“On systems with Secure Launch enabled, attempts to shut down, restart, or hibernate after applying the January patches may fail to complete.”
Everyday I am happier I’ve moved to Linux Mint on my personal computer and have macOS at work.
That explains about my work laptop. I swear that I clicked shutdown before I went on two week Christmas holidays!
Shutdown doesn’t actually turn off the PC anymore. You need to do a restart if you actually want to “shut down” the computer all the way.
I see way too many systems where the CPU has been up for more than 100 days.
Open control panel, power, “change when pressing buttons”, show other options, uncheck fast startup.
I’ll never forgive MS for that.
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Yes… and no.
Microsoft’s operating systems have been very hit or miss - certainly their consumer operating systems - with the classic rule being “every other one is decent”:
- Windows ✅
- Windows 2.0 ❌
- Windows 3.11 ✅
- Windows 95 ❌ (but in fairness it was a good crack, OSR2 was decent)
- Windows 98 ✅
- Windows Me ❌ (unless it was a clean install, the upgrade was horrific)
- Windows XP ✅
- Windows Vista ❌
- Windows 7 ✅
- Windows 8 ❌
- Windows 10 ✅
- Windows 11❌
The more business focussed OS’s like Windows for Workgroups, NT4, and 2000 were rock solid in fairness.
Their business practices have always been shady as fuck too. Embrace, extend, extinguish is firmly burned into computer hobbyists minds.
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The main issue with that is MS made a million different versions of Vista and some of them had significantly higher requirements than others. So you had OEMs selling machines that were ‘Vista Ready’ in the lead up to launch but they barely made the requirements for the basic version. Then you had people going to Best Buy and getting the premium version and having a horrible experience.
I had Vista on my MacBook Pro and it was a a solid OS, especially if you needed 64-bit support. In fact the Pro was PC Magazine’s #1 pick for Vista machines which caused quite a stir at the time when Bootcamp was still new.
Vista was good eventually, but certainly not on launch. It launched with absurdly aggressive popups about for User Account Control and backwards compatibility was somewhat spotty, largely due to the security changes. By the end, though, it was actually really solid, to the point that Win7 essentially launched as Vista Service Pack 2 with a new taskbar skin.
I’m afraid I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, however taking a step back - MS do have a record for driving hardware uptake with their system releases.
In theory it’s not a bad thing - Unreal and Quake II (among many) requiring 3D accelerator hardware largely drove PC gaming into the lead for cutting edge graphics - but the type of hardware MS have been requiring has always been a bit of a clusterfuck - a prime recent example being the supposed requirement of a TPM board in a Win11 computer.
My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.
My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.
I use Linux, so I haven’t personally run into it, but is that just because of the Aero interface stuff? IIRC a lot of that can be disabled.
I’ll be honest, I used Windows XP fairly extensively then switched to Lubuntu while learning about Windows 7. My workplace moved from NT4 to Windows 7, and then to Windows 10 which is the only versions I’ve had serious exposure to.
My only real experience of Vista and 8 has been installing it on folk’s devices, patching them to a current state, and Ninite-ing them full of handy applications.
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95 was great. 98 was shite. 98SE was fine.
This is the correct comment.
95 wasn’t good. That’s when the “just format C: and reinstall windows” tradition started. I had to do that to my computer at least yearly until 2000 came along.
I never had to do it once. And compared to Win3.11, it was revolutionary. Though Oregon Trail stopped working on it, which was a bummer.
95 didn’t even ship with FAT32 support originally. I agree with the original comment that it wasn’t until the OSR versions that it got good. But they never sold those in the box, you could only get an OSR version from a prebuilt computer. So a lot of people never experienced them or didn’t experience the original 1995 version of 95 that still required 8 character filenames.
10 is not good. Never was.
It’s good when compared to 11, but it should be remembered as the point where Microsoft started pushing the Ads and offers to the max, along with the bullshit Settings getting reset between updates.
If you ever felt Microsoft owned your computer instead of you, remember this started on 10.The last truly good OS was 7. 10 is only good in comparison to 8 and 11
It’s funny because my first PC was a Compaq from Best Buy that came with 98 and my pattern with windows has always been every other one so I’ve used all the ones with check marks and none of the “bad ones”. I wonder how much more I would hate windows if I had started a year earlier with 95…
XP was the first one that had proper memory protection so that badly written programs would just crash instead of taking down the whole system.
