Windows 10 20H2: ChkDsk damages filesystem on SSDs with KB4592438 installed
borncity.com
borncity.com
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/former-microsoft-employee-ta...
Probably came from the same MBA: let consumers be lab rats to for big enterprise customers
AFAIK all office subscribers can change their update channel from monthly (default) to SAC (the one that "high paying users" use). The only difference is that the low paying user has to do it via group policy or registry, whereas the high paying users probably have some sort of enterprise admin tool that allows it to be set at the organization level.
You can meet in the middle and run transcript on pro which disables most of the worst new features.
LTSC can be purchased legally by anyone for around $300: https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811300700_windows_10_ltsc.html
That sounds good!
How do I do this? What's transcript?
Next LTSC release should be late next year apparently.
according to that link, support for Ryzen 9 4xxx began in build 2004. It says even build 1909 doesn’t have support for Ryzen 9 4xxx only Ryzen 3/5/7 3xxx. Confusing because 1909 definitely worked ok since my laptop came with it and ran okay.
The expected version you'd be running on enterprise desktops is just the regular semi-annual release, delayed by a few months so the SMB sector can test the major bugs for you.
But why? Is it for the bleeding edge features? I looked at the previous feature updates and everything there looks incidental, nothing that would warrant an upgrade.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/macos-big-sur-update-br...
Dropping quality is happening everywhere.
My 2018 work USB-C MacBook Pro has several keys failing and several others with mushy tactility, has a failing battery which you have to wait to reboot from because the charger is so low voltage, has a bluetooth chip that hard crashes and requires a reboot to kick it back to life, often kernel panics while asleep.
The 2014 arguably had harder use too because I used to use it for 3D rendering while all the 2018 has done is 2D design and Javascript.
Not even gonna bring up 2002 Titanium Powerbook that I used daily until I bought that 2014 which fared best of all and didn't even have a fraying power cable like the modern Apple chargers where they switched to "eco friendly" rubber that failed dangerously requiring more chargers to be purchased negating any eco saving.
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.
I am just saying Apple, for me, has the most reliable and consistent experience. And I have tried most options:
- windows, linux, and macos for my personal and work machines
- android, ios, and even windows phone (remember that?)
So far, may experience has been the opposite of yours - my work laptop is a 2015 macbook pro 15 and still performs really well (no crashes), but I have BSODed a couple of times on my windows 10 laptop I bought last year. Doesn't say much, I know.
That being said, Windows 10 cannot be in the business of "ship and keep calm", due to the number of businesses and governments relying on Windows.
In every Linux thread on HN, macOS fans seem to disregard the fact that Linux has to support so many more hardware configs entirely. In fact they'd compare the experience of them installing Ubuntu on a $300 Best Buy laptop they got for $150 on Black Friday and wonder why the experience isn't up to par compared to their 2019 decked out $3000 MBP.
Mac fans have defended Apple saying that "QA is expansive and they can't afford it", as if Apple is some low budget indie app developer in an incubator and not this trillion dollar goliath with insane margins.
Being a QA is the most thankless way of making the world better imaginable.
As a fellow dev, you might be getting ahead of yourself. I think there are plenty more professions that go thankless and that are actually making the world a better place.
I hope this doesn't offend you but the thankless garbage men or street cleaners on my neighborhood have a bigger impact on my life than the people who do QA on the apps I use on a daily basis.
If github, slack and outlook stop working I basically have that time off and go outside for a coffee. If my garbagemen stop picking up my smelly garbage, then I'm gonna have a pretty bad day.
Again, no offense, just stating the facts.
They do try... for instance I’ve heard the reason they always charge more for RAM is labor costs from running additional tests to fail chips other companies ship.
A friend of mine was once stationed in a jungle in South America. Most laptops couldn’t handle the humidity there. His IBM Thinkpad was the only one that held up.
Which is false. Apple uses the same off the shelf DRAM chips from established manufacturers found in any PC/Phone/Laptop.
