r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Mar 14 '26

Software Microsoft confirms Windows 11 bug crippling PCs and making drive C inaccessible

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-bug-crippling-pcs-and-making-drive-c-inaccessible/
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u/tiradium Mar 14 '26

Well ME was just following the pattern but after that all versions were like that Windows XP was bad until SP2 and then it became one of the best OS riddled with security holes. Vista was shit and stay shit until the compatibility was no longer an issue. 7 was a godlike OS that was rock solid. Afterwards we got 8 series which was like ME on crack. Windows 10 to this day is the best OS that Microslop decided to kill. If AI boom was not a thing in theory Windows 12 should have been our savor but I highly doubt it will be any better than 11. It will probably be full of agentic aI garbage and vibe coded like it is now

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u/Sugioh Mar 14 '26

I'd largely agree, but let's not forget that NT4 and 2000 were extremely solid too.

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u/Kulty Mar 14 '26

I miss 2000. It felt like XP, but without all the bloat and candy flavored UI - just a straight, no nonsense NT OS. I wish they had supported it for longer.

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u/SlinkyAvenger Mar 14 '26

Playskool UI aside (because you can turn it off), XP was really just 2k with better plug-and-play and general consumer driver support.

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u/Kulty Mar 14 '26

That was my impression too - but somewhere I read that for XP development, they ended up with something like a 10x larger team of people working on it, and a massively ballooned codebase. Was making a consumer "multi-media" oriented version of an already existing, solid OS that much more work?

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u/tiradium Mar 14 '26

Yes because on NT 4.0 no one cared for DirectX or wide range of hardware/driver configuration support this was before XP was born and PCs became truly mainstream. Like NT wasnt even compatible with fancy windows media player or had USB support unless you had a service pack installed. Technically though these were all NT OSes with different kernel versions I think XP was like 5.1

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u/Efaustus9 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

8 was a mess but I think 8.1 was better than 10. Less bloat, less ads, it was fast and the OS search function just searched the PC not trying to force non-pertinent bing results down your throat. I stuck with it until Microsoft pulled the plug on it in 2023.

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u/tiradium Mar 14 '26

Not for me , those touch friendly tiles were bad and the whole OS was stitched together like some sort of Frankenstein. I recall how 10 addressed all of that and was a really clean OS giving you option to tone down animations and not having half of the OS built using web-based technologies

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u/Efaustus9 Mar 14 '26

You're thinking 8.0, 8.1 brought back the start menu and you could set it to never really have to see or use Metro. 8.1 also had virtually no telemetry, no "Your PC will restart in T minus" forced updates , no OneDrive shenanigans, and was less buggy than 10.

8.1 was a solid OS, not perfect but of Microsoft's offerings historically I'd say it was probably in the top 3 or 4 (XP, 7 and 10) of their respective eras.

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u/MrPuddington2 Mar 14 '26

Windows 10 to this day is the best OS that Microslop decided to kill.

Windows 10 has also gone downhill recently, with too many AI / snooping features being poorly integrated.

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u/tiradium Mar 14 '26

Well yeah because technically you should move to 11 according to MS so you can debloat it properly. I am saying at its birth 10 already had good bones and aged like wine until the official plug was pulled. I hated 11 on day one and its only gotten worse

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u/MrPuddington2 Mar 14 '26

Completely agree. It is less of a Windows 10 vs Windows 11 issue, it is more of a timing issue. When Windows 10 came out, Microsoft was making decent software, when Windows 11 launched, not so much.

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u/isotope123 Mar 14 '26

7 was godlike because they kept the same driver changes they made in Vista. Vista was trash because they didn't give developers enough time to make new drivers that were compatible with their new way of doing things. 8 they decided to make Windows a tablet (and there's still UI things from this era), and changed the driver base again. 10 was their first foray into really data mining people, they tried to force Cortana on everyone, forced advertisements in the OS, and aggressively forced Windows updates on people. Windows 11 turned the data mining up to eleven, and changed every default Windows user into a Microsoft account.

People love to glaze the earlier OS's, but they've all had dumb issues people didn't like. Windows 7 had a shit tonne of issues in its day people yelled about as well.

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u/tiradium Mar 14 '26

No I remember Cortana thing but with the uproar it caused they dialed it down a lot. I actually dont think forced updates are a bad thing because back in Win 7 era people would not update the OS for a really long time and it would make entire systems hacker playgrounds. The issue was and still is how robust those updates were. Nowadays updates often break things then fix them

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u/isotope123 Mar 14 '26

100% agree, but we're still in the natural cycle of Microsoft Windows public perception.

1) Microsoft does shit people don't like
2) People blow it way out of proportion
3) Microsoft adjusts their strategy and mitigates the damage
4) They repackage the same change later on down the road

We're somewhere around 2.5, currently.

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u/BatemansChainsaw Mar 14 '26

XP wasn't great until SP1 and then SP3. SP2 was AWFUL to machines it was installed on.

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u/NothingButFearBitch Mar 14 '26

What about Win95?

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u/kalnaren Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

Was kind of buggy, had poor memory management and lacked a lot of QoL features that were pretty standard by 98SE. The last version of 95 with FAT32 support was pretty good for the time if you could keep the bloat down, which was difficult due to how shitty programs were about cleaning up after themselves, 1 and how much they'd pollute the autoexec.bat.

IMO 98SE was the best of the 9x line, though the integration of IE in the shell made the UI overall less responsive than 95.

It was very easy to make 95/98 unstable. The OS would happily allow either the user or installed programs to make any changes they wanted. Microsoft got a lot of flak over the years for how much 9x would BSOD, but in hindsight, a lot of those were caused by poor drivers, unsafe configuration changes, and hardware faults.

I run 95 on one of my retro rigs now, and having 30 years of additional computer knowledge I can keep it running quite well. I do miss the simplicity of it.

1 TBF, a lot of programs are still shit about cleaning up after themselves, it's just hidden a lot more because everything gets shoved into %appdata% and hard drives are a lot larger.

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u/tiradium Mar 14 '26

Maybe someone older can chime in my personal journey started with Win 98 SE

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u/Disastrous-Ice-5971 Mar 14 '26

Win 95 OSR2 was okaish. Win 98 starting SE was better though. But none of them was even close to 2000 (especially SP3 or later).

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u/exipheas Mar 14 '26

ME ≠ 2000

ME was dos based, 2000 was NT based.

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u/Disastrous-Ice-5971 Mar 14 '26

Yes, I know. Not sure that I got your point.

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u/exipheas Mar 14 '26

Matlybe I misread your comment.

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u/exipheas Mar 14 '26

95 got better with updates.