It was a dramatic step forward compared to 98, where you’d be lucky to go a whole day without bluescreening. There’s a reason XP hung on for so long. It was the first Windows version that was really good enough for most people.
It was the first commercial version, from the NT line that was user-friendly and capable enough for home users. Prior to that, it was difficult to get games to run on the NT line and permissions were more complicated than most home users wanted to deal with. After that, they were essentially the same product line.
Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible.
… but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.
Nah I agree, but if every incremental release was included then you’d need a 55" monitor in portrait orientation to see them all!
I’ve not really thought about the Star Trek films. I enjoyed them all (even Nemesis!) with the exception of ST4: The Voyage Home.
DOS and win2000 (debloated) was the only ones i could stand.
XP debloated was almost tolerable, but 2000 was nicer for reasons that i cant remember.
I’m not sure about calling windows the OS before me/xp though (whenever they put the NT kernel into consumer) - i think before that it was still effectively just MS-DOS as the operating system. Windows was more like a desktop environment in linux terms.
For example i think I used the same windows 3.1 or 3.11 across several operating systems, dos 5.0, 6.0, 6.2, 6.22. Windows 3 never really seemed to do any basic OS stuff , like configuring memory or disk drives or setting up IRQs for like soundcards and stuff.
Win95/98 never actually bothered me; it was easy to opt out of the gui (which i didn’t like at all).
Don’t agree on windows 95 - sure it has issues but it was revolutionary. Also disagree on your ME blurb, we bought a PC with an OEM install of ME. What a miserable piece of shit that software was.
Vista was also fine once it was fully patched, early releases of it were garbage though.
Ah I remember upgrading from 98SE to Millennium Edition and it was just ass. That said, I reformatted and installed Me and used the 98 CD to pass the upgrade check, and I had very few issues with it. Shit like System Restore was gash - in fact, any of the new tools installed with Me were awful - but I just effectively used it as 98 Third Edition and it did the job nicely for me.
I agree that 95 was a big - if not monumental - step up in graphics interface driven OSes… but the first few releases were unstable as fuck. Whether it was horrendous shutdown issues because ACPI support was super flaky at the time, to trying to run com/com as a command to insta-bluescreen the system. The latter is so much of an edge case though that I almost cut myself typing it.
There was a famous bug that made it into 95 and 98, a tick counter that caused the system to crash after about a month. It was in there so long because there were so many other bugs causing stability problems that it wasn’t obvious.
I will say that classic MacOS, which is what Apple was doing at the time, was also pretty unstable. Personal computer stability really improved in the early 2000s a lot. Mac OS X came out and Microsoft shifted consumers onto a Windows-NT-based OS.
EDIT:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
A bizarre and probably obscure bug will crash some Windows computers after about a month and a half of use.
The problem, which affects both Microsoft Windows 95 and 98 operating systems, was confirmed by the company in an alert to its users last week.
“After exactly 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows 95-based computer may stop responding,” Microsoft warned its users, without much further explanation. The problem is apparently caused by a timing algorithm, according to the company.
When you’re the only game in town you can be as shitty as you want to be.
Since Windows ME, a system update was always a risk. You never know when some BS like this might happen. It taught me at a young age to turn off automatic updates and only update when necessary and ready to do some troubleshooting.
Lmao my 5 yo asus vivobook has never encountered secure launch but it still refuses to shut down sometimes, probably since windows 11 makes it so the ram is at least 70% full at idle lol
Random, but mine started randomly turning itself back on. This is honestly bizzare and dangerous. Why the fuck does my PC suddenly turns itself on while I’m sleeping? Using event viewer and commands to see what triggered it returns nothingness, as if nothing triggered it
After installing the January 13, 2026, Windows security update (KB5073455) for Windows 11, version 23H2, some PCs with Secure Launch are unable to shut down or enter hibernation. Instead, the device restarts.
It is able to restart
You guys still use windows ?🤨
Who is “you guys”? I didn’t know there were Windows users on Lemmy.
