I have an idea
Can we just have Windows 10 back*? We didn't need Windows 11 or 99% of what's in it, and the few things that are useful can be backported anyway.
* 7 would be preferable but asking for 10 back is delusional enough as it is...
Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11
Microsoft has acknowledged that it needs to improve the quality of Windows 11 and outlined its plan to get the job done. A Friday post from executive veep for Windows and devices Pavan Davuluri, and addressed to Windows Insiders, says he’s taken soundings among users and “What came through was the voice of people who care …
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:01 GMT Piro
Re: I have an idea
Rollback to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT 2021, make the interface entirely look like Windows 7, including the start menu, and then dive deep in to the code to optimise every last thing for speed and stability.
Then let the public buy that version with 10 years of support, no telemetry and no ads, no changes in hardware requirements in that time.
Is what they should do.
What we'll get instead is more cruft on top of cruft, artificial restrictions and "agentic" bollocks not a single soul on the earth asked for.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:30 GMT Fred Daggy
Re: I have an idea
Unpopular opinions: Shell and usability is setting new lows in likeability and function since 2K. Of those, 7 was the least worst. Kernel has been getting better since XP Sp3 but impoved leaps and bounds from 7 upwards.
Security has been tracking downwards since the days of BillG. Just too much legacy.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 04:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I have an idea
I genuinely do not know why people prefer Windows 10. It was a horrible mismatched Frankenstein's monster of a UX. No two modals were alike, everything felt flaky and half-baked. 7? Yes, 7 was the best OS ever made. And I liked 10 when it came out. But 11 is better in almost every way to 10, save for the forced cloud crap and built-in ads, which are easy enough to bypass anyway. But 10 felt like a failed prototype, I really don't know what people see in it. Nothing about it felt intentional or pre-planned. At least 11's UX feels somewhat consistent. 10 just felt like "Windows 8.2", still Windows 8 but horrifically morphed into the facsimile of a desktop OS that feels like it was made out of the stitched-together remains of what was once a coherent desktop OS. I do not miss it at all, and again, I was excited for it when it came out.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:56 GMT Roland6
Re: I have an idea
Depends on what you are assessing.
From a pure getting work done usability then I would prefer W2K.
XP was the first step backwards with Vista making the first misstep that W7 partially remedied; just like W10 is a partial remedy to the mess of W8.
I suspect MS are probably holding off any W12 announcements, because it would kill W11, given its lack of popularity and slow speed of take up.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 17:12 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: I have an idea
From a pure getting work done usability then I would prefer W2K.[..] XP was the first step backwards
XP was basically a more consumer-friendly version of W2K, and W2K itself was never marketed towards the consumer/lower-end market though. (*) From that perspective, XP's predecessors were Windows 98 SE and then the short-lived Windows ME.
Against which XP probably doesn't look as bad. :-)
(*) Windows 2000 was originally *intended* to be the replacement for 98SE and the first NT- rather than DOS- based version of Windows aimed at the consumer/mainstream market. (That would explain the consumer-friendly name and the fact it *sounds* like it's meant to be the successor to 98). But for various reasons- including, I think, legacy compatibility- that didn't happen, and NT didn't completely replace the DOS-based line until XP came out.
This most likely also explains why they bothered with the maligned ME at all- it was a backup plan and little more than a short-term stopgap.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 07:38 GMT Felonmarmer
Re: I have an idea
I use a corporate Win11 at work which has most of the crap removed. Still on Win10 at home. All the Win11 differences are experience are just that, different. Not better, occasionally slightly worse. Things like the snapping to different bits of the screen that pops up when you mouse to the top are not better than WIN LEFT or WIN RIGHT and pop up when you don't want them, making moving windows about a pain. Win7 to Win10 was a downgrade, but I had no real choice. Still got Win7 on a PC not internetted. Didn't go near Win8, and the one device I got that came with it got upgraded back to Win7.
My main problem with Win11 is the mandatory hardware upgrade needed for no other reason than because Win11 makes you. Add in the adverts fed into the OS and it's unbearable. But soon we will have Age Verification mandatory in the OS, do you think MicroSoft would apply that as a patch or use it to force "upgrades"?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 08:19 GMT blu3b3rry
Re: I have an idea
W11's UX feels consistent, sure. It also has awful workflows:
- Additional clicks in explorer to load the full context menu rather than that stupid iconified version with limited functionality.
