Windows Archive

Good news for Windows users, and for once there’s not a hint of sarcasm here: Microsoft has started rolling out Windows Hotpatch to the client versions of Windows. This feature, which comes from the server versions of Windows, allows the operating system to install patches to in-memory processes, removing the need for a number of restarts. Obviously, this is hugely beneficial for users, as they won’t have to deal with constant reboots whenever a new bunch of Windows updates are pushed. There are some limitations and other things you should know. First, the way the system works is that every quarter, installations with Hotpatch enabled will receive a quarterly baseline update that requires a reboot, followed by two months of hotpatches which do not require a reboot. Hotpatches can only be security updates; new features and enhancements are rolled up into the quarterly baseline updates. In other words, while this will not completely eliminate reboots, it will cut the number of reboots per year down from twelve to just four, which is substantial, and very welcome in especially corporate environments. The biggest limitation, however, is that Windows Hotpatch will only make it to one client version of Windows, Enterprise version 24H2, so users of the Home or Professional version are out of luck for now. On top of that, you’re going to need a Microsoft subscription, use Microsoft Intune, and an Intel/AMD-based system (Hotpatch will come to ARM later). I hope it’ll make its way to Windows 11 Home and Professional, too, because I’m fairly sure quite a few of you using Windows would love to set this up on your own machines.

If you’re elbow-deep in ’90s retrocomputing and maintain a fleet of your own personal seemingly identical but definitely completely different Windows 98 machines, Windows 9x QuickInstall is tailor-made just for you. It takes the root file system of an already installed Windows 98 system and packages it, whilst allowing drivers and tools to be slipstreamed at will. For the installer, it uses Linux as a base, paired with some tools to allow hard disk partitioning and formatting, as well as a custom installer with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking. ↫ Windows 9x QuickInstall gitHub page What you end up with is an easily customisable packaged Windows 98 installation that can be installed onto computers (or in virtual machines, I guess) at blazing speeds. It’s a relatively simple concept, but its implementation is genius and definitely not simple at all. This is a great tool for the retrocomputing community.

Do you want to install Windows 11 without internet access or without an online Microsoft Account? It seems Microsoft really doesn’t want you to, as it has removed a very common and popular way of bypassing this requirement. In the release notes for the latest builds from the Dev and Beta channels, the company notes: We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account. Let me blow your minds and state that I don’t think online accounts for an operating system are inherently a bad idea. I would love it if I could install Fedora KDE on a new machine, optionally log into some online “Fedora Account”, and have my customisations and applications synchronise automatically. It would save me some time and effort, and assuming it’s all properly encrypted and secured, I don’t think the risk factors are particularly high. The keyword here is, of course, optionally. Microsoft wants every Windows 11 user to have a Microsoft Account instead of a local account, and would rather not make it optional at all. Of course, this is still Microsoft, a company wholly incapable of doing anything right when it comes to operating systems, so even making this script available again during installation is stupidly easy. It took a few nerds mere moments to discover you could just make some registry changes during installation, reboot, and have the script return to its rightful place. Oh Microsoft. Never change.

I’ve complained about the utter inscrutability of the Windows release process for a long time, with Microsoft seemingly using channels, build numbers, code names, date-based version numbers, and so on interchangeably, making it incredibly hard to keep track of what is being released when. It turns out even Microsoft itself started losing track, because it’s now released a roadmap for Windows 11 development. In the roadmap tool – of course it’s a tool – you can select a platform, which isn’t x86 or ARM, but Windows PC or Copilot+ PC, a version (23H2 or 24H2 for now), a status (In preview, Gradually rolling out, or Generally available), and a channel (Canary, Dev, Beta, or Retail), after which the roadmap tool will list whatever features match those criteria. Do you now see why people might want such a tool to keep track of what the hell is going on with Windows? Anyway, as the date-based version numbers – 23H2 and 24H2 – may already make clear, this seems more like a roadmap about where development’s been than where development’s going. The problem for Microsoft, of course, is that it maintains several different Windows variants with different feature sets and update schedules, and users, too, can of course opt to stick to certain versions before moving on. The end result is this spaghetti, which makes it hard to untangle when you’re getting which feature. Anyway, if you’re elbow-deep in the Windows spaghetti, this tool may be of use to you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.