back to article Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Microsoft has logged some new known issues with Windows 11 24H2 and thrown up more safeguard holds until the problems are resolved. The latest glitches noted in Microsoft's Windows Release Health Dashboard are related to audio and gaming. The audio issue was reported by users who upgraded to Microsoft's latest and greatest …

  1. David 132 Silver badge
    Meh

    It’s a promising update

    It should be pretty good when it gets out of pre-Alpha status.

    …wait, it’s what??

    1. seven of five Silver badge

      Re: It’s a promising update

      > …wait, it’s what??

      GA.

      Which may come as a surprise, but I can explain:

      GA translates to "general availability". This refers to the availability of the product itself, as in "you can buy this". Or rather, "could buy" (for whatever reasons).

      Availability does not imply the availability of the services (theoretically) provided by the GA'ed product. (As if we didn't know already).

      All aside, GA in terms of Micros~1 usually expands to "Going Alpha" - a broad outline of what might come to market sometime. If they could be arsed.

      1. JWLong Silver badge

        Re: It’s a promising update

        I thought GA=God Awful.

  2. HighHair
    Unhappy

    Avoid 24H2 for now

    Don't implement 24H2 like I did.

    My boot times are at least TWICE as slow as below.

    There are now three different round swirling wait graphics before I get to the desktop.

    Applications now take about 20% longer to start.

    1. blu3b3rry
      Devil

      Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

      Just another reason I punted it off the laptop.

      It's always a good sign of efficient processes when W11 makes a fast Samsung Evo NVMe SSD feel like a worn-out 5400RPM Toshiba HDD from the mid 2000s (with a few bad sectors on top of that). At least it gave me plenty of time to decide what to replace it with....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

      Tried clean-installing Server 2025 24H2 on a lab machine yesterday.

      Even out-of-the-box it throws up error codes when trying to install server roles.

      And if you Google them you get a knowledgebase article.

      From 2013.

      1. ITMA Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

        Isn't that standard for a lot of errors Microsoft products throw up?

        No information, let alone useful informatioln.

        1. ecofeco Silver badge

          Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

          Oh come now, who doesn't know what Error x000996673382r67 means?

          1. Zarno
            Joke

            Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

            Ah, yes, "Pigeon stood on keyboard, moggie followed pigeon. Cleanup in shoe closet, STAT!"

      2. David 132 Silver badge

        Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

        You’re lucky there was at least an error code, and not just something dumbed-down and patronising like

        “:-( Something Went Wrong.”

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

          Microsoft's other favourite tactic (apart from 'Something went wrong') is to give what at first glance appears to be a useful error code, but when you search for what it means you find that it covers a very, very wide range of possible issues, many of which are very vague and generic, so you aren't really any further forward than you would have been with "something went wrong"!

      3. hoola Silver badge

        Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

        Ha, had exactly the. Had to get 2025 configured so we could start to QA some of our stuff.........

    3. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

      Microsoft. Making systemd look good.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Windows 11 Bluetooth...

    ...it fucking sucks. It was bad already, and then 24H2 broke my Bluetooth mouse, and even rolling back the update left it broken. The same mouse works great under Linux, btw. I thought W11 was basically fine when it came out, but Microsoft has just engaged in a process of continual enshittification.

    Much to my shame, I will invoke a particular long-banished commentard:

    MICROSOFT FAIL!

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: MICROSOFT FAIL!

      Well, to be honest, it's pretty good at that.

      And yet, it's still there.

    2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Big Brother

      Re: MICROSOFT FAIL

      The problem with MS is that they simply don't care.

      If you complain loudly enough, you get sent to Room 101 and they make your systems even slower.

      I hope that people take time over the holidays to think long and hard about their dependency on MS. If you can break it then go for it. It will be good for your mental health in the long run.

      1. Lon24

        Re: MICROSOFT FAIL

        Yes, the relief of escaping one last dependency means I now live in a Windows free world which had necessitated two dual boot laptops.

        Gone is whether my Rufus workaround on the Win 11 would upgrade to 24H2 - I'll never know or care. Getting the other Win10 to Win11 when support ends is also in the same bin.

        Now I can devote all that time watching Windows Updates to reclaimng the partition space and running up a few non-snap KDE distro VMs to see if I can find a better one.

        A very Happy Christmas!

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: MICROSOFT FAIL

          Try Devuan and be systemd-free as well. You know where its maintainer works, don't you?