- Awful start menu, once again requiring additional clicks to get to an interface that's a list rather than a grid.
- Immobile taskbar that on smaller screens fills up rapidly, and can't be positioned vertically in a way I've been happily doing for over twenty years. Seemingly no good reason that this isn't a feature.
-The mess of settings between the "settings app" and Control Panel, which was bad enough in W10 but even worse in W11 as the control panel functions all got hidden away further...!
10 retained at least some of the functionality and workflow that Windows 7 and earlier had (although I won't dispute the interface is messy)
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:44 GMT Dave K
Re: I have an idea
Controversial take, but I'll give you an upvote. I think lots of people look at Win10 with rose-tinted glasses, but it was not a good OS. It was just better than Windows 8 and "OK" overall - hardly a glowing endorsement. The UI was flat, dreary and boring. It was hopelessly inconsistent with a mis-mash of old/new dialogs, the Start Menu was merely "OK", but nowhere near as good as Windows 7's menu. It started the push towards "you must use a Microsoft account", albeit it was easier to bypass. Basically, it always felt to me like an unfinished piece of "beta" software that never got completed. There was way too much about it that screamed of unfinished placeholders and other bits that felt roughly bodged together.
Win11 is a funny one. The UI is far more smooth and consistent - it actually looks like they gave a crap about how it looked. Unfortunately, they then enshittified it with ads, dumbed it down by stripping out customisability, implemented an awfully restricted and basic task bar and Start Menu, gave it ridiculous system requirements that blocked perfectly capable systems from running it, then spent most of their time bolting Copilot icons everywhere instead of fixing the multitude of gripes people had with it. If it had landed as a more polished and customisable Win10 without all the enshittification and dumbing down, it probably wouldn't have received such a negative reception.
FWIW, I do prefer Win10 to Win11, but Win7 remains the last MS OS where I feel they made a genuine effort to deliver a polished product that would be well received by users, instead of just doing what they wanted to do instead. Saying that, if MS were to put a concerted effort into fixing the pain-points of Win11, adding more customisability and trying to design it to be what people want, maybe the animosity towards it will fade. Oh, and MS: Allow local accounts again!!
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Monday 23rd March 2026 16:29 GMT isdnip
Re: I have an idea
11's default task bar breaks by trying to look like a Mac. Taking out the text and just having icons may be pretty but some of us read the text better than we decipher the icons, and when we have multiple windows of the same task open, it's easier to see them next to each other in 10. MS still has a bad case of Apple envy and doesn't realize that not everyone loves their UI.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I have an idea
I don't think there's actually much to pick between 10 and 11 once configured optimally. By default, 11 is more of a mess and with more crap, but 10 is hardly brilliant by default either!
As regards 'best' version - probably W7 overall, but Vista had the best UI of any of them (shame about the general performance and other issues with it).
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Saturday 28th March 2026 01:50 GMT Fluffy Cactus
Re: I have an idea
Sorry, no! Win 11 is way worse. The insane security disaster of RECALL and the even increased Telemetry and data sucking. Clearly, you must not have any kind of important client data on your
computer, that would cost you, 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000 of Pounds if compromised. That alone prevented 100's of millions of people from even trying Win 11. Why, because MSFT does truly
not give a dimn domn, demn damn about security. Ok, so you like nice colors, and games. Have fun w Win11.
Overall, though, the constant useless and uncalled for changing and ruining (effing deprecating) of concepts, procedures, long-standing useful key stroke sequences is something that
many MSFT people deserve a wonderful lightning-bolt delivered by the Greek God Zeus.Eventually that God will come out of retirement and serve up the ancient version of an EMP
How else can anyone get their attention? They all live in some weird ivory tower dreamland. FEEDBACK HUB IS NEVER READ BY ANYONE AT MSFT!
Win 8 & 8.1: terrible! Bought a laptop of it more than 11 years ago. Got full refund after 3 days!
Win 8 was an insane joke, unexplained, everything hidden, no instructions, irrational, made by an idiot signifying nothing!
