Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste
theregister.comMy favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
> I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.
>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion?
My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.
They broke:
* at "random", during regular use
* when installing something, sometimes
* when removing something, sometimes
* slowly, over time
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
I just started using windows after being on macOS since Vista. I planned to go full Linux for a gaming pc, but there are still some kinks, so dual booting it is.
The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.
Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.
The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.
> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
The OS is no longer a product they care about. Brings no money compared to Azure.
I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into incompatible stuff. Obviously not great but working. What we get now is pure slop and negligence.
I remember a Windows update pushed through SBS that bricked all machines in company overnight. Boot up to bsod. Was that Windows 7?
I just looked it up. Yes, it was Windows 7. You have a better memory than me.
The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.
The problem with 8 was that the UI was designed for a touch screen without a thought given to the fact that most users were going to be driving it with a mouse. Reliability-wise, it was perfectly fine.
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
DOS 5 was awesome. I can't recall a single bug?
But DOS 6 was buggy as hell due to DoubleSpace.
Pretty much up until Windows 10. Not that every decision they made was great (it wasn't), but they very rarely shipped stuff which was straight up broken. They used to have a commitment to quality which they threw away around the time of Win10 when they fired the QA staff.
I switched to Linux in 1993. Never looked back
My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with... a login window.
So now, just-in-time debugging only works if I happen to remember my password.
Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
that rotting lack of QA is now spreading through their Xbox subsidiaries too. WoW is much buggier than ~4 years ago.
To be fair, WoW is a 20+ year old game that to my knowledge never really got the ground up rewrite it has needed.... so I feel issues keep compounding faster and faster. Also - and not trying to defend MS here - I am pretty sure MS has been fairly hands-off about how blizz is run - so far. Just the general enshitification going on in parallel everywhere.
Midnight's war on addons, won by addons btw, is rumoured to be a push from top up. It has been cause of such borkage that stock, no addons UI shart LUA errors upon release.
> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
I have had these problems on Windows too.
Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
If you're talking about compiling WiFi drivers, then you're not using Linux the way most people do.
Ah yes, they’re just holding it wrong.
All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
I’m saying that compiling Wi-Fi drivers from source is still representative of trying to run Linux on consumer hardware.
Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.
It's compile drivers or research your hardware before you buy it. The latter is highly recommended. If you go against the common advice, it's kinda your problem. If you bought the hardware before installing Linux or it was given to you, well, that sucks. That said, driver problems, especially important ones, aren't that common anymore.
I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.
The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.
At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
What kind of research did you do?
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
The review's purpose wouldn't be to provide you an in-depth guide to walk you through installing some distro. It's more like probing for high level details around hardware compatibility.
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.
I've been using the Discord "thick client" on Linux for many years now and it works just fine. I've never seen any sort of crashes, nor have I seen any instability that couldn't be explained by shitty Internet "weather".
Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.
</meta>
Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver.
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
Try linux mint. Gnome 3.x is cancer. Also, linux mint still uses xserver and for some reason suspend works properly on nvidia
Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.
Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.
> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
> in QA
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
> remote access and pasting issues
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
> issues should have been discovered in QA
Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.
No need for QA if you just tell Claude to "make no mistakes".
but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!
A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.
joke's on you, it has never worked for me.
There's a massive RDP bug in the new update that is breaking stuff with no fix right now. Congrats Microsoft on the help desk ticket generation.
(KB5124008)
Every time I see one of these articles I will, very briefly, get optimistic that people will move to an operating system that isn't terrible, and then realize that most people will literally just forget about the bullshit they put up with Windows.
I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful thing Windows does.
People will (correctly) call out the jankiness of desktop Linux, but tacitly imply that Windows doesn't have jankiness. They will forget all the times that Windows Update bricked their computer, or all the time that their "repair" tools were literally just no-ops, or their copy-paste feature not working, or Microsoft literally breaking fucking Notepad, or the "System Restore" tool not actually restoring anything.
Desktop Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not so deluded as to say that it's perfect, but I really feel like its bullshit-level is lower. Oh, and since it supports filesystems that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, the snapshotting actually works.
Instead, I'll be stuck playing tech support for Microsoft's shitty products for my parents until the heat death of the universe.
Will the last competent employee being laid off please turn out the light.
Let's pour more AI
> "The paste operation might fail silently," according to Microsoft.
> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?
Similar behaviour here:
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
I’ve got that problem.
I think I’m just going to roll that machine back and turn updates off now. It’s too risky.
Do they even have automated testing? This should have been detected not only in one layer of the release process, but in serveral ones.
Not anymore. The test lab and testers got laid off. Now they test in production on end users.
There is not a single component in Windows that is not riddled with bugs, its infuriating.
I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/05/satya-nadell...
The culture of QA sailed off like 10-15 years ago I think.
item no. 17531 why i will be using windows 10 LTSC to the grave. zero issues
I keep hearing about how software development is a solved problem in the age of AI... and then reality hits, like we see here.
We just need QA agents to check the work of the coding agents (yeah, I’m sure that’s already a thing and people are saying this in all seriousness).
Senior staff at my company have been saying that already. They don’t care if it works just if they can say they have it and get rid of the QA people.
so just a regular day for Microsoft
After the last update many things suddenly feel very sluggish like searching an app and starting it.
Well that explains why excel was completely and utterly borked cutting and pasting then.
What an absolute fucking shit show.
They must have forgotten to prompt "bug-free and make no mistakes". It happens to the best of us.
Also, “maintain all existing functionality.”
I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.
Vibe coding?
Sounds like Microsoft, yes.
MS is forcing everyone to vibe code right? Like they utterly fucked Minecraft with many baffling bugs fairly recently afaik.
Windows users, welcome to the world of Linux! Now you don't need to have to install Linux to experience the Linux way of working.
When they tell you that Linux has issues with suspend, reply that Windows has issues with paste /s
I see no difference anymore. I used Windows because it worked and didn't break obvious things. Thats gone. I switched to Linux because the user experience is now better. Never expected that this switch happens because Windows gets worse...hoped everytime Linux gets better.
Nah Linux is clearly getting better, but perhaps Windows is getting worse faster than Linux is getting better. Easier to destroy than to create and all that.
Ty here from Sillyz.Computer pointing out once again, software authorship is and has always been political and not technical.
AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.
The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.
I really wanted to spend more time reading the comments, but I've sworn off doom-scrolling.