Unlike Flash storage, there is really not really bad performing DRAM per-se, just defective, And apple is no guarantee of free from defects with RAM fault in MACs being as common as in the rest of the PC industry.
The extra price is just the Apple tax.
That doesn't mean parts with some defects don't sneak into the final products but the rate is low enough that testing each chip you receive is not monetary feasible for consumer products so you just test the final assembled product to a degree, but even then, brand new Apple products are no strangers to having their mainboards replaced for a defective chip in the warranty period. Just ask Luis Rossmann or people working at the genius bar. That's why everyone recommends you get Apple care.
So the theory that Apple thoroughly tests each chip that goes in their products is false. It would be too expensive and eat into their fat margins.
What you do test, is samples from each batch you receive, to make sure your supplier did not pull a bait and switch and replaced your contracted parts with lower quality ones under the same part number and hope you would not notice but this is more common on low margin parts and Chinese suppliers are notorious for this since for them it's just regular business practice and see nothing wrong with it.
Source: my career as a hardware engineer.
We do BYOD on phones, so don’t have data there.
In theorie Win10 looks nice. I tryed to upgrade one of my notebooks at home from Win7 to Win10. Privacy is one thing, but CandyCrush and things like that, was a totaly show stopper for me. I mean, I even have the Pro licences, but so much bloat .. So since the, I'm Linux only at home. I will never upgrade to Win 10.
I never felt so miserable using a notebook before and dreaded each day I had to use it.
I literally use drivers from Lenovo because the ones HP provides are like 5 years old and they don't plan on updating them.
Updating the BIOS is like playing Russian roulette, they seem to introduce more bugs than they fix.
But the hardware itself is nice, I've been using HP workstations for more than a decade. Quality has gone down somewhat (less metal, more plastic, less durable compared to early Elitebooks imo), but they're still nice machines.
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-sg/troubleshoot/windows-client...
2: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/2c...
Your RAM might be working fine, but with crashes and lockups I think its always worth checking. Life is too short to put up with faulty hardware.
The thing is that the issue started long before that, my Blender app would crash in tens of times a day, and same with Solidworks on windows.
So yeah, i recommend running memtest and replacing ram if necessary.
The first one just needed a cleanup and some new thermal pastes. But afterwards, when I was test driving the laptop, I found the machine started to crash randomly - the OS was a fresh install. And later, I found whenever I put the laptop on the metal chassis on my PC (it was on the same table), it could trigger a kernel panic. Oh no, did I accidentally shorted something on the motherboard to the chassis? I reopened the machine and reseated the board but it didn't solve the problem. I also tried to reproduce the problem with a multimeter probe, but it didn't work. I got the final breakthrough while searching the web using the laptop while lying on a sofa - whenever my lap kicked the bottom cover, it would crash instantly!
The DIMMs came loose. Reseating it fixed the problem - the machine was previously dropped, which also explained the cracked plastic I saw on the battery.
Coincidentally, one day later, another family friend (with absolute no relation or knowledge about the former one) sent me a message, showing a MacBook with random screen corruptions. I said "you're out of luck, better to get a replacement from Apple." Later, I was also told that screen corruption was not the only problem - whenever a spot near the keyboard was punched, it would promptly crash! I couldn't stop laughing, "Okay, just send it to me, it's a 5 minute fix..." And yes, the machine was previously dropped by kids.
Nowadays, most MacBooks come with soldered RAMs. But if your machine has sockets, make sure to reseat the RAM and swap the slots first before declaring the death of your motherboard or your RAM.
1. Linux
2. MacOS
10. Windows
I had more crashes on Linux than any other, all related to the Gpu driver (intel iGpu), and it really depends on the kernel version but newer not necessarily means better. In a VM with i3, it never crashed.
But regarding hardware support except for the Gpu, I had better experience with Linux than Windows on the same machine. On Windows my mouse is stuttering when connected on my TB3 hub, Wifi connectivity is much more unstable and strangely my battery consumption is higher (5-6 h on Windows, 6-7h on Linux)... But the issue on Linux is the lack of proprietary software to manage these device (talking about my Canon printer and scanner).