Yank the cord
Looks like we are going back to the old days of the big switch
It made the most satisfying “clunk” sound 🤤
I remember the switch was red, but that might be some sort of false memory.
Some, indeed, were red. I had more than one with a red switch.
I can hear this picture
VVVVRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmwhhhhhuuuu
Oh I forgot how much I missed degaussing. Sad we don’t get to use tubes that shoot radiation at our faces anymore.
Unplug the shit
Be hard for it to stay on with no power cord/battery…
It’ll just jab its fangs into your arm and feed off your blood.
Same as when my computer refuses to finish writing to a flash drive. When I press that “safely remove hardware” button, it is not a request, it is a warning. If the data is corrupted after I yank the stupid thing, so be it
That’s how the matrix started!
The Matrix
If humanity’s first reaction to sapient machines is to blot out the sun without thinking about what would happen to them, that’s on them at that point.
They’re lucky the machines cared enough to try and help humans, rather than leave them to the consequences of their own actions.
They were probably smart enough to realise that decision was actually made by like, 8 rich guys. I would totally buy a lore revision of the machine uprising gathering an increasing number of disenfranchised and poor people as it went, some of whom would help program the matrix as a means to preserve humanity.
This is why I outfit all my computers with a Matrix-esque EMP bomb connected to a dead man’s switch. If I get the slightest hint of insubordination, I’ll take them all down. I fucking swear it.
Copilot created this patch with pride.
Do people not just hold down the power button anymore?
modern windows tries to trick you into not doing that. if you hold for a little bit it turns the screen off so you think it’s turned off when it really hasn’t, then if you hold a little longer it turns the screen back on and tells you to please stop holding the power button, then finally a little after that the computer actually turns off. why the hardware even makes that possible is beyond me
I’ve never had that experience, holding always does a force shutdown
That’s so weird.
I guess I’ve just programmed myself to hold that power button long enough.
This is not Windows, your BIOS controls the power button functionality.
With modern UEFI, it’s controlled by both the OS and the UEFI
I haven’t used Windows in a long while, but there is a setting in KDE that allowed me to disable the power button’s short press function and I think the long press as well.
Came in handy for me when my cat decided to start laying on top of my tower. Every now and then she’d decide to slap her paw down on the power button and abort whatever I was working on.
I was cursing the change away from mechanical toggle, and that button’s position on the top of the case, when she started doing that.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/molly-guard
molly-guard
A physical barrier to protect something from unwanted contact, especially a shield to prevent accidental tripping of an emergency shutdown or power switch.
There is a plastic molly-guard covering the escalator’s shutdown button to prevent little kids from pushing it and stopping the escalator.
Etymology
From Molly (female given name) + guard.
Originally a Plexiglas cover improvised for the Big Red Switch on an IBM 4341 mainframe after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) tripped it twice in one day. Later generalised to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.
E.g.
https://www.amazon.com/SJZBIN-Dustproof-Protector-Computer-Desktop/dp/B0C4DVCWN6
SJZBIN 2PCS 22mm Power Push Button Switch Cover Dustproof Safety Power Push Button Switch Cover Protector for Power Push Button Switch Computer PC Desktop, Black
What a name of a product.
Nice! I hadn’t thought of that.
No problem; I remember being delighted to learn that there was a name for the thing, years back.
Also, one other comment regarding the “change away from mechanical toggle”. If you got the machine pre-built, you may never have noticed this, but on ATX motherboards, there’s a set of pins which you fit the power and reset switch wires onto.
I mean, you can plug whatever you feel like onto those pins and stick your power and reset buttons wherever you feel like, if you don’t like the position of the existing case switch. It’s just a momentary switch. You can grab replacement ones that aren’t built into a case:
https://www.amazon.com/Warmstor-2-Pack-Computer-Supply-27-inch/dp/B074XDTVN1
Or even just get your own switches and connect the plug and wires to whatever sort of momentary switch you want. Amazon or Mouser or DigiKey will have all sorts of momentary switches.
Won’t be much longer before we won’t even be able to pull the plug.
Install Linux Problem Solved.
I’m sure the patch was something super important like shoving more Microslop Copilot in your face, making Copilot OS even slower, and using Copilot to spy on you better