Win 7 was ok
Vista was bad
XP was ok
Win2000 and Win Me was useless
Win98 2nd ed. was, uhm workable
Win 95 was a broken promise. Went back to Win3.11 for more than 2 years.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 11:43 GMT Roland6
Re: I have an idea
The laugh is the easiest and cheapest way for MS to deliver on “lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows, freeing up more capacity for the apps you run.” Is to simply rebrand W10 as W11 Performance Edition, given they already have committed resources to its ESU program. Obviously, with W10 it will be much easier to drop the Copilot crud…
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Saturday 28th March 2026 01:21 GMT Fluffy Cactus
Re: I have an idea
Me too!
I am still on Win 10. A family member got an HP branded and Lenovo made (or is it the other way around?) Windows 11 computer for free,
because someone was apparently very tired of it.
So, I thought, "Hey, I can test some basic functions".
I tested this: Use the on Win 10 workable "Shift + Prtscrn" key combination, to make a screenshot to the clipboard, and then open the MSFT Paint application (not an App)
and try to paste the clipboard picture into the Paint App.
I could not do it, because Windows 11 removed the "Prtscrn" button. I thought that was weird! The "Shift" button was still there.
Then I figured, "HEY, I will go to NOTEPAD, type the words THIS IS A TEST! , in uppercase,
then select that via a mouse, do a CTRL C (copy) and then go to PAINT.
to paste it in. NOW WAY!
Why? Because old PAINT had a PASTE BUTTON, with which to, yes, paste something into PAINT.
BUT ON WIN 11, some abstrusely evil and sadistic person from MSFT (without conscience)
must have thought: "How can I destroy something that people relied on for more than 30 years, and make sure it never works again?"
And that's what they came up with.
I asked Co-Pilot to explain the situation, but CO-PILOT has apparently never been taught the concept of "customer service" or "anything like basic MICROSOFT knowledge".
So I disabled Co-pilot, and stopped fussing - yes fussy, fussy, fussy! - with Win 11, and went back to Win 10. That's where things still work, especially because I no longer
get untested updates.
Thank you, dear Microsoft, for the odd person reading THE REGISTER!
Because none of you MS peeps ever read the100 million messages on the Microsoft FEEDBACK HUB.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:34 GMT Like a badger
Re: No mention of forced cloud logins
It is, just not to anybody around these parts.
He didn't say how many people care deeply about Windows. My guess is only those people whose jobs depend upon it, in which case "what came through" was the opinions of the people who have made W11 the mess it is, and what didn't come through was the voice of the majority of people who probably don't really care, and the minority of technically informed who might know a thing or two (eg Reg readers).
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Monday 23rd March 2026 04:05 GMT billdehaan
The internal polling numbers must be brutal
Whenever a new version of Windows is released, it usually gets criticized, fairly or unfairly, as being inferior to the current version. The early releases (1.0. 2.0. 3.0, 3.1, WfW) didn't, because it was still a new and evolving tech. Likewise, Windows 95 and Windows 2000 were revolutionary changes. But for most mature versions, the initial response is usually "it was fine the way it was, the new version is garbage". Windows 98 was initially dismissed, as was XP. People initially preferred Windows 95 and Windows 2000. But eventually 98 and XP both become wildly popular.
Some versions get a thumbs up because the predecessor was disliked. Windows 2000 replaced the wildly unpopular ME. Windows 7 replaced Vista, and Windows 10 replaced Windows 8.x. So initial dislike of Windows 11 is nothing new, and nothing for MS to be alarmed about.
At least initially.
Normally, the new version matures, and either the complaints die down (98, XP, Windows 10), or the users stick with what they have. Most personal users skipped ME, Vista, and Windows 8. But with modern security issues, users can't safely stick with Windows 10, they have to go to Windows 11. If they can.
So there were always going to be more complaints, because unlike the past, it's a forced upgrade. But even then, MS figured the complaints would die down over time.
Not only have they not died down, they've increased. There were TPM 2.0 requirement complaints. And telemetry and invasion of privacy complaints. And forced Outlook account complaints. And Recall complaints. And CoPilot complaints. And what appeared like a never ending stream of forced upgrades that broke something new every week or two. Upgrades broke SSDs. They broke MS Paint. They broke Notepad. They broke the taskbar. They broke the logins. And most recently, they crashed the C: drive on Samsung laptops.