As for Mac (MBPro 2015 early) I had quite some issues with Bose QC35 II bluetooth connection. I have to reboot sometimes. And one issue with Mac I noticed is compared to Windows, is less support for corporate software. For instance, for my AWS remote certification exam, I could not connect with my Mac.
Linux on a server is basically bullet proof. There's just no surface area for issues, it's talking to storage and a network card. Desktop Linux with the wrong display drivers can crash daily.
Windows can be rock solid. I do game dev and am forced to have it as my daily driver. I have a 3900X, 2070 Super, do machine learning, VR development, game playing, peg it at 100% CPU overnight and I haven't had a blue screen since I bought it.
Buy the wrong laptop with shitty drivers, though, and BSOD is a way of life. Although Microsoft cracked down hard on this over the last decade, the WHQL initiative. They were well aware Windows stability was suffering at the hands of third parties, and put processes in place to validate their work.
And OS X, since it barely has to work with third party drivers, is more or less rock solid. You buy a MacBook Pro, plug an Apple mouse in and use it like that for years, maybe you never see a fault.
When it does interact with third party devices in my experience it's not better than Windows. Bluetooth handling in particular is quite poor.
This wasn't intended to be some kind of argument. Defending MS on the internet is of zero interest to me. I was intending to say, if you're forced to use Windows professionally and it's not stable, you absolutely do not have to put up with that. I don't.
Not saying it's definitely the cause, but strongly suggest you check if you haven't yet. It doesn't take long.
We sometimes fry CPUs, memory controllers or RAM at office. Even a well cooled component has a lifetime and eventually gives up.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been better or worse times with platforms I’ve used over the decades.
But it does mean that no platform is exempt from flaws or even dark times.
Individual mileages vary wildly depending on a combination of general quality of the product at any stretch of time, personal use patterns at that time, and blind, random luck.
And I’m still using 3 or 4 major platforms daily, depending how you count. None are worth total praise. And none totally suck either. As with many relationships “it’s complicated” :-)
Last year I worked at a location with a Mac on my left, Win10 on my right. Same software / jobs. Mac hangs 3 times a day. Both machines were very well tended to.
One thing to keep in mind is that Windows/Mac/Linux do render fonts differently - they may not look identical to macOS out of the box, but there's a lot of configuration options (if you want to play with them) to get them to look the way you want.
The only thing I can say is that with the M1 Mac mini I have it’s the only computer I haven’t found any issues with at all yet and I’ve been using it since November 26th 100% of the time. Absolutely no issues at all.
Now windows is mostly reliable from the hardware side of things I’d you are lucky but the software is broken as fuck. Nothing works reliably or consistently. For over a month now Alt-tab on 20H2 has been randomly changing window ordering as an example breaking over 20 years of muscle memory. Their own mail client stops receiving mail twenty times a day. I’m not even going to start the book-sized rant on how unreliable their development stack is. And yesterday I spent an hour trying to delete a file which wouldn’t go away. It’s just motivational poison at the end of the day. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Inertia is a powerful force in the IT departments of Corp America.
The worst font rendering Linux ever had is still better what macOS does today to non-apple-blessed displays. It's a blurry mess.
There are a lot of non high dpi devices out there. The majority of screens are. Whether it's your personal one (and you can't or don't want to change it) or a professional one (and your company may not want or be able to justify changing dozens of screens), you need to use them.
It's possible to display properly and cleanly on them, everyone else does it. It's not as great as on a high dpi obviously, but it's perfectly sevicable for its need.
Apple with osx is the only major os that fails to do it, either through incompetence, malice or just pure disdain for their users facing that scenario.
It’s because of cost involved in maintaining the code that can push the hinting through the various layers of the graphics stack. Coupled with Apple’s culture of ditching old technology at the first opportunity.
