Windows Archive
It’s rare in this day and age that proprietary operating system vendors like Microsoft and Apple release updates you’re more than happy to install, but considering even a broken clock is right twice a day, we’ve got one for you today. Microsoft released KB5053598 (OS Build 26100.3476) which “addresses security issues for your Windows operating system”. One of the “security issues” this update addresses, is Microsoft’s “AI” text generator, Copilot. To address this glaring security issue, this update removes Copilot from your Windows installation altogether. Sadly, it’s only by mistake, and not by design. We’re aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some devices. The app is unintentionally uninstalled and unpinned from the taskbar. Microsoft is working on a resolution to address this issue. In the meantime, affected users can reinstall the app from the Microsoft Store and manually pin it to the taskbar. ↫ Microsoft Support Well, at least until Microsoft “fixes” this “issue” with KB5053598, consider this update a simple way to get rid of Copilot. Microsoft accidentally cared about its users for once, so cherish this moment – it won’t happen again.
When I checked where Windows Defender had actually detected the threat, it was in the Fan Control app I use to intelligently cool my PC. Windows Defender had broken it, and that’s why my fans were running amok. For others, the threat was detected in Razer Synapse, SteelSeries Engine, OpenRGB, Libre Hardware Monitor, CapFrameX, MSI Afterburner, OmenMon, FanCtrl, ZenTimings, and Panorama9, among many others. “As of now, all third-party/open-source hardware monitoring softwares are screwed,” Fan Control developer Rémi Mercier tells me. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge Anyone reading OSNews can probably solve this puzzle. Many fan control and hardware monitoring applications for Windows make use of the same open source driver: WinRing0. Uniquely, this kernel-level driver is signed, since it’s from back in the days when developers could self-sign these sorts of drivers, but the signed version has a known vulnerability that’s quite dangerous considering it’s a kernel-level driver. The vulnerability has been fixed, but signing this new version – and keeping it signed – is a big ordeal and quite expensive, since these days, drivers have to be signed by Microsoft. And it just so happens that Windows Defender has started marking this driver, and thus any tool that uses it, as dangerous, sending it to quarantine. The result is failing hardware monitoring and fan control applications for quite a few Windows users. Some companies have invested in developing their own closed-source alternatives, but they’re not sharing them. Luckily, Windows OEM iBuyPower says it’s trying to get the patched version of WinRing0 signed, and if that happens, they will share it back with the community. Classy. For now, though, hardware monitoring and fan control on Windows might be a bit of an ordeal.
Like the other Chrome skins, Microsoft Edge is also moving to disable Manifest v2 extensions, restricting the effectiveness of ad blockers like uBlock Origin. As an advertising company, Microsoft was obviously never going to do the work to keep Manifest v2 support around in Chrome, so this was inevitable. Blocking ads might be a necessary security practice, but why cry over spilled user data, am I right? Anyway, today: In early December 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detected a large-scale malvertising campaign that impacted nearly one million devices globally in an opportunistic attack to steal information. The attack originated from illegal streaming websites embedded with malvertising redirectors, leading to an intermediary website where the user was then redirected to GitHub and two other platforms. The campaign impacted a wide range of organizations and industries, including both consumer and enterprise devices, highlighting the indiscriminate nature of the attack. ↫ Microsoft Threat Intelligence If only there was a type of browser extension that prevents such malvertising attacks from being possible in the first place, and if only support for such browser extensions wasn’t being gutted as we speak. If only.
About two weeks ago, there was a bit of confusion about the system requirements for Windows 11 24H2, because Intel’s 8th Gen, 9th Gen, and 10th Gen processors had disappeared from the list of supported hardware. This seemed rather drastic, even by Windows 11 standards. I skipped posting about it on OSNews because I kind of assumed it must’ve been an error instead of actual policy, and it turns out that’s indeed the case. A page update made on February 13, 2025 did not reflect accurate offerings. It has since been updated, including the addition of Intel processor models 8th, 9th, and 10th generation Intel CPUs, and the reclassification for select Intel processor models to support Windows 11. ↫ Windows 11 version 24H2 supported Intel processors Good news for people still stuck on the Windows 11 train.