The churn has gotten so bad that Linux numbers have risen as much in the past two years as in the past twenty. Vendors like Asus, Dell, and Lenovo are making Windows an option on their laptops, rather than mandatory. And Apple just released a notebook that puts it in the same price range as many Windows laptops.
It's not news the people are fed up with MS' nonsense. The fact that VPs are tacitly admitting it, and are publicly saying they're going to start acting on the complaints means that the financials must have reached a point where it's been brought to the attention of the board.
Anyone expecting MS to change course will be disappointed, though. Oh, they'll slow the AI adoption, and make it less visible, but their focus isn't going to change. They won't be shoving it in everyone's face and telling them to just deal with it any more; they'll quietly slip it in and make it optional, at least initially, but the long term strategy isn't going to change. Just as Recall didn't disappear and was just "retooled", the transition to an AI-centric OS will continue, as well. They'll just be less confrontational about it, that's all.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 04:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
> The internal polling numbers must be brutal
Perhaps not. I wonder about statistical effects.
When switching has never been easier, and intentional anti-features never more obnoxious, how many customers who would have complained in a past survey have removed themselves from the Windows ecosystem (and thus the polling sample) entirely? Is it possible Microsoft might be seeing and misinterpreting a paradoxical decline in reported dissatisfaction?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:46 GMT billdehaan
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
Declines in satisfaction numbers don't matter to accountants. They don't care if users are happy. They care about sales. An unhappy customer's money is just as profitable as a happy one's.
Declines in sales numbers matter. A buyer being unhappy doesn't matter; he still spent the money. A potential buyer going elsewhere and not buying matters.
Accountants don't care how many Youtube videos lambast Windows 11. But they care that Asus, Lenovo, and Dell all replaced their mandatory Windows licence sale model with a Windows optional model. That represents a loss of sales revenue, potentially a very large loss. That in turn demands an explanation from the board, which also requires the board have a plan to address the problem.
And that's where the public statement from Microsoft comes in. It's to placate the accountants as much as the consumers.
The fact that the explanation is the same as what the Youtube videos have been complaining about doesn't matter to the accountants. What matters is that there's a plan to fix it.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 08:56 GMT Paul Crawford
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
Windows 2000 replaced the wildly unpopular ME
Maybe in some chronological sense, but really w2k was the successor to NT4 as both were full 32-bit protected systems, ME was the last of the 16-bit/32-bit not-properly-multitasking systems that followed from 98.
The real successor to ME I would say was XP as it was MS' attempt to rationalise both in to a 32-bit only line to work with both the professional market and the home/gamers market. Sadly it had the Fisher-Price interface, but at that time MS allowed to to configure it like w2 if you wanted (which I did) but it also added telemetry and licence tying to your hardware.
As a result w2k was the last Windows I personally bought, I had XP and win7 from previous work and have the odd w10/w11 laptops I could not buy without it (but usually wiped or dual-booted with Linux).
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
I would agree - ME was the last of the W9x consumer-focused line, whereas 2000 was the parallel version in the business-focused NT4 line - computers aimed at home users didn't have 2000. It was with XP that both lines got merged into what was effectively the next development of 2000, and the 9x line was dropped.
For all the rose-tinted glasses about XP., it was actually pretty crap when released and it wasn't until the second service pack that it became reasonable (but the UI remained terrible).
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Monday 23rd March 2026 16:35 GMT isdnip
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
That's basically true about XP, but it's not uncommon for the first release version of software to be, well, an unannounced beta test. Lots of applications came out for "Windows XP SP1 or later". But after SP1 it was pretty solid. And 7 was pretty solid. 10 isn't bad but 11 seems like another iteration of ME/Vista/8, the B-team version.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:23 GMT billdehaan
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
Maybe in some chronological sense
Which is what the consumer market saww.
I was a developer. My personal path started with DOS 1.1, then DOS + Desq (later DesqView), then OS/2 2.x and 3.x, then Windows 95, then NT 4, then 2000, then XP onwards. I used Windows 2.x and 3.x at some workplaces, but never used it at home. I avoided the LIM/UMB/extended/expanded memory chaos of the 1990s by running OS/2. While Windows 95 was still technically inferior to OS/2 in several ways, it was superior in driver support and vastly larger applications availability, so I switched to it briefly. NT 4.0 was mature enough to use, so I moved to that path (and Linux for secondary and headless server machines).