As opposed to what other year? Color me naive, but I thought it was supposed to be the function rather than the form that we were supposed to make those kinds of comparisons about. What about a low pixel density is /not/ appropriate to the year 2020?
That said, I was in disbelief that this was a problem that both was common enough to be all over the Internet, and so involved to fix. Amazes me that OSX doesn't simply have an advanced setting for RGB/YPrPb, and instead requires that you boot into Recovery Mode (!!!) to fix it!
1. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/08/24/macbook-pro-externa...
Anyway, low-dpi screens on macOS are so blurry because it doesn't do font hinting.
In my company i am the only one, but it is not due to a faulty Dock since it works with Windows and Linux.
I had like 30 crashes until i could reliably avoid them.
Alas, it turns out my OS drive was busted. Not Windows' fault. Before that, more than a year ago I had some crashes with Windows, by then it was my GPU dying out. It's all anecdata, and it still doesn't feel right to praise Windows for its stability (guess everyome from earlier days would feel the same), but hey, in last few years my Windows OSes outlasted the hardware they worked on.
In the meantime I can't count how many times I had to reboot my Macs (two of them) for one reason or another. Crashes after wakeups, permanent visual bugs that only get solved after reboots, weird slowndowns, Mac's disdain for external monitors and adaptors, etc etc. Back then Mac was the it-just-works machine, nowadays I would attribute that to nothing but Windows.
I often hear this, but I've never seen an ad (except MSFT's own ads getting to to try its new Edge browser.)
But.. I still get winrot, and my dev environment drives me mad. I've been working on a laptop since covid started, and my dev machine is a VM on the laptop, so it's a nightmare.
At home I run NixOS with a Win10 VFIO setup for games. Both Linux and Windows at home are drama-free, but I don't abuse my home computer nearly as much and it's much more powerful than the work laptop.
And people really need to stop expecting that paid products won't show ads. From the POV of the provider, not showing ads would mean leaving money on the table (you likely won't quit paying over just an ad here or there). On top of that, as a paid customer, you self-identify as a real person with disposable income, making yourself much more valuable a target for advertisers.
- The Start Menu shows "suggested apps" by default
- On first install/boot, the Start Menu is preloaded with about 10 sponsored apps, and many of them install automatically even if you don't click them.
- These sponsored apps have a tendency to reinstall themselves _even after you just uninstalled them_ if you haven't rebooted your computer at least once or twice after first boot up.
- Microsoft Edge ads appear in the Taskbar at times, Action Center at times, and sometimes when you are changing the default browser to Chrome, and sometimes even after Chrome is default.
- Windows Explorer occasionally advertises OneDrive.
- Most built-in Windows Apps like Weather, News, and Sports contain lots of built-in ads.
- The Mail app comes with an "Upgrade to Office 365" button always visible.
- Cortana occasionally pops up by itself to ask if you want to use it. And there are ads in her search results and "suggested apps" from her for you.
- The default Lock Screen, "Windows Spotlight," occasionally advertises games, Microsoft's latest political agenda, or Bing when your computer is Locked.
- Office 365, on new installs or accounts, has links to _every web app_ on the Start Menu by default.
- When adding a user, Microsoft will hide the ability to create a Local account not linked to a Microsoft account under, like, 3 pages of advertising for why Microsoft accounts are awesome.
- The new Settings app has a new header that is in A-B testing right now, which (among other things) has a big obvious link _in the Settings app_ to Bing/Microsoft Rewards.
- Microsoft Edge has, by default, the entirety of MSN as your New Tab page and your Homepage. Plenty of ads on that, and worse, they serve ads from Taboola and Outbrain. Those types of ads with "You won't believe what celebrity XYZ..." or "Take this 2 minute quiz to learn..." kind of junk. (In fact, all of the built-in Windows apps seem to serve Taboola/Outbrain. You just want to check the Weather!)
- If you are not signed into OneDrive, OneDrive will inform you of this fact _every single time_ you log in with a giant error message.
