#windows-bsod

#windows-bsod

Take these gates at Polegate station. They are equipped with a barcode reader, a place to tap a card, and even a slot for inserting a ticket. However, it all appears to have come to naught, and the gates opened wide. Windows is slumped in the corner like someone on the last train home after a night out that involved drinking too much booze.

Microsoft is removing trust for kernel drivers that haven't been through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program, targeting those signed by the long-deprecated cross-signed root program. This change will take effect with the April 2026 Windows Update.

When Windows 10 was released in 2015, it was immediately controversial, with critics zeroing in on one feature in particular: telemetry. I spent many months in those early days reading one article after another on the subject that read, in retrospect, like entries from the diary of a mad conspiracy theorist.

There are a couple of conditions to keep in mind. Using Recovery Drive resets Windows back to its initial factory state. Specifically, the recovery stores all built-in Windows files, any updates installed when you set up the drive, and any customizations from the PC maker. Your customizations, personal files, and any apps you've installed are not included, so you'll want to make sure you have separate backups of those items.

Microsoft keeps touting its Copilot AI as the greatest invention since the wheel. Toward that end, the company has been force-feeding more and more AI into Windows in the belief that everyone is yearning for an "agentic OS." Well, based on much of the user feedback, that's not quite the case. In fact, the more Microsoft keeps promoting AI as some white knight riding in to rescue Windows users, the more that people have been pushing back. The main argument?

But are things getting worse? According to Register readers, and the company's own release health dashboard, the answer has to be yes. It isn't just you. The frequency of emergency out-of-band releases for the company's operating systems has been rapidly increasing to the point where, for every Patch Tuesday update, there'll likely be at least one out-of-band patch to fix whatever got broken.

January 13 marked another milestone for legacy systems, as support for the software - codenamed Longhorn Server - expired for customers that bought Microsoft Premium Assurance (PA). Extended support ended for Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020. It was possible to keep the lights on until January 10, 2023, via Extended Security Updates. A fourth year came courtesy of Azure, which took the code to January 9, 2024, but that was it for anyone without PA.

The issue focuses on how Windows handles these directories for specific user sessions. Because the kernel creates a DOS device object directory on demand, rather than at login, it cannot check whether the user is an admin during the creation process. Unlike UAC, Administrator Protection uses a hidden shadow admin account whose token handle can be returned by the system when calling the NtQueryInformationToken API function.