alt Hacker NewsWindows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse
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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
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.
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)
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.
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.
I see Microslop's "AI" coding mandate is continuing to go well
> "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.
Modern Windows... It's like having your own DoS adversary baked into your PC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Previous discussion:
>Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
"Uninstall latest lack-of-quality update"
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.
> 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?
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.
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.