- If you are not signed into Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams will inform you of this fact _every single time_ you log in with an Office 365 Sign-in dialog. It frequently fights with OneDrive to see who can make you sign in first.
- The operating system will sometimes randomly pop up with messages from "Windows Tips." While (theoretically) making the experience nicer for new users, the actual Tips app is pretty barebones and really motivates people to click a button to "Learn More"... using Bing search.
- If you want to use Google as default search engine on Microsoft Edge instead of Bing, that is a.) extremely nested deep in the UI and hard to find, and b.) if you do manage to find it, there's a three-section ad explaining the "benefits of Bing."
And there's still stuff I'm forgetting.
* After every version update I'm prompted to finish setting up my account by converting my local sign in to a Microsoft account. The wizard itself only gives options to go through with it or be reminded in 3 days. Disabling it is a checkbox in notifications settings page "Suggest ways I can finish setting up the device to get the most out of windows". This to me feels like deliberate disguising of the true purpose of this setting
> Taboola is the world’s largest discovery platform. Through our exclusive partnerships with many of the world’s top publishers, we serve 360 billion content recommendations to over one billion people across the web each month. You have probably seen our feed serving recommendations on sites like Bild, Bloomberg, NBC News, Le Figaro, MSN, The Independent and The Weather Channel.
Yup... MSN is right there in their list of customers! They mention "native ads" quite a bit on their front page. What are native ads you ask? They tell you:
> Native advertising is the concept of creating ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer feels the ad belongs there.
and:
> As consumers become more resistant to traditional forms of advertising, Fortune 500 brands and consumer startups alike are allocating bigger budgets towards content marketing and non-disruptive ad formats.
Translation: People are starting to become resistant to the overt brainwashing, so we're making the brainwashing covert.
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
How do the people that work in these places sleep at night?
Like Donald Draper said: "On a bed made of money!"
USB installed without a key Windows 10 Pro N, which comes with less bloatware - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
when installing do not sign up for an outlook.com account, create a local agent account
Go into settings and tweak as much privacy stuff as I saw - as found here https://fix10.isleaked.com/ & https://techlog360.com/stop-microsoft-spying-windows-10-priv...
downloaded o&o shutup10 to tweak more privacy settings, could have probably done this without the reg edits - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
registry edits to -remove the activation watermark -https://www.techolac.com/computers/how-to-remove-activate-wi...
wallpaper can be changed by right clicking on an image and setting it as background wallpaper - cool wallpaper site https://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/downloads/rating/any/
downloaded Open Shell for further customization https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/
added show desktop to taskbar https://winaero.com/blog/add-the-show-desktop-button-next-to...
Also, your link to "Windows 10 Pro N" just leads me to the download page for Windows 10 -- I don't see any option for "Pro N". Smells like dark patterns to me.
macOS has the same issue but is not so far down the road.
By right-clicking on the button you can hide it completely.
It’s one of those tropes that keeps getting repeated but on the occasion I have said to someone “show me these ads” it turns out to be a recommendation in the Microsoft Store or something. Apple does those too in its App Store.
knowing what the other half does is usually a couple clicks away on the web, a 'man ...' away in the terminal, sources are usually available at a similar distance, and most of these services can be stopped and (forever?) disabled with a 'systemctl stop/disable ...' (you might even go the extra step and apt remove them). Trimming down stuff that you know you don't need is a pleasure (assuming you know what you're doing), and the end result is a leaner, faster system. Eg. after I installed AnyDesk, I didn't like that it started with the system (I'm paranoid, and I'm only using it occasionally), so I systemctl disabled it. This doesn't stop me from using it when I need (that is, to assist others. In the rare events when I need remote access to my system, I just use a reverse SSH tunnel, which is more practical for me)
What does svchost do?