But I was a software professional. Most people weren't. Consumers, who are the vast majority, saw the path migration path as 3.0 to 3.1 to WfW to 95 to 98 to ME to 2000 to XP to Vista (which many ignored) to 7 to 8 (also largely ignored) to 10 to 11. The NT releases were't aimed at consumers. In many markets, it wasn't easily available.
In the days when users bought the OS and installed it, NT wasn't even sold in a lot of retail outlets. And if it was, it was much more expensive (NT 3.1 was something like $400 compared to $99 for Windows 3.11). Add to that the fact that it didn't support a lot of hardware (like USB devices), required more powerful PCs to run, and didn't even run a lot of consumer software (the only game I can recall that ran on NT 4.0 was Diablo), and the average consumer skipped the NT line completely until 2000.
Once PC vendors and local computer stores started selling PCs with Windows preinstalled, that dictated what people bought. And that was 95, then 98, then ME, then 2000. And a lot of consumers stuck with 98 rather than deal with the buggy ME or with 2000 which was still in its' teething phase.
You and I and other professional users used NT4, but there really wasn't much public awareness of it. I have an "I saw NT first" shirt from a rollout event, and people used to ask me when it was coming out. I'd have to explain to them that W2K was already out, so it was obsolete. Then they'd ask me what W2K was, and they'd say they heard of it, but everyone had to them that 98 was better, and they were sticking with that.
A lot of developers look at the technical aspects and ignore or dismiss the marketing to the public, and we shouldn't. What matters to us isn't what matters to the average consumer. Windows 3.1 defeating OS/2 showed that. IBM provided a better technical product, but Microsoft gave customer what they wanted, and those are not the same thing.
That's why this action by Microsoft indicates that it must be hitting them at the consumer level. Migration to Linux is increasing, but Linux hasn't gotten much better, Windows has gotten worse. That's not news. But the fact that Microsoft feels the need to address it? That's news.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 15:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
"Which is what the consumer market saww."
No, not even that. W2000 license was expensive and what consumers got, was 98SE and then ME. Not NT or W2000, both being very expensive.
"Windows 3.1 defeating OS/2 showed that. IBM provided a better technical product, but Microsoft gave customer what they wanted, and those are not the same thing."
This is also BS. IBM was asking king's ransoms for OS/2, while Microsoft used their DOS monopoly to abuse hardware makers to force sell DOS/Windows.
Customers for MS are the corporations making machines, *not* the poor people who had to use their software. You're missing that altogether.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 17:36 GMT Michael Strorm
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
> "Maybe in some chronological sense"
Nope, not even in a chronological sense. Windows 2000 came out several months *before* ME.
The *original* plan was for the NT-based Windows 2000 to replace the DOS-based Windows 98SE (as well as the existing pro-oriented versions of NT) making it the first NT-based version of mainstream Windows.
Which would explain why Windows 2000 has a consumer-ish name that *sounds* like it's meant to be the direct successor to 98SE.
My assumption is that- since that plan was temporarily abandoned until a full move to NT finally to came to fruition with XP- the DOS-based ME was their backup plan and released purely as a stopgap. Which would explain its relative pointlessness.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:03 GMT Roland6
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
>” But with modern security issues, users can't safely stick with Windows 10”
What security issues can’t be addressed in W10 ?
Remember, MS want users on W11, so they have taken a commercial decision not to maintain W10, just as they did with XP - refusing to release driver updates to support new hardware as they wanted users to move to W7.
Yes sticking with W10 beyond October 2026 (end of free ESU for EU consumers), is not looking good, but MS could extend that by another 2 years and bring it into line with the paid for service. Giving MS time to make a better job of making W12 something people want to use.
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Thursday 26th March 2026 11:29 GMT Roland6
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
The laugh is, if this really is MS’s approach, someone really has messed up, as they have done a really poor job of making ESU attractive.
If MS really wanted everyone on subscription then step one would seem to be make it attractive for people to switch to subscription - which would suggest, stop talking about EOL and forced upgrade and start talking about paid for support: choice is yours: either pay for W10 support on a rolling 3 year basis or upgrade to the latest version of Windows every 3 years to benefit from 3 years of free support.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 14:21 GMT Irongut
Re: The internal polling numbers must be brutal
> Windows 2000 replaced the wildly unpopular ME.
