alt Hacker NewsWindows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse
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Unrelated to the article itself, but I'm really not a fan of websites like this one hijacking the back button to show more articles. It feels like a mistake to have ever allowed websites to modify behaviour of the back button like that, although I'm sure it leads to some usability improvements elsewhere.
I'm wondering why the guy at Microsoft in charge of Windows is still employed.
Over the prior weekend my installation of Playnite (a catalog/launcher for my games) was broken by the update, until I moved its data off of OneDrive[1]. And the other day I figured out that a couple of icons on my desktop had become completely inert and unresponsive due to the same bug - again due to an interaction between the Windows Shell and OneDrive. And this one I can't fix, I can't shift my desktop out of OneDrive.
MS's strategy at this point is that Windows is a loss leader to get people onto the subscriptions for Office and OneDrive. So when the Windows team releases bugs that break usage of those services, forcing people off them onto alternative solutions, the guy in charge of those updates really needs to be answering some tough questions.
[1] I've now got SyncThing handling this.
Here's a similar discussion[0], and here's my experience[1]:
Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.
So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[2], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
That's why I live very well with Win 10 without updates. I downgraded in May last year from Win11 after months of frustration and headaches and since then everything works smoothly and peacefully.
I seriously wonder if everyone in the Windows development team(s) are just vibe-coding everything now. I feel like all of these are rookie mistakes from the POV of working on an operating system. This is also the consequence of eliminating all QA and testing and forcing your users to do that for you. Admittedly there are some things that are hard to test (or impossible to) in an automated way, but that's what the old Windows hardware lab test machines were for.
How can a company this big fail so hard in what one would consider their main* product still baffles me.
*Yes, they probably make more revenue in Azure or Office365 licenses but at least when I think “Microsoft” I immediately think Windows.
This makes me wonder what the testing method is for this sort of thing. Presumably you'd do as much as possible in VM's to get repeatable states with updates from every conceivable starting point.
But what about physical machines? Exactly how many repeatable update tests on physical machines are done? You get a combinatorial explosion if you need to test on 100 different configurations for hardware and you have 100 different starting points in your pre-update OS image. But something like that (10k tests on physical machines, millions for VM's) is what I would _expect_ they are doing.
I see Microslop's "AI" coding mandate is continuing to go well
> After the Power-On Self-Test (POST), and you see the blue Windows logo (if applicable), press the power button again to shut down.
> Repeat steps 1 and 2 multiple times to trigger the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).
What exactly was wrong with pressing f8?
Just checking into this thread for the record, I commented in one of these "update bricks windows" threads maybe a year ago about how I don't let my Windows 10 update, still haven't updated and everything is still working great!
If your device is working, after an update there are only two options, either it keeps working or it doesn't. Why roll the dice?
At this point Microsoft needs to go back to service packs and a three year OS version cycle. Rapid development doesn't seem to be working.
Updated Windows 11 on Parallels: Has been stable since 2021.
Boot loop: Can't system restore. Can't roll back updates. Can't reset PC. Can't even enter safe mode.
All options ran into unexpected errors and cancelled out. Only option left was to shut down or "restart".
Had to clean install and attach the old virtual drive to a new installation to copy files across then copy the new installation's disk back to the old system as a replacement to ensure it was able to activate.
Seriously considering if I even need Windows anymore.
> "Microsoft has received a limited number of reports […]
Interesting working: one night interpret this as “a few reports”, but they’re technically saying “a finite amount of reports”, without really implying if there were a few or many cases.
i hope that whoever caused all those bugs doesn't move later into developing Azure.
(part of me actually wishes it would happen, ngl).
Modern Windows... It's like having your own DoS adversary baked into your PC.
So happy being on supported, stable version. Every other Windows release is a nightmare and when I saw W11 empty task manager (yes, the bug still persists, of course no response from M$ and some private contact saying to "just reinstall it"), bootloop after defender signatures update and other funny stuff - waiting for Windows 12.
That's terrifying, as I currently have no boot stick. Does someone know a reliable free system backup tool for windows, in simplicity comparable to Timeshift on Linux Mint, which I can start from an USB Medium to restore a broken system? (I need to able to exclude some folders, like Steam games)
Previous discussion:
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
Heaven forbid any company ever come to the conclusion that shoving updates down your users' throats against their will might not be the best idea humans ever came up with.
I tried Win11 out for maybe a week before upgrading (I refuse to call it a downgrade) back to Win10. Explorer of all things being slow as molasses on my very beefy system was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, but also idiotic decisions like not letting my move the damn taskbar without hacky 3rd party software certainly didn't help me feeling frustrated with every minute of use.
