
It’s a promising update
It should be pretty good when it gets out of pre-Alpha status.
…wait, it’s what??
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 …
> …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.
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....
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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"!
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...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!
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.
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!
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 ?
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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.
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.
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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
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> 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.
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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...
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.
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).
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.
> 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).
"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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'.
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.