    3. JimmyPage
      Unhappy

      Re: Windows 11 Bluetooth...sucks

      Ironically, bluetooth was one of the few things that MS had over Linux where none of the implementations really worked. Well, not if you wanted to use the handsfree protocols.

      The practical difference being colleagues were able to use their PC audio headsets to drive their mobile phone, and I couldn't. As always with Linux I found an abandoned project from a decade ago. And various commentators assuring me that pipewire was the fix (it wasn't).

      I do wonder if there are some secret linux followers at MS who are slowly eroding all the good bits in Windows.

      (See also miracast ...)

      BTW, where's teh "OS of the Gods" icon gone ?

    4. TangoDelta72

      Re: Windows 11 Bluetooth...

      I feel your pain. There was a similar BT fail with 23H2. Search the comments against my handle and perhaps my suggestion can help.

      https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/01/windows_11_23h2/

    5. Diogenes

      Re: Windows 11 Bluetooth...

      I gave up on my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard ages ago.

      24h2 broke my sound, I am using an ordinary headphones jack. Unplugging it and plugging it back in got it working again.

  4. Mentat74
    Trollface

    They should have called it...

    Windows 11 Vista...

    1. picturethis
      Devil

      Re: They should have called it...

      It's not too late to call it.

      Maybe Vista II ?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. TangoDelta72
        Coat

        Re: They should have called it...

        Vista 2: Electric Boogaloo

        1. MrDamage
          Pint

          Re: They should have called it...

          >> Vista 2: Electric Bugaloo

          FTFY

      3. BobChip

        Re: They should have called it...

        Windows 8 beta?

    2. neilo

      Re: They should have called it...

      That's kinda an insult to Windows Vista.

      Vista had two main problems. The first was the half-baked UAC system that made life hell.

      The second was the last minute decision to remove Aero support for Intel integrated graphics chips, leaving people who bought new "Vista Compatible" laptops with this chipset stranded without the pretty Aero display. This left a lot of new laptop buyer very disappointed that their new Vista laptop looked nothing like the flashy TV adverts.

      Winodws 11 has been nothing that a shitstorm since its inception. For a supposedly complete refresh of everything, I can still find Windows 3.1 era file dialogs in the system. Blowing up audio like this speaks volumes to Microsoft's commitment to ignoring things like basic testing.

      Microsoft, I think, is infinitely more focussed on Azure-hosted Windows experiences than the desktop experience, and it shows.

      1. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: They should have called it...

        You mean Azure/InTune/Entra?

        ...and whatever it will be called next year.

    3. isdnip

      Re: They should have called it...

      It may be Microsoft's version of tick-tock. Not like Intel's, which makes sense. But Microsoft's seems to be that Windows releases come in alternating good and bad ones. (Okay, Linux fanatics, that's *relative*.) So XP, 7, and 10 were good ones; Vista, 8, and 11 are the bad ones. It may be that they have two teams doing releases, and 11 comes from the "B team" who also did Vista. Maybe 12 will be better, coming from the A team. In the meantime I'm sticking with 10, which basically works.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: They should have called it...

        Windows 10 has only been "good" by comparison to 8 and 11.

        1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

          Re: They should have called it...

          > Windows 10 has only been "good" by comparison to 8 and 11.

          I have to disagree, strong. Below the UI a lot of things were better than in Windows 7. Even Windows 8.0 had a lot of things improved below the UI in comparison to Win 7.

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Swordfish1

    I thought Vista and Windows 8 were bad enough, but 24H2 and 2 further cumulative updates were a right pain to install, without issues. Many many hours of wasted time, again. I dread every mandatory update from MS. Its getting to the stage where I'm considering dumping MS and moving over to a Linux Distro. CS

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. robinsonb5

      Re: Unnamed Manufacturer

      > An unrelated question: does anyone here use any M$ peripherals?

      I've not used any MS gear made in the last decade, but to be fair their keyboards and mice ranged from pretty good to excellent back in the day.

      I still have a couple of Comfort Curve 2000 keyboards, though a lot of those are failing with membrane problems now.

    2. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Unnamed Manufacturer

      I currently have a Microsoft wired keyboard, Bluetooth mouse, and Surface Headset (also Bluetooth). All working perfectly under 24H2.

      GJC

    3. James O'Shea Silver badge

      Re: Unnamed Manufacturer

      If experience is any guide, it's probably either Dell or HP. Probably Dell. Indeed, quite possibly Alienware, the better to invoke the Wrath Of The Geek Brigade.