Get-CimClass | ?{$_ -match 'service'}
$svc - Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_service
$svc | Get-Member
$svc | Select-Object -Property Name, PathName, ServiceType | Format-Table
$svc | ?{$_.PathName -match 'svchost.exe'} | Select-Object -Property Name, PathName, Description | Format-TableAnd no matter "privacy is a human blah blah", apple collects a ton of data too - whether you agree or not.
(I will mention that ubuntu is not microsoft terrible, but it is starting down the path trying to force automatic upgrades and collecting info)
...by subtracting value
It's almost like a zero-sum game.
I on the other hand would never voluntarily set my foot into the walled garden. That might be suitable for some users, but for readers of HN it shouldn't be necessary. I'm happy to run Gnu/Linux even on my phone, even if that might cause occasional inconvenience with the current duopoly in that segment. Freedom is freedom after all.
Well, people seem to make different choices...
The previous huge fuckup that caused data loss is still a fresh memory to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
This is why things like security audits exist - you can't judge a software product's internal quality from just what the salespeople tell you and what you see by running it, so you demand as a condition of purchase that someone look (with an appropriate NDA) at the internals and deliver a second opinion as to whether it's competent-looking code. This is also why things like PCI exist - you certainly can process credit cards without being careful about anything, but the credit card companies have decided (with an eye their own long-term profitability) that you only should process them with at least a little bit of care, even if that doesn't produce a visible functional difference. Yet.
Now, I'm not saying these are perfect processes by any stretch, but they absolutely act to prevent a company from laying off a division that provides an important but unseen function and coasting on reputation for several years.
No company the size of Microsoft is going to develop good software out of the kindness of its heart or a sense of professional pride or responsibility. Individuals do this all the time, of course - that's why Linux exists in the first place. But once you put a company around it, you should expect that it's going to have MBAs who don't want people to spend their time doing things that don't bring profit, and the customers should interact with the company accordingly: make sure the things you do want them doing bring them profit
Anyway, if you make money using your computer, don’t update. If you make money making updates, I don’t know.
The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing.
The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests rather than flag the problem and dedicate budget and effort to redesign the existing for testability.
That’s where guidance and oversight are key, and more often than not, sorely lacking.
I had two separate computers with very distinct hardware that both failed to upgrade to any of the semi-annual Windows releases. They would just get stuck in a reboot loop at the SSD storage driver loading section of the installer, which means that no errors could be written. Hence, no specific errors could ever be sent back to Microsoft other than "failed".
I eventually found a workaround myself, but the root cause was never fixed, and will never be fixed, because Microsoft is blind to it.
Similarly, anything that causes a BSOD gets reported back via telemetry, but hangs and freezes aren't. Random performance issues, glitches, etc... are in the same bucket of permanently invisible issues.
If you're wondering why Windows is crashing less but glitching more... there's your answer.
It's why I like having a few non-automators and program noodlers around.
I always stay one entire version behind. I'm going to barely going to update to macOS Catalina now that big sur is out.
The night light is awful and blasts you with full blue light whenever monitors come out of standby mode and then it'll be "On" but not actually on until you toggle it.
Lately explorer hasn't been refreshing properly, so when I create a new folder I need to right-click, refresh before I see it and can rename it.
Things that auto-install drive me crazy. No, I don't want to "Meet Now".
Every SAC update tries to trick me into enabling OneDrive "backup" (sync is NOT a backup) and I missed it once so all my stuff got uploaded to OneDrive.
BitLocker with a PIN and Windows Update don't seem to know each other exist. Updates auto-restart the computer and then it sits at the BitLocker screen or, in my case, reboots continuously every few minutes spinning the fans up to max on every reboot.
I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones that annoy me daily.
Having used Windows for decades, I more pleased with Windows update now than I remember ever having been. Although some of that may be because I don’t have a team responsible for patching Windows servers anymore. But my workstation performs great and the update process for Windows 10 has seemed very reliable (relative to versions past).
As an example, Big Sur bricked lots of Late-2013 MBP laptops, but Apple had no way of knowing this would happen because they never tested them.