A bit hard to replace something when you are released 6 months BEFORE the thing you are supposedly replacing. (not to mention that 2k is NT and ME is 9x)
Win 2k: RTM 15 December 1999, retail release 17 February 17 2000
WinME: RTM 19 June 2000, retail release 14 September 14 2000
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Monday 23rd March 2026 06:50 GMT Sorry that handle is already taken.
I'm not so sure they did...
The real lesson comes when the bubble bursts and shareholders start to ask exactly what they're getting for 11 figures of wasted R&D.
As a total neophyte I'm currently trialling a handful of Linux distros because W11 can gargle my balls, and I'm impressed at how mature and user friendly the ecosystem is (although it's true I have no prior experience).
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Monday 23rd March 2026 05:07 GMT Neil Barnes
Fundamentals?
Davuluri also promised a File Explorer will become “faster and more dependable,” by offering “a quicker launch experience, reduced flicker, smoother navigation and more reliable performance for everyday file tasks.” He also promised “Copying and moving large files will be faster and more reliable” and “substantially lower latency for search, navigation and context menus.”
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but surely the file explorer - of whatever flavour - is fundamental to using a computer as anything other than a toy? One needs to know what data one has, and where to find it (and yes, that is broken on Android at least, but has the vague excuse that beyond phone-produced images, most things viewed/produced on a mobile phone are probably ephemeral).
Why is it that the MS file explorer is slow and flickery? Why is moving large files not reliable? Why do search, navigation, or context menus have such a high latency? These are fundamentals without which the entire system might be considered broken to the point of unusability: if moving files is not reliable, how can I trust anything on the machine?
Could it be layers on layers of models and languages all calling each other before they finally get down to the file handlers and up to the display drivers? Or (whisper it) have they perhaps been letting AI 'write' their code?
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:54 GMT Dave K
Re: Fundamentals?
This. It also integrates dreadfully with OneDrive. I hate that if you duplicate a file in a OneDrive-linked folder, you can't reliably rename it until it has finished syncing. If you do, then half-way through renaming it, Explorer will randomly select the entire filename so you end up accidentally wiping it. Why?
Or there's the stupid bit where you rename a file and open it, only for Excel to show the old filename and throw a "This file has been renamed, we recommend saving it to get the new filename". At what point is that good design? Why does Excel show the old filename? Why does it need to be saved to grab the current filename? What sort of useless, inept shit is this?
MS really needs to go back to the basic fundamentals of what a quick and reliable file manager should be, and fix Office's file handling as well for that matter.
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 15:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Fundamentals?
"Why is it that the MS file explorer is slow and flickery? "
In the old times (NT) a single context switch took 15ms. That is an eternity in computer time.
Not because the processor was slow, but because of the semi-infinite layers of software which needed to be flushed from memory and loaded back.
Processors have gotten faster, but I'm sure the actual time is still the same as Microslop has added even more layers on top of the old ones.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 05:17 GMT Mike VandeVelde
better faster stronger
Faster file performance between Linux and Windows
Improved network compatibility and throughput
More streamlined first-time setup and onboarding experience
Better enterprise management with stronger policy control, security and governance
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Monday 23rd March 2026 05:27 GMT Claude Yeller
People who care deeply about Windows
“What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”
This sounds like MS marketing telling us they increased licensing fees because customers demanded more simple and higher license fees (which they have actually done in the past).
Forcing the world to buy newer, more expensive hardware for a forced upgrade that runs worse on that newer better hardware than the old version on the obsolete hardware is expected to induce some negative responses.
But I get the impression many of the people mentioned cared deeply about Windows like prisoners care deeply about the quality of prison facilities and "services".
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: People who care deeply about Windows
I managed to get my employer to provide me with a 2nd laptop 'in case of cyber incident'. It's identical to my windows machine except it has Ubuntu long term release on it so I know it will be good for another 10 years. My corporate laptop has over a hundred processes running before I even start up outlook/teams/edge which use the rest of the 16GB memory; while my ubuntu machine re-awakens in a blink of an eye, reads my fingerprint every time and logs me in (windows Hello has a few good days of recognising me before it gives up and I revert to PIN). Ubuntu is lightening fast and the web versions of office running in firefox are pretty decent but I can fallback to open source for big spreadsheets on those odd occasions.
