of course stresses that while he thinks the tool is quite stable, he obviously makes no guarantees or claims about its stability. In other words, please don’t use this on sensitive data or in a production environment. What makes this tool even more amazing is that you can combine it with two of Harmstone’s other tools to really pull some rabbits out of your hat. First, there’s his Btrfs driver for Windows, which, as the name implies, allows Windows to work with Btrfs-formatted drives. Second, and here’s where things get really spicy, there’s Quibble, his custom bootloader consisting of open source reimplementations of Windows’ own bootloader. Using these three tools together you can, if you’re lucky, boot and run Windows off a Btrfs drive. That’s quite cool, and while perhaps not particularly useful due to its experimental nature, it’s still an awesome weekend project.
Windows 10’s free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica That deadline sure feels like it’s breathing down Microsoft’s neck. Most Windows users are still using Windows 10, and all of those hundreds of millions (billions?) of computers will become unsupported less than a year from now, which is going to be a major headache for Microsoft once the unaddressed security issues start piling up. CrowdStrike is fresh in Microsoft’s minds, and the company made a ton of promises about changing its security culture and implementing new features and best practices to stop it from ever happening again. That’s going to be some very tough promises to keep when the majority of Windows users are no longer getting any support. The obvious solution here is to accept the fact that if people haven’t upgraded to Windows 11 by now, they’re not going to until forced to do so because their computer breaks or becomes too slow and Windows 11 comes preinstalled on their new computer. No amount of annoying fullscreen ads interrupting people’s work or pleasure are going to get people to buy a new PC just for some halfbaked “AI” nonsense or whatever – in fact, it might just put even more people off from upgrading in the first place. Microsoft needs to face the music and simply extend the end-of-support deadline for Windows 10. Not doing so is massively irresponsible to a level rarely seen from big tech, and if they refuse to do so I strongly believe authorities should get involved and force the company to extend the deadline. You simply cannot leave this many users with insecure, non-maintained operating systems that they rely on every day to get their work done.
One of my favourite devices that never took on in the home is the thin client. Whenever I look at a fully functional Sun Microsystems thin client setup, with Sun Rays, a Solaris server, and the smartcards instantly loading up your desktop the moment you slide it in the Ray’s slot, my mind wonders about the future we could’ve had in our homes – a powerful, expandable, capable server in the basement, running every family member’s software, and thin clients all throughout the house where family members can plug their smartcard into to load up their stuff. This is the future they took from us. Well, not entirely. They took this future, made it infinitely worse by replacing that big server in our basement with massive datacentres far away from us in the “cloud”, and threw it back in our faces as a shittier inevitability we all have to deal with. The fact this model relies on subscriptions is, of course, entirely coincidental and not all the main driving force behind taking our software away from us and hiding it stronghold datacentres. So anyway Microsoft is launching a thin client that connects to a Windows VM running in the cloud. They took the perfection Sun gave us, shoved it down their throats, regurgitated it like a cow, and are now presenting it to us as the new shiny. It’s called the Windows 365 Link, and it connects to, as the name implies, Windows 365. Here’s part of the enterprise marketing speak: Today, as users take advantage of virtualization offerings delivered on an array of devices, they can face complex sign-in processes, peripheral incompatibility, and latency issues. Windows 365 Link helps address these issues, particularly in shared workspace scenarios. It’s compact, lightweight, and designed to maximize productivity with its highly responsive performance. It takes seconds to boot and instantly wakes from sleep, allowing users to quickly get started or pick up where they left off on their Cloud PC. With dual 4K monitor support, four USB ports, an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3, Windows 365 Link offers seamless connectivity with both wired and wireless peripherals. ↫ Anthony Smith at the Windows IT Pro Blog This is just a thin client, but worse, since it seemingly can only connect to Microsoft’s “cloud”, without the ability to connect to a server on-premises, which is a very common use case. In fact, you can’t even use another vendor’s tooling, so if you want to switch from Windows 365 to some other provider later down the line, you seemingly can’t – unless there’s some BIOS switches or whatever you can flip. At the very least, Microsoft intends for other vendors to also make Link devices, so perhaps competition will bring the price down to a more manageble level than $349. Unless an enterprise environment is already so deep into the Microsoft ecosystem that they don’t even rely on things like Citrix or any of the other countless providers of similar services, why would you buy thousands of these for your employees, only to lock your entire company into Windows 365? I’m no IT manager, obviously, so perhaps I’m way off base here, but this thing seems like a hard sell when there are so, so many alternative services, and so many thin client devices to choose from that can use any of those services.
Way back in April of this year, I linked to a question and answer about why some parts of the Windows 98 installer looked older than the other parts. It turns out that in between the MS-DOS (the blue part) and Windows 98 parts of the installation process, the installer boots into a small version of Windows 3.1. Raymond Chen posted an article detailing this process for Windows 95, and why, exactly, Microsoft had to resort to splitting the installer between MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. The answer is, as always, backwards compatibility. Since Windows 95 could be installed from MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 (to fix an existing installation), the installer needed to be able to work on all three. The easiest solution would be to write the installer as an MS-DOS program, since that works on all three of these starting points, but that would mean an ugly installer, even though Windows 95 was supposed to be most people’s first experience with a graphical user interface. This is why Microsoft ended up with the tiered installation process – to support all possible starting points in the most graphical way possible. Chen also mentions another fun fact that is somewhat related to this: the first version of Excel for Windows was shipped with a version of the Windows 2.1 runtime, so that even people without Windows could still run Excel. Even back then, Microsoft took backwards compatibility seriously, and made sure people who hadn’t upgraded from MS-DOS to Windows 2.x yet – meaning, everyone – could still enjoy the spreadsheet lifestyle. I say we pass some EU law forcing Microsoft to bring this back. The next version of Excel should contain whatever is needed to run it on MS-DOS. Make it happen, Brussels.
This option is for users that want to create a Windows 11 on Arm virtual machine on supported hardware using an ISO file or to install Windows 11 on Arm directly without a DVD or USB flash drive. The ISO file can also be used to manually create bootable installation media (USB flash drive) to install Windows 11 on Arm, but it may be necessary to include drivers from the device manufacturer for the installation media to be successfully bootable. This download is a multi-edition ISO which uses your product key to unlock the correct edition. ↫ Windows on ARM ISO download Oddly enough, up until now, Microsoft hadn’t published a Windows 11 on ARM ISO yet. With this new ISO, ARM users can do a fresh install, and create Windows on ARM virtual machines. Not the biggest news in the world, but it’s a little bit surprising it’s taken them this long to publish this ISO file.
The current version of Windows on ARM contains Prism, Microsoft’s emulator that allows x86-64 code to run on ARM processors. While it was already relatively decent on the recent Snapdragon X platform, it could still be very hit-or-miss with what applications it would run, and especially games seemed to be problematic. As such, Microsoft has pushed out a major update to Prism that adds support for a whole bunch of extensions to the x86 architecture. This new support in Prism is already in limited use today in the retail version of Windows 11, version 24H2, where it enables the ability to run Adobe Premiere Pro 25 on Arm. Starting with Build 27744, the support is being opened to any x64 application under emulation. You may find some games or creative apps that were blocked due to CPU requirements before will be able to run using Prism on this build of Windows. At a technical level, the virtual CPU used by x64 emulated applications through Prism will now have support for additional extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture. These extensions include AVX and AVX2, as well as BMI, FMA, F16C, and others, that are not required to run Windows but have become sufficiently commonplace that some apps expect them to be present. You can see some of the new features in the output of a tool like Coreinfo64.exe. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc on the Windows Blog Hopefully this makes running existing x86 applications that don’t yet have an ARM version a more reliable affair for Windows on ARM users.
Nothing is sacred. With this update, we are introducing the ability to rewrite content in Notepad with the help of generative AI. You can rephrase sentences, adjust the tone, and modify the length of your content based on your preferences to refine your text. ↫ Dave Grochocki at the Windows Insider Blog This is the reason everything is going to shit.
Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server IoT 2025. This new release includes several improvements, including advanced multilayer security, hybrid cloud agility, AI, performance enhancements, and more. Microsoft claims that Windows Server IoT 2025 will be able to handle the most demanding workloads, including AI and machine learning. It now has built-in support for GPU partitioning and the ability to process large datasets across distributed environments. With Live Migration and High Availability, it also offers a high-performance platform for both traditional applications and advanced AI workloads. ↫ Pradeep Viswanathan at Neowin Windows Server IoT 2025 brings the same benefits, new features, and improvements as the just-released regular Windows Server 2025. I must admit I’m a little unclear as to what Windows Server IoT has to offer over the regular edition, and reading the various Microsoft marketing materials and documents don’t really make it any clearer for me either, since I’m not particularly well-versed in all that enterprise networking lingo.
Microsoft has confirmed the general availability of Windows Server 2025, which, as a long-term servicing channel (LTSC) release, will be supported for almost ten years. This article describes some of the newest developments in Windows Server 2025, which boasts advanced features that improve security, performance, and flexibility. With faster storage options and the ability to integrate with hybrid cloud environments, managing your infrastructure is now more streamlined. Windows Server 2025 builds on the strong foundation of its predecessor while introducing a range of innovative enhancements to adapt to your needs. ↫ What’s new in Windows Server 2025 article It should come as no surprise that Windows Server 2025 comes loaded with a ton of new features and improvements. I already covered some of those, such as DTrace by default, NVMe and storage improvements, hotpatching, and more. Other new features we haven’t discussed yet are a massive list of changes and improvements to Active Directory, a feature-on-demand feature for Azure Arc, support for Bluetooth keyboards, mice, and other peripherals, and tons of Hyper-V improvements. SMB is also seeing so many improvements it’s hard to pick just a few to highlight, and software-defined networking is also touted as a major aspect of Server 2025. With SDN you can separate the network control plane from the data plane, giving administrators more flexibility in managing their network. I can just keep going listing all of the changes, but you get the idea – there’s a lot here. You can try Windows Server 2025 for free for 180 days, as a VM in Azure, a local virtual machine image, or installed locally through an ISO image.
Another day, another Windows Recall problem. Microsoft is delaying the feature yet again, this time from October to December. “We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we’re taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders,” says Brandon LeBlanc, senior product manager of Windows, in a statement to The Verge. “Originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs by December.” ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge Making Recall secure, opt-in, and uninstallable is apparently taking more time than the company originally planned. When security, opt-in, and uninstallable are not keywords during your design and implementation process for new features, this is the ungodly mess that you end up with. This could’ve all been prevented if Microsoft wasn’t high on its own “AI” supply.
There’s been more controversy regarding Microsoft’s Recall feature for Windows, with people supposedly discovering Recall was being secretly installed on Windows 11 24H2. Furthermore, trying to remove this secretly installed Recall would break Explorer, as it seemed Explorer had a dependency on Recall. Unsurprisingly, this spread like wildfire all across the web, but I didn’t report on it because something about it felt off – reports were sporadic and vague, and there didn’t seem to be any consistency in the various stories. Well, it turns out that it is a big misunderstanding arising from Microsoft’s usual incompetence. “Ever since the Recall security fiasco in summer, all insider and production builds lack Recall completely,” explains Windows watcher Albacore, in messages to The Verge. Albacore created the Amperage tool that allowed Recall to run on older Snapdragon chips. The references we’re seeing in current installs of 24H2 are related to Microsoft making it easier for system admins to remove Recall or disable it. “Ironically, Microsoft going out of its way to make removal easier is being flipped into AI / spying / whatever hoaxes,” says Albacore. “Microsoft has an ungodly complex and long winded system for integrating development changes into a mainline build, parts of the optional-izing work were most likely not merged at once, and thus produce crash loops in very specific scenarios that slipped testing,” explains Albacore. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge What this story really highlights is just how little trust Microsoft has left with its very own users. Microsoft has a history of silently and secretely re-enabling features users turned off, re-installing Edge without any user interaction or consent, lots of disabled telemetry features suddenly being turned on again after an update, and so on. Over the years, this has clearly eroded any form of trust users have in Microsoft, so when a story like this hits, users just assume it’s Microsoft doing shady stuff again. Can you blame them? All of this is made worse by the absolutely dreadfully bad messaging and handling of the Recall feature. The shoddy implementation, the complete lack of security, the severe inability to read the room about the privacy implications of a feature like Recall, combined with the lack of trust mentioned above, and you have a very potent cocktail of misinformation entirely of Microsoft’s own making. I’m not trying to excuse Microsoft here – they themselves are the only ones to blame for stories like these. I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot more Recall problems.