I always looked at Linux as not being worth the hassle.. now it's not worth the hassle to use anything else.
Would it be fair to say that Windows extinguished your Linux install? :D
If there is a software they want us to use, you're gonna use it. Oh you use Linux or mac? Sorry, you gotta go to the computer lab at the school or find a windows machine.
After a few months without progress, I ended up debugging the problem myself and mailing them an analysis.
It's still not fixed, and not on that known issues page. I wrote a twitter thread about it here:
https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1310619801606184960
There is an office kb article about it, because it turned out it also broke Outlook.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/outlook-and-other...
I would love to see a how-to for the way you debug these things with IDA, as otherwise I consider myself good at debugging, but have never even tried to peak under the hood of Windows.
I don't understand how such core things break in Windows.
Honestly, I'd pay money so they bring back the testing team and not use all of us non-enterprise users as beta users.
1. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
flaky hardware?
Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever.
Try using the Start Menu.
Nothing will work.
The search upon typing will not show all items.
If you click on a search result, it won't launch.
Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something.
Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists.
Etc...
It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.
This leads to absurd situations where the index show different programs for each letter.
For example on my machine:
Up > Windows Update first
Upd > Lenovo System Update first
Upda > Windows Update first
Update > Lenovo System Update is the only result
When I search for Visual Studio, only a few programs are found. I made a shortcut for the Visual Studio Command prompt because Windows search regularly threw it out of the results. One day it's there, the next it's gone. Horrible UX.
What planet are you from that it takes a server nearly 170 hours of processing time to index... what... a few dozen kilobytes?
And why, for the love of god why, does it have to index the Start Menu!? Why isn't it indexed synchronously on install!?
Why does it even need indexing in the first place!? Do you have any idea how few milliseconds it takes to just brute-force search through a few dozen KB of text?
I implemented real-time character-by-character completion and search for an index over a 100M records in a web application in 2007. Are you telling me that Microsoft, one of the world's biggest corporations struggles to solve the same problem in a week for an amount of text that a child could index using play cards in a matter of minutes?
This is one of those places where Microsoft has let the OEMs that install Windows on 5400rpm hard drives or slower to this day ruin the experience for others. Hence we get this weird performance detection system that tries to guess how slow your system is when it comes to search and seemingly fails miserably at all cases.
There are many similar examples with this same pattern.
It's the fucking OS, that even with its problems (Spotlight has gone downhill on macOS too) is still a generally more pleasant experience than the other 2 options.
I would guess it's something like non-deterministic order of patch installation. Which seems easy to end up doing even if you think it's deterministic. For example, some patches don't finish install until boot time, so unexpected reboots could bork things. Or things like "can't install this patch while X software is running", etc.
Admittedly I have a test rig running windows posready 2009, aka w7 with esu cooked in from the beginning for contractual reasons. It is a bit like running windows xp embedded b on a normal desktop but seems good enough that I could use it as a daily driver if I wanted to.
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
Now you're forced into it, like it or not.
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
EDIT here's one thread talking about installing some, but not all, patches and updates: https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.backoffice.smal...
Did you cross over from a parallel universe, because Windows Update always was, to use the term of endearment, a shitshow:
https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+update+deleted+docum...
I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
In that case, running Hyper-v might be a good thing. (Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning your logged in session is running in a vm with dedicated input/video)
I'd argue the opposite. Thin or leaking abstractions are how operating systems and video games harness the full potential of the hardware. Trade-offs are ugly nonetheless.
He only found that there was a problem when the ones started earlier finished and rebooted.
By then it was too late for 7 machines but he was able to stop it on the rest.
I've downloaded my Google Takeout Backup, so 74 4GB sized zips. After I was done extracting them and storing them on Dropbox, I tried to delete the zip files, but my machine froze without so much of a bluescreen. After a hard reboot, I could reproduce the behavior. I can still change the focus of apps, but everything that requires the ssd to do anything is waiting for i/o until the system freezes completely.