For the past several years my desktop has also had a disk dedicated to maintaining a Windows install. I’d prefer to use the space in my PC case for disks for Linux. Since I already run a home NAS, and my Windows usage is infrequent, I wondered if I could offload the Windows install to my NAS instead. This lead me down the course of netbooting Windows 11 and writing up these notes on how to do a simplified “modern” version. ↫ Terin Stock The setup Terin Stock ended up with is rather ingenious, to be honest. They had to create not just an environment in which netbooting through iXPE using iSCSI, but also a customised Windows PE ISO that included the necessary drivers to make installing Windows onto a iSCSI-connected remote drive possible in the first place, because they’re not included in the Windows installation ISO. This isn’t exactly a standard setup, of course, so there were a few roadblocks to clear before getting there. They now have Windows 11 booting from a drive in their NAS, and it seems it doesn’t affect gaming – the reason why they did this in the first place is an online game that hard-requires Windows – at all. Installing the game through Steam took a bit longer, sure, but regular gameplay seems unaffected, and there’s no saturation on the network or disk. You’d think this would be wholly too slow to be suitable for gaming, but I guess at least some games handle this just fine. My uneducated guess is that more demanding games that rely on a ton of disk activity to load textures and so on will have a much more difficult time running. In any event, this intrigues me, and I’m kind of curious to try and set this up myself, if only for the memes. It looks like fun.
Windows was an early adopter of Unicode, and its file APIs use UTF‑16 internally since Windows 2000-used to be UCS-2 in Windows 95 era, when Unicode standard was only a draft on paper, but that’s another topic. Using UTF-16 means that filenames, text strings, and other data are stored as sequences of 16‑bit units. For Windows, a properly formed surrogate pair is perfectly acceptable. However, issues arise when string manipulation produces isolated or malformed surrogates. Such errors can lead to unreadable filenames and display glitches—even though the operating system itself can execute files correctly. But we can create them deliberately as well, which we can see below. ↫ Zafer Balkan What a wild ride and an odd corner case. I wonder what kind of odd and fun shenanigans this could be used for.
Remember about half a year ago, when the PowerPC versions of Windows NT were made to run on certain models of PowerPC Macs? The same developer responsible for that work, Rairii, took all of this to the next level, and it’s now possible to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT on the GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and a few related development boards. NT 3.51 RTM and higher. NT 3.51 betas (build 944 and below) will need kernel patches to run due to processor detection bugs. NT 3.5 will never be compatible, as it only supports PowerPC 601. (The additional suspend/hibernation features in NT 3.51 PMZ could be made compatible in theory but in practise would require all of the additional drivers for that to be reimplemented.) ↫ Windows NT for GameCube/Wii GitHub page As you may have expected, there are some issues, such as instability and random reboots, USB hotplugging doesn’t work, and some other, smaller issues, but none of that takes away from just how awesome and impressive this really is. There’s framebuffer support for the Flipper GPU, full support for the controllers ports and a ton of compatible controllers and related input devices, including support for the N64 mouse and keyboard, although said support is untested. The GameCube and Wii (U) are PowerPC computers, after all, running IBM processors, so it shouldn’t be surprising that running Windows NT on them is possible. Still, it’s an impressive feat of engineering to get this to work at all, let alone in as complete a state as it appears to be.
Microsoft seems to be addressing some of the oddities with the Windows 11 Start menu, finally adding basic views that should’ve been in Windows 11 since the very start. We’re introducing two new views to the “All” page in the Start menu: grid and category view. Grid and list view shows your apps in alphabetical order and category view groups all your apps into categories, ordered by usage. This change is gradually rolling out so you may not see it right away. We plan to begin rolling this out to Windows Insiders who are receiving updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 in the Dev and Beta Channels soon. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc These new views are very welcome, but sadly, you still can’t set them as the default view in the Start menu. You’re still forced to use whatever that default view is, and click on “All” to get to these new views, instead of being available right as you open the Start menu. I messed around with Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 for a few weeks as I waited for a review laptop to arrive, and I couldn’t last for a few hours without buying a replacement for the Start menu that allowed me to have a working, non-terrible menu that I could configure to my own needs. It’s wild to me that such an iconic element of the Windows user interface is in such a dire, unliked state. We all know Windows seems to be a in a bit of a rut, with Microsoft investing more in nonsense like “AI” and ads in the operating system than in actually listening to users and improving their experience. It’s been roughly thirty years since the introduction of the Start menu, and the original one from Windows 95 is still superior to whatever’s in Windows now. Wild.