The difference between the experiences is night and day. Every morning my Ubuntu machine tells me that it's up to date and I don't need to do anything. Most weeks windows tells me at 2 minutes to 9 that I'm gonna have a crap day unless I reboot right now and miss the first 10 mins of a key meeting.
Outlook and OneDrive search are equally bad whatever the OS, plain guesswork as to what it comes back with so I suspect MS have no clue how to fix search at all.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 07:38 GMT Artem S Tashkinov
Windows 11 has indeed become a resource hog.
My 11 LTSC (a highly optimized version of Windows with ostensibly no junk) with zero applications running consumes close to 6GB of RAM on boot thanks to:
* Its own RAM footprint
* Massive Intel GPU driver
* Some Windows WorkLoad AI process abusing my CPU
And there are two dozen Workload apps installed thanks to the Intel GPU driver. Took me a couple of hours to figure it out all and delete them. Now I'm down to 3.7GB of RAM on boot which is still pure bonkers.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 07:56 GMT Dan 55
Your post made me search for what Windows Workload AI is.
It's Recall, even though you might have turned it "off" in Settings. And MS really want it to be running, the bastards.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 08:17 GMT ComicalEngineer
Put Windows on a diet
Start writing economical code.
Remove the crapware [Recall, AI etc] and adverts
De-junk the interface e.g. having rounded corners on windows uses a disporportionate amount of CPU time
Give us back the ability to have the taskbar on any side of the screen
Stop changing the start menu to what M$ thinks it would be
Stop the OS getting in the way of what we actually want to do (in my case work).
Stop forcing 0365 / Bing / Edge on us
Remove all the deeply nested spyware reporting back to the mothership
I'm generally happy with W10 and even like the start menu. What I don't like is the bloat and that I have to disable about 20 different settings to stop the spyware.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:32 GMT Claude Yeller
Re: Put Windows on a diet
"Remove the crapware [Recall, AI etc] and adverts"
But, but,...
What use is Windows to MS if all they care for would be your work and your convenience?
Did you think of that? Don't you think you are egotistical and self centered, not thinking of poor MS and it's shareholders?
Don't ask what MS can do for you. Ask yourself what you can do for MS!
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Monday 23rd March 2026 15:42 GMT JLV
Back in the days when I used to care, MS always sicced some semi-senior exec before a new release shipped, to explain, in great details, how complaints about this and that subsystem that had been annoying techies had been heard. Might be the registry’s foibles, sleep modes, whatever.
The exec seemed, well, frank and knowledgeable about the need for improvement.
Being a sweet summer child, and a Windows user, I would dutifully purchase the new Windows and open box the fixed components.
Guess what. The registry never improved much and the list of acknowledged niggles or deep flaws never saw much improvement (improving the throughput on displaying text in terminals being an exception) . Nothing changed, except my low usage of Windows 10 and my disinterest in using Windows 11 at all.
This could be a sea change driving real improvements, but past history, under far more competent MS Windows teams doesn’t really bode well. Occasionally they fix the UI and stability of a new release, out of sheer necessity: successor to Win ME, Windows 7 after Vista, Windows 10 after 8.
What’s left of the dev, and QA, team under Satnad just doesn't seem to have the oomph. There’s too much of a telemetry, upsell and ads culture and the consumer facing Windows is just not a core MS concern.
Gates and co IIRC understood that youngsters would become MS ambassadors in the enterprise, having been brought up on Windows. This team is focused on LLMs and growing market cap and doesn’t understand the impact of negative ambassadors.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 16:04 GMT Taliesinawen
Total Microsoft Windows revenue
Grok: "Windows" generated around $17.31 billion to $21.51 billion in various breakdowns, representing roughly 4-6% of total revenue.
Perplexity: In Microsoft's fiscal year 2023, Windows revenue was reported around $24 billion, and Windows revenue represented roughly 10% of total company revenue in that period.
