AMD graphics card users report gremlins with Windows 11 Another day with a "y" in it, another Windows update issue. This time, it's AMD gamers complaining about Microsoft's legendary quality control. The September 26 operating system update debuted last week and arrived laden with features, including a preview of Windows Copilot (if you were in a "select set of global markets"), a …
All of Microsoft's client-side software has effectively been beta for quite a few years now, along with a lot of their cloudy services. As a sysadmin who gets their notification emails (always best to know about these things), it's clear that there are issues with something or another, often multiple somethings, pretty much every day. These are often attributed to a 'code change' - i.e. something they didn't test properly!
The most stable of their software is the on-prem server stuff, but probbaly only because they now see cloudy stuff as a priority so the on-prem stuff doesn't get as much attention so fewer opportunities to break it. They've not managed to break Windows Server for quite a while, although perhaps it's risky to say so!
Maybe it is.
When once upon a time, I used windows as my primary OS, it was a well know "joke" that every other windows release was "Beta"
But they surpassed themselves with windows releases by making sweeping changes to the UI not just once, but three times.
Windows 8 was a disaster - it was Microsoft trying to enter the mobile OS game by cobbling together a single unified OS.
It was pants.
They rolled it back a little with Windows 10, then went and threw the baby out with bathwater AGAIN with windows 11.
No lessons learned, continuous dabbling - beta releases all round.
The glory days were win2k, winXP and win7 - everything since has been annoying and awful.
The direction they are headed? Cloud only "headless" PC's with AI built in, whether you like it or not.
It's going to be an operating system as a service eventually - a monthly fee, where microsoft can change _anything_ on your computer _whenever_ they want.
ALL of your data will be in the cloud, you WILL have AI whether you like it or not.
You will get updates, whether you want them or not - but you won't even notice it happening. No warning. No choice.
It isn't your computer, it isn't your operating system, it isn't your data.
If you are a smart computer user and still using windows? - time to get out now - plenty of alternatives out there!
Sad to say but Windows still wins because it handles many common desktop use cases far better than the competition.
Linux still can’t do simple things like video calls performantly in many cases because hardware video encoding/decoding is still (at least partially) broken for anyone not using Intel integrated graphics. The only reason Intel graphics is so well optimised is a combination of ChromeOS and Red Hat engineers having some kind of special arrangement with Intel.
On macOS, web browsing uses up to 3x the RAM per tab and Apple doesn’t seem to care because brainwashed fanboys will keep chanting “unused RAM is wasted RAM” while watching poorly coded apps suck the cache pool (which that phrase is referring to) completely dry. 32GB RAM is barely enough to keep memory pressure in the green for me on macOS Sonoma just browsing the web, loading a few office apps, a scripting IDE and a handful of TeamViewer sessions. For everything Apple gets right, they also get a lot of basic things wrong too.
"Sad to say but Windows still wins because it handles many common desktop use cases far better than the competition."
That very much depends on the use cases. And where they don't include gaming the alternatives do often perform a lot better than Windows, while also avoiding all the baggage and crap that Windows brings.
"On macOS, web browsing uses up to 3x the RAM per tab and Apple doesn’t seem to care because brainwashed fanboys will keep chanting “unused RAM is wasted RAM” while watching poorly coded apps suck the cache pool (which that phrase is referring to) completely dry. 32GB RAM is barely enough to keep memory pressure in the green for me on macOS Sonoma just browsing the web, loading a few office apps, a scripting IDE and a handful of TeamViewer sessions. "
I'm not seeing that, and we have users with well over 50 active tabs in Safari, plus email (Apple Mail), Zoom and other productivity apps (none from Microsoft, though) on measly Mac minis M1 with 8GB RAM, and memory pressure remains low. All across >1500 users.
Besides, those "brainwashed fanboys" are absolutely correct when saying that unused RAM is wasted, so I'm not sure the snark was appropriate. Especially since it's only marginally relevant for your problem, which is likely caused by a memory leak in one of your apps (and if those "few office apps" you mentioned happen to be from Microsoft then that may well be your culprit right there, especially Teams is a real shit show on both Windows and mac OS).
I updated my 6900XT to 23.9.3 a few days ago... since then I've been having desktop woes.
At some random point, switching windows from one to another... be it one firefox instance to another window or to brave... or running a YT video on one and then trying to read something on another... causes the whole system to hang (but audio still plays) for a random amount of time between 5-30 seconds. Sometimes it just hangs the once, other times it repeatedly hangs, un-hangs for a split second and hangs again, repeating this process for a few mins at times.
It only started after the driver update... The last OS updates were a few weeks ago and I'm still on W10.
Strangely... it's not affecting any games at all. Just the desktop and it's getting infuriating.
I have an MSI motherboard like that.. Every time I update the firmware, it resets all the UEFI settings to default, so I have to go through their God awful "Click BIOS" menu changing everything back to the settings I use, because I like WOL enabled, doing stuff with Virtual Machines and not having all the fans on the PC running at full speed the whole time. I have a very old case, with a PC that is about 3 years old in it. The PC normally runs almost silently if I have the fans tuned correctly. But if they aren't tuned, they run at full speed and are bloody noisy when they do that.
Still, the software is crap as well. My PC is using a gaming motherboard. I didn't want one, but this motherboard was the only one compatible with the then new 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs, and I wanted a new Ryzen. Because it's a gaming motherboard, it has RGB LEDs on it. It's a cheap motherboard, so the LEDs are rather crap. I also have an RTX 2080 which, in common with a lot of consumer graphics cards, has lots of RGB LEDs on it.. Thee can look quite pretty, but I generally leave both off.. This is why I had to use their software. The Firmware does not allow you to turn off the LED lights, or control them in any way. They are just on, and follow the same pattern they did the last time the software was run. When Windows boots, and the software runs, it sets up the LEDs according to what you've selected. I sleep in the room the PC is in. If I leave it on, I don't want bright LEDS shining through the case vents, and lighting my room, even if they are pretty rainbow colours.
And yes, despite not having an AMD graphics card, I've had to uninstall MSI's management software in recent days because the machine keeps bluescreening with it installed. It doesn't even need to be running, just installed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