There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for full use of these apps. You’ll see a new overlay that informs you of this before use. In our case, however, the respective features were simply grayed out. ↫ Laura Pippig at PCWorld It’s only the “AI” features that are being paywalled here, so I doubt many people will care. What does feel unpleasent, though, is that the features are visible but greyed out, instead of being absent entirely until you log into Windows with an account that has a Microsogt 365 subscription with the “AI” stuff enabled. Now it just feels like the operating system you paid good money for – and yes, you do actually pay for Windows – is incomplete and badgering you for in-app purchases. The gameification of Windows continues. There’s also a y in the day, so we have another Ars Technica article detailing the long list of steps you need to take to make Windows suck just a little less. The article is long, and seems to grow longer every time Ars, or any other site for that matter, posts an updated version. I installed Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 a few weeks ago to see just how bad things had gotten, and the amount of work I had to do to make Windows 11 even remotely usable was insane. Even the installation alone – including all the updates – took several hours, compared to a full installation of, say, Fedora KDE, which, including updated, takes like 10 minutes to install on the same machine. I personally used WinScript to make the process of unfucking Windows 11 less cumbersome, and I can heartedly recommend it to anyone else forced to use Windows 11. Luckily for me, a brand new laptop is being delivered today, without an operating system preinstalled. Can’t wait to install Fedora KDE and be good to go in like 20 minutes after unboxing the thing.
AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don’t particularly care about benchmarking – even less so benchmarking on Windows – but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me ↫ AIDA64 v7.60 release notes Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025, is kind of amazing.
One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons? Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn’t actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything yourself, though. There were no graphics primitives aside from a BIOS call to plot a single pixel. Everything else was on you, and you didn’t want to use the BIOS call to plot pixels anyway because it was slow. If you wanted any modicum of performance, you had to access the frame buffer directly. ↫ Raymond Chen And with everything the Windows 95 setup program needs that you’d have to create, you’d end up just… Developing a custom operating system in the first place. Since Microsoft already had Windows 3.x lying around, why not reuse parts of that to aid in the Windows 95 installation process? Honestly, all of it makes perfect sense, and I really don’t understand why anyone would seriously advocate for building a separate, entirely custom operating system just to install Windows 95 when Windows 3.x was right there. Of course, these days things are a little different, but Windows still loads a different operating system during its installation. It’s called the Windows Preinstallation Environment, but it’s no longer based on Windows 3.x, obviously, and instead is a cut-down version of the Windows version you’re actually installing. The latest version of Windows PE is 10.0.26100.1, and it’s built from Windows 11 24H2. Windows PE also powers the Windows Recovery Environment, the menu you can boot into to perform various analyses, maintenance, and repair of your Windows installation. Since Microsoft does not want Windows PE to be used a general purpose operating system, it comes with a few interesting limitations you can’t really circumvent. It has a non-configurable 72-hour time bomb, after which if will just shut off, and since PE runs entirely in memory, no changes are saved – unless you make any changes during the creation of the PE image. It also makes use of FAT32, so there’s a whole host of limitations there, and there’s a few other things Microsoft disabled. Since you an add drivers to a PE image, though, I wonder if you could sneak in a file system driver and circumvent FAT32’s limitations that way?
Venture is a cross-platform viewer for Windows Event Logs (.evtx files). Built with the Tauri, it is intended as a fast, standalone tool for quickly parsing and slicing Windows Event Log files during incident response, digital forensics, and CTF competitions. ↫ Venture GitHub page Neat tool. It makes sense that it would be possible to build third-party viewers for Windows event logs, but I never stopped to think about it and just defaulted to the one built into Windows.
It seems we’re getting a glimpse at the next stick Microsoft will be using to push people to buy new PCs (we’re all rich, according to Microsoft) or upgrade to Windows 11. In a blog post extolling the virtues of a free upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, the company announced that with the end of support for Windows 10, Microsoft will also stop supporting Office applications on Windows 10, otherwise known as Office 365. Lastly, Microsoft 365 Apps will no longer be supported after October 14, 2025, on Windows 10 devices. To use Microsoft 365 Applications on your device, you will need to upgrade to Windows 11. ↫ Microsoft’s Margaret Farmer Of course, the applications won’t stop working on Windows 10 right away after that date, but Microsoft won’t be fixing any security issues, bugs, or other issues that might (will) come up. It reads like a threat to Windows users – upgrade by buying a new PC you probably can’t afford, or not only use an insecure version of Windows, but also insecure Office applications. I doubt it’ll have much of an impact on the staggering number of people still using Windows 10 – more than 60% of Windows users – so I’m sure Microsoft has more draconian plans up its sleeve to push people to upgrade.
Speaking of Microsoft shipping bad code, how about an absolutely humongous ‘patch Tuesday’? Microsoft today unleashed updates to plug a whopping 161 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, including three “zero-day” weaknesses that are already under active attack. Redmond’s inaugural Patch Tuesday of 2025 bundles more fixes than the company has shipped in one go since 2017. ↫ Brian Krebs Happy new year, Windows users.
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?