    4. Eecahmap

      Re: Unnamed Manufacturer

      After hit-or-miss results with more niche (and more expensive) ergonomic keyboards, I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I'm on my second, and bought one more, for backup, before they discontinued them.

      (I use a Logitech M100 corded mouse.)

    5. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: An unrelated question: does anyone here use any M$ peripherals?

      Is this the place where I can complain about the Function keys on M$ keyboards being ridiculously tiny?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Tubz Silver badge

    Windows 10/11/xx will never be truly production ready, as it's was always designed as a rolling fix, fix, fix, release new version with all the fixes and some clean up work, fix, fix, fix and repeat ....

    1. Andrew Barr
      Holmes

      Ah now to work out if this is DevOps or Agile development!!

    2. ecofeco Silver badge

      Business as usual for the last 20 years.

      1. Nematode Bronze badge

        Shurely a lot longer than that. 20 years is only 2004

  8. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    HDR

    Educate me: is this some mechanism to increase the contrast of an image by e.g. stretching the greyscale thereby clipping either peak whites or black levels, or just generally messing around with the gamma to increase local contrast, or something much more exciting and sciencey?

    Because it strikes me that the defining limit for both brightness, colour, and contrast, is set by the display device (and secondarily, how many bits the image is generated in vs how many bits the display can show).

    Ex-video engineer, long out of the game...

    1. Spazturtle Silver badge

      Re: HDR

      It hooks directly into Direct3D so that it can access the game's internal data, then it uses machine learning to map the internal colour and luma information to HDR.

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Re: HDR

        Thank you - so basically, it guesses what it thinks the user might like to see...

        1. David Black

          Re: HDR

          Not so much, it just introduces a lot of range in the "near black" which most folks hate as we invented illumination to make living in dungeons and shadows a little more pleasant. The idea is that it models the authentic range in real life which is only really represented in a film based world in a cinema... but clearly an era of cinema where there weren't permanently illuminated emergency exit signs. Also to fully appreciate that dark range, you'd need to let you eyes fully adjust for 5-10 minutes which would be a very curious game or movie opener and the minute there's one explosion or flash of light, back you go again.

          HDR really is the equivalent of high-end audiophile nonsense. Physically it is a real thing (like hearing above 20kHz) but practically of no use. Worse still when activated with "auto", it will corrupt all your existing gamma/black point settings and technically make everything worse.

          1. Bebu sa Ware
            Coat

            Re: HDR

            "an era of cinema where there weren't permanently illuminated emergency exit signs."

            You might be forgetting the ever present pall of cigarette smoke in the cinemas of the day. ;)

    2. JamesTGrant Bronze badge

      Re: HDR

      Hey Neil. A non-HDR display has a peak brightness of some value and a colour gamut of whichever ITU standard. An HDR display has a much brighter peak brightness and a wider colour gamut (but not equal increase in each vector). (BTW - every real-world domestic HDR display is not capable of reproducing the peak brightness across the entire display, but that’s ok - if it could you’d deffo not want to look at it when it did…)

      Simply linear scaling luma from non-HDR to HDR produces pictures that are generally far too bright, such that you turn down the display luminance and so can’t visually resolve anything in the grey-black range. Similarly with chroma, linear factor scaling makes the colours look strange.

      There are a few very convincing conversion curves (not machine learning), many are patented, some are not patented. The good ones look very impressive. Not as consistently ‘wow’ as something properly graded in HDR but impressive and visually more immersive than non-HDR.

      -From a (very recently) former engineer at the company which made the first real-time broadcast MPEG-2 video encoder and receiver (and pretty much the earliest real-time broadcast H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) HD video encoder).

  9. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

    I recently had the "getting stuck like Windows 95" bug back..

    Starting Skype for business on the "This Laptop is only used for this customer and it owned and secured and locked down by that customer to be safe" machine.

    Typical since Windows 11: Type in Skype, the first two characters appear, and a 3-to-5 seconds the rest appear. After a bit more it somewhat responds normal. Never happened with Win10 on that machine.

    Upgrade version 24h2: Type in Skype, the first two characters appear, 7-9 seconds later the rest appear but WLAN dead LAN dead - maybe other things (bluetooth, sound etc) dead too. Classical driver timeouts when the OS behind it does not respond. You may remember from Windows 95. Difference to Windows 95: The mouse still worked, stuttered a few seconds, but still worked. Keyboard too. Reboot did not work, was forced to do a "shutdown.exe -s -f -t 0" to get WLAN/LAN back. Normal shutdown does pseudo-mini-hibernate and is not recommended in such scenarios.

    Oh, and this is an i5-12something "not Ultra-Mobile" Laptop, 16 GB RAM, NVME with > 3 GB/s on linear read/write, therefore perfectly fine for business use.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: I recently had the "getting stuck like Windows 95" bug back..

      Well see, the first problem is Skype...

      Not even joking.

      1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

        Re: I recently had the "getting stuck like Windows 95" bug back..

        > Well see, the first problem is Skype...

        Skype for business, and true that this is part of the problem. But was no issue with Windows 10 on the same machine(s).

        But what to replace it with which works 100% offline and can be managed by the existing IT staff? The customer, in this case, has the size of several 10000 clients with an extreme variance in which field they work in. And that is just a part region in an European country, not even across the whole country which comes to a high six digit number of employees. And the IT has been split by responsibilities more than good, which attracted quite an amount of "defend my line" and "not my responsibility" types. And the "must work without external cloud dependency whatsoever" has a high priority on top.

        Edit: Of course I am open to suggestions! Must work with AD and exchange/outlook (not Exchange Online, and never will be).

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: shutdown.exe -s -f -t 0

      Shouldn't that be

      shutdown.exe -s -t -f 0

      1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

        Re: shutdown.exe -s -f -t 0

        > shutdown.exe -s -t -f 0

        Yeah, try that, and report back.

  10. Acrimonius

    Not recognsing all devices on USB Hub

    All was fine before the update but straight after the update it would not see the keyboard on the USB extender at logon. Have to now plug out and back in everytime.

    Has Windows become a monster now too complex for Microsoft to handle?

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: Not recognsing all devices on USB Hub

      Has Windows become a monster now too complex for Microsoft to handle?

      Oh that happened around the time of XP...

      1. ecofeco Silver badge

        Re: Not recognsing all devices on USB Hub

        Yep.

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Has Windows become a monster now too complex for Microsoft to handle?

      Now?

  11. Stuart Castle Silver badge

    From my own point of view, for curosity's sake as much as anything, I'd like to find out from Windows Update why it is blocking my 24h2 on my machine..

    1. navarac Silver badge

      Consider yourself lucky.

  12. Tron Silver badge

    Imagine a parallel universe....

    ...where MS stopped at W7 and then spent the next 15 years making it more secure as everyone ran it on ever faster silicon.

    Instead. Silent night, wholly shite. Merry Christmas from MS.

    1. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Imagine a parallel universe....

      Imagine a world in which M$'s past fraudulent business practices relegated it to the 3d tier market where it belongs.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Let's have windows 10 security updates until 11 is ready

    perhaps indicated by an entire month without an update breaking it.

  14. Fuzzy Fitzpatrick
    Facepalm

    Please stop trying to do useful things with the operating system

    It’s only for data collection and adverts!

  15. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

    Windows? What's that?

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      > Windows? What's that?

      Hole(s) in the wall(s). The origin comes from kitchens centuries ago where you needed a hole in the wall for air, which was windy. That is where the original "Window" name came from. Glass? Only vulcanic god could make that back then.

  16. Bebu sa Ware
    Coat

    Have to wonder...

    at what version of Windows will Wine + Linux/Unix become the better option for running Windows applications? 11?

    Might purchase some Codeweavers stock in the new year. ;)

  17. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Linux

    I hate being wrong

    I didn't think Microsoft could get any worse.

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Re: I hate being wrong

      Wait. Just wait.

  18. blu3b3rry
    FAIL

    Words do not exist in english to describe how dumb this is

    "The Windows vendor gave five possible reasons for the issue. These were:

    Change in licensing group, where user is moved from one group to another (applies to both Azure AD Groups and security groups synced from on-premises AD)

    Changes in license/product assignment at the user level. Example: switching user license from Office 365 E3 subscription to Microsoft 365 E3 subscription

    Removing and re-adding users to the same license group or different license group

    Toggling license or service plan for the users

    If administrators have turned off the "Latest version of Desktop Apps" service plan under the Microsoft 365 subscription for users"

    .....so in other words almost any day-to-day admin task can break this. Wut?