ClippyAI: In fiscal year 2025 (ended June 30, 2025), the Windows segment accounted for about 6% of Microsoft’s total revenue.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 17:04 GMT Tron
Removing ALL Copilots will improve Windows 11
FTFY. But they would still have a long way to go. W7 was better. Secure it and it would walk off the shelves as a personal OS requiring much less memory.
Everything they have done since 7 has been for their commercial benefit, at the expense of the user. Cloud, SaaS and AI. Dump it all and give us our personal computers back.
The reduction in CoPilot is because it is costing them money, but nobody us getting addicted to it. The majority of AI users only use it when it is free.
The Google overview/summary/whatever may not really count as AI (does any of it?) but is moderately useful. It allows you to spot straight away when their tech has misread your search and is delivering completely the wrong thing. They should provide easier click throughs to the websites they take the data from, as it would allow them to rate the link between search request, offered responses and higher quality data/sites. They have missed a trick there that would rapidly improve their own tech.
That said, I think it is a useful bonus. If they asked for cash, I'd just scroll down the links and click through them instead.
They really aren't going to make enough cash from AI to pay for the processing. Not even by conning enterprise customers via FOMO or lobbying politicians. The amount they have obtained so far is impressive, but you can only spin these things so far before you start losing money and it all collapses..
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Monday 23rd March 2026 17:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dream that will never be delivered !!!
Win 7 was used by people who wanted to get work done.
It was not perfect but it was usable and did not work hard at getting in your way.
Win 8, 10 & 11 are an attempt to improve on Win 7 without knowing what exactly you are trying to improve.
A Fisher-Price UI that is still not consistent everywhere, extra clicks, drags and hidden menues that are at odds with the original working UI of Win 7.
1001 ideas that are not fully working together with extra bugs and breaking code everytime there are new updates ... regular as clockwork !!!
What exactly was wrong with the UI in Win 7 ???
Why could Win 10 or 11 have not been the same win 7 UI with better code behind it ???
Win 10 is only looked on fondly because Win 8 was so bad what ANY improvement would win friends.
Win 11 was meant to improve over time BUT in reality it has got worse.
I still use Win 7 if I want to use Win apps and need to get work done without fighting the OS.
My dream is that MS realise the error of their ways and create an OS that looks like Win 7, has the same UI but with newer modern code behind it.
This would blow Win 11 or whatever comes after out of the water.
Somewhere the original intent of the Windows OS has been lost.
The users have been forgotten !!!
One can dream BUT I know that it will never happen ... we are just going to get Win 12 or whatever marketing decide it should be called !!!
Still just as bad and still bug ridden and half complete !!!
:)
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Monday 23rd March 2026 18:06 GMT Ryan D
Honest question to the room
Is there any possible way they could strip 11 down to a bare bones OS at the point, or does it need a complete refresh from the ground up? Honest question.
I suspect it would need a fresh start but I do recall a time where one could strip windows down to a pretty lean core (all be it back the the XP days).
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Monday 23rd March 2026 19:45 GMT B33Dub
Amazingly obvious
I feel like the actual talent started steadily marching out the door the moment MS told their software engineers that they were going to be replaced by LLM.
Obviously these C-suite types aren't THAT stupid as to say this out loud to anyone's face, but the problem with programmers in general is that they tend to be fairly smart individuals. Especially those that made it through MS's HR checklists.
Now, I'm not the sharpest of my peers, but I did the mental math on ALL of this in about 30 seconds 2 or so years ago when this crap started pushing for mainstream. I suspect the body of programmers at MS did the very same when Slopya told them to use Co-Pilot or quit. Days are numbered.
Luckily for me, I work for people who aren't greedy idiots so there was no AI mandate. I imagine if there was, I would be doing very very little to prove that the technology set to replace me actually succeeds in doing so.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 02:30 GMT Mike Lewis
Windows 11 25H2 is worse than 23H2
The GUI for setting environment variables is broken, Defender relocates entire folders it decides are dangerous without telling me where they went and File Explorer keeps showing me folder views it thinks I should see rather than the ones I told it to.
That last one is particularly important. I process 1.5 GB of podcast audio and around 8 GB of video every week. Constantly having to reset folder views slows down my workflow.
I finally replaced 25H2 with 23H2, spending a considerable amount of time and effort installing, configuring then testing all my programs. I have now locked it down so it never updates again, I hope.