I dunno what the fuck they're smoking at M$ HQ, it's truly baffling.
As they wrote it. It only affects physical computer. It seems we now have to learn that win11 is only for VM. Lesson learned
Guess 30% AI generated code isn't good enough.
It didn't need Ai to create something as horrific as windows vista.
At least they're shipping a million lines of code per month per engineer. That's what counts.
Vibe-coding at scale.
LLMS are a farce of productivity, one of the largest companies in the planet with Azure (cost reduction) AND their own inhouse chips and LLMS still can't get anything meaningful out of it, trillions of dollars spent, Lol.
They just keep digging
Look on the bright side; at least "not booting" is better than "deleting all your files": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
Also, every time MS fucks up an update, more users will become persuaded to turn them off completely. It's a massive amount of trust and valuable user time lost. They keep harping about how much cyberattacks cost, but are clearly silent on the cost of periodically breaking everyone's PCs in various ways.
Why doesn't Fedora suck, but windows does? Serious question.
Why is windows literally worse than Fedora? I'm not exaggerating, I just can't understand.
Open gpedit.msc, configure policies to disable automatic updates. At this point Windows is a virus that is useful for only playing computer games and should be avoided for any other purpose.
I'm still on Windows 10, and the only issue I have is the huge nag-screen promoting Windows 11 that appears sometimes when I boot up.
No option to say "don't show again". If anyone knows how to permanently disable this intrusive Windows 11 propaganda screen, please share. I tried searching for a solution but the one I found - a registry change, didn't work.
The most impressive thing is that if they stopped putting out new features, and solely delivered security and optimization patches for Windows, it would unironically be the best no-frills platform. You could just keep milking steady upgrade fees.
But no, they have to go out of their way to accelerate the enshittification of Windows.
"Uninstall latest lack-of-quality update"
> It's unclear why January's security update for Windows 11 has been so disastrous. Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
I think I might know...
>nightmare gets worse
Gets?
It was actually just as bad when first deployed as it is now, but none of the key humans who were supposed to know about things like this in advance, knew about any of it in advance.
That's the approach that makes it the gift that keeps on giving.
Or the embarrassment that keeps on embarrassing.
Is there a person or team having high standards that is able to accurately say when the changes introduced by this particular download alone have been thoroughly reviewed to their satisfaction?
Or will there ever be anybody like that ever again?
no matter the industry, quality control isn't a tool. you can find tools to produce content and to help test for quality, but the ultimate bar for quality is depends on team members.
The issue is that despite code assists (pre and post AI ) helping to produce more testable product, the bar for quality acceptance continues to decline.
Interesting. I bought a brand new Windows Arm machine the other day that was DOA: It booted with the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME message. I brought it back to Microcenter and exchanged it and the replacement works fine. I wonder if that machine was just updated at the factory before it shipped...
I'm a longtime Microsoft fanboy, but even I wait a couple of weeks before updating anything, unless there's an actual problem I need the fix for.
Why is windows so hard? In my many years of Linux, I've never managed to brick a computer. Microsoft makes computers hard for no reason. At worst, in the olden days I used to just boot into a livecd and fix my issue, including using an old kernel. Today, I just revert to an old zfs snapshot or if something is truly awful just pull my archived zfs snapshot.
I mean obviously windows can be reinstalled and restored, but my nixos desktop flake can be restored in like 10 minutes while a windows install takes hours
It's 2025... Why are we still dealing with these problems?
Never encountered any of this issues all computers working just fine. Also please format your laptops when you buy them, and do a clean install of Windows, don't install any vendor drivers if you don't need to
Microsoft's problem is probably the same as the author of the article. Look at the last sentence. Either it was proof-read by an AI, or the author was so sure of his perfection he never proof-read it.
W11 is the best OS I've ever used, but everyone seems to hate it because Microsoft is so adamant in destroying its reputation by pushing Copilot and bugs instead of focusing on reliability. It's a shame.
So, a couple years ago Microsoft was the first large, public-facing software organization to make LLM-assisted coding a big part of their production. If LLM's really delivered 10x productivity improvements, as claimed by some, then we should by now be seeing an explosion of productivity out of Microsoft. It's been a couple years, so if it really helps then we should see it by now.
So, either LLM-assisted coding is not delivering the benefits some thought it would, or Microsoft, despite being an early investor in OpenAI, is not using it much internally on things that really matter to them (like Windows). Either way, I'm not impressed.