    1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

      Re: Words do not exist in english to describe how dumb this is

      > .....so in other words almost any day-to-day admin task can break this. Wut?

      | sed 's/task/task in a, without warning, constantly changing admin surface/'

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Breaking Steam

    I was forceably updated to 24h2, and since then Steam will lock up every couple of days.. Menus don't work, games don't launch. I need to kill the process and restart Steam for it to work again.

    Oh and that's after the absolute cratering of framerates forcing a full GPU driver reinstall to recover.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Breaking Steam

      Woke up one morning to find that 24H2 had been installed overnight on my personal machine - found that important applications like Far Cry and Call of Duty wouldn't run so a manual install of 23H2 soon sorted that, with a registry key to stop 24H2 re-appearing...

  20. Ilgaz

    Xmas Miracle

    Just imagine a "viral" mass switch happens and 40% of users moved to Linux desktop.

    It would take Adobe one month to polish their secret version of suite to release on a LTS Linux. Once you are getting out of space you inspect their monster sized folders more. They opt in to multiple platform frameworks and libraries more than ever.

    Didn't you notice how fast they shipped for ARM?

  21. Confused of Tadley

    4k monitors get a free bork

    Windows 11 24H2 also includes a surprise feature for 4k monitors that run on a pc with a Celeron processor, by preserving screen lifetime by showing a completely black screen.

    If you have a 2k monitor that works OK. However Windows only vaguely recognises a 4k monitor is connected but treats it a 600x800 size and refuses to use it. The Intel control panel recognises the 4k exists but is unable to enable it.

    The fix is to install the updated Intel driver released on 19 December 2024. It gave the option to do a clean install, which was taken.

    I have no idea if installing the driver update before 24H2 would avoid the free bork, but it was handy to have a spare 2k monitor to plug in while getting the big screen working again.

  22. bazza Silver badge

    Oh good grief

    Sigh. The only hardware on which I have successfully upgraded to 24H2 is officially unsupported. It started off ages ago as a Rufus'ed installation to get past the lack of TPM, the antiquity of the CPU (though the CPU does support the necessary SSE4.2). But it's now running 24H2 like a champ.

    Just as well. Meanwhile, on my officially supported Dell and Lenovo hardware? No joy. Mysterious error codes. No information. At least they're reverting to their previous state.

    1. bazza Silver badge

      Re: Oh good grief

      I'll put in a reply here even though it's most unlikely to be stumbled across by my fellow El Reg regular commentators.

      I finally got them all fixed.

      One was successfully upgraded by preparing a USB stick using Microsoft's media creation tool, and running the set up from there. I'm guessing that bypassed any kind of upgrade data in place in the existing installation. It successfully retained all apps and data. This was to overcome an error code of 0x800736cc when it tried to update itself to 24H2.

      Another was a bad drive in the 23H2 install that the 24H2 update was trying to bring in, resulting in an 0x80070002 -0x20007 error. I found a post in Microsoft's own community pages here by 'youaremine', advising looking at "$Windows.~BT\Sources\Panther\setupact.log after the failed installation. This will be from the root of c: when you reboot (c:\$Windows.~BT...) and it's hidden (so turn on view hidden files). At the bottom of that file you'll find the driver in the existing 23H2 installation that it's trying to install into its 24H2 self and failing. All I did was take ownership of the corresponding folder in c:\Windows\system32\driverstore, and moved it elsewhere (instead of just deleting it, in case something goes wrong). Running the 24H2 upgrade again (from USB stick) resulted in a clean upgrade. Note that whilst the setupact.log file might be talking about a driver in d:\windows\system32\driverstore, the d: is simply because that's how the drive was enumerated whilst the upgrade was in progress and failing.

      In my case it was an Oxford Semi eSata filter driver that was causing the problem, that my laptop definitely doesn't feature.

      So, thank you 'youaremine'.

      1. Jou (Mxyzptlk) Silver badge

        Re: Oh good grief

        Oh, you describe a rather normal method here. BattlEye Anti Cheat prevented Windows 10 1809 or 1903 upgrades, and this log is where I found that too. This is the only way to find this if you do not know beforehand from others testing before you something was pre-borked.

        You would not have needed to move it, renaming is enough. But the better method: Use ProcessHacker to test-deactivate the associated driver. Drivers and Services are, for Windows NT, both "services", so you will find it in the services tab. If the system still lives after deactivation you can remove the service completely, and later delete the driver.

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