Unplugging the notebook seems to help, sometimes, but I can't make this work coherently at the moment.
Until this post I thought my SSD (Samsung Evo 970 Plus) was faulty, despite working perfectly for everything else.
Might that be your problem, or part of it? Not 100% sure, but whenever I access machines with Dropbox all kinds of weird things happen like there's a ghost in the machines. E.g. deleting a directory managed by Dropbox through explorer consistently results in all its subdirectories and files deleted, but the directory itself remaining there, requiring deleting it again.
Regarding the parent poster, on Windows Smart Sync is enabled and, while extremely useful (and better that Onedrive’s equivalent IMO), it did cause issues in the past. Since it seems to work as a file filter, it can cause some issues. That being said, I haven’t seen those in a while.
It should be a persistent problem that shows up immediately after you've just installed an incompatible SSD, and it should only affect those who installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. So, if it only appears after a system upgrade, it should not be the problem here. But apparently it's still a possible cause.
So, just in case, the solution follows:
First, try disabling HIPM and DIPM in Windows "Power Options", you can use this tutorial: https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-link-power...
Also, if you are using the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver, LPM and DIPM can be disabled by making the following registry changes. After making the changes, reboot the system and test.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port0]
"LPM"=dword:00000000
"LPMDSTATE"=dword:00000000
"DIPM"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port1]
"LPM"=dword:00000000
"LPMDSTATE"=dword:00000000
"DIPM"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port2]
"LPM"=dword:00000000
"LPMDSTATE"=dword:00000000
"DIPM"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port3]
"LPM"=dword:00000000
"LPMDSTATE"=dword:00000000
"DIPM"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port4]
"LPM"=dword:00000000
"LPMDSTATE"=dword:00000000
"DIPM"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor\Parameters\Port5]
"LPM"=dword:00000000
"LPMDSTATE"=dword:00000000
"DIPM"=dword:00000000
1. It disables LPM and DIPM blindly for Port0, Port1, Port2, Port3, Port4, and Port5. It may miss your SSD if you have more ports (unlikely), and if you know the location of your SSD, one entry is enough.
2. I only tested it many years ago on an old version of iaStor, perhaps a new upgrade has made these register keys ineffective. Who knows.
3. Previously, uninstalling iaStor and using the built-in AHCI driver in Windows could be a workaround. But I'm not sure whether it's still a solution.
I have to say this problem ONLY appears when DELETING these specific 4gb zip files. I really can't reproduce this in any other way.
After an evening of trying to fix it, I restored from a backup. Thank $deity for Macrium Reflect and nightly disk imaging.
FWIW, the error doesn't even occur if you use the recommended (and much faster) chkdsk /scan followed by chkdsk /spotfix combo.
Machines back to running perfectly after downgrade.
Feel like these builds are just Beta builds and they are using a staggered release for consumers to be the testers
Data was all still there but it rendered the drive unbootable. Very annoying.
My friend woke up two days ago to find out that 500gb of source video and 24 hours of edits from Adobe Premier were mysteriously missing from her computer having only recently copied them there.
But we’re too desensitized to news about shit like this happening in Windows. Why?
I just walked past an ATM with a blue screen of death. Business as usual.
wusa /uninstall /KB:4592438
should I?
First of all there's no reason to ever run chkdsk/f in the first place if there are no problems with your SSD.
Secondly, just never use chkdsk /f - chkdsk /scan is faster, requires no restart and no further action is needed if no problems were found. Problems can be fixed using chkdsk /spotfix otherwise, which doesn't cause any problems.
But that's what you get from disbanding most of your QA-team I guess...
[1] https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/hard-drive-re...
[2] https://fossbytes.com/repair-corrupted-hard-drive-fix-disk/
[3] https://winbuzzer.com/2020/04/20/windows-10-how-to-run-chkds...
[4] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
So many people are claiming they loved Windows 7 so much, but the irony is Windows 7 was the last Windows OS where chkdsk /f was actually needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection