Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shared some history about one of those finely aged bits: the Format dialogue box, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installs to this day when you format a disk using Windows Explorer.

Plummer says he wrote the Format dialog in late 1994, when the team was busy porting the user interface from the consumer-focused Windows 95 (released in mid-1995) to the more-stable but more resource-intensive Windows NT (NT 4.0, released in mid-1996, was the first to use the 95-style UI).

Formatting disks "was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some custom UI," wrote Plummer on X, formerly Twitter. Plummer didn't specify what those differences were, but even the early versions of Windows NT could already handle multiple filesystems like FAT and NTFS, whereas Windows 95 mostly used FAT16 for everything.

"I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on," Plummer continued. "Then I busted out [Visual] C++ 2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived. That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in 'temporary' solutions!"

The Windows NT version of the Format dialog is the one that survives today because the consumer and professional versions of Windows began using the NT codebase in the late '90s and early 2000s with the Windows 2000 and Windows XP releases. Plenty has changed since then, but system files like the kernel still have "Windows NT" labels in Windows 11.

Plummer also said the Format tool's 32GB limit for FAT volumes was an arbitrary decision he made that we're still living with among modern Windows versions—FAT32 drives formatted at the command line or using other tools max out between 2TB and 16TB, depending on sector size. It seems quaint, but PC ads from late 1994 advertise hard drives that are, at most, a few hundred megabytes in size, and 3.5-inch 1.44MB floppies and CD-ROM drives were about the best you could do for removable storage. From that vantage point, it would be hard to conceive of fingernail-sized disks that could give you 256GB of storage for $20. //

Red Zero Ars Praetorian
12y
510
"Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution." - Attribution Unknown. Having encountered this in the work environment many, many times, I know the truth of this. //

https://xkcd.com/2730/

While the flexible security model employed by Windows NT-based systems allows full control over security and file permissions, managing permissions so that users have appropriate access to files, directories and Registry keys can be difficult. There's no built-in way to quickly view user accesses to a tree of directories or keys. AccessEnum gives you a full view of your file system and Registry security settings in seconds, making it the ideal tool for helping you find security holes and lock down permissions where necessary.

Musk's problem was that his laptop was automatically connecting to the local Wi-Fi, which doesn't have a password. If a user can install without connecting to the internet, it is still possible to get Windows 11 up and running without using a Microsoft account. //

On a sacrificial PC, we found that Windows 11 can indeed be installed without a Microsoft account. We used Shift + F10 to drop to a command line at the network connection page and entered OOBE\BYPASSNRO to force a reboot and make the "I don't have internet" option appear. To be fair to Musk, it is quite convoluted.

Running a personal Windows 11 device without a Microsoft account is not a great experience, however. Some elements of the operating system simply do not work, and Microsoft is clearly keen for customers to have an account. If that's not a path you wish to tread, there are plenty of alternatives to Windows 11 out there.

In the early days of microcomputers, everyone just invented their own user interfaces, until an Apple-influenced IBM standard brought about harmony. Then, sadly, the world forgot. In 1981, the IBM PC arrived and legitimized microcomputers as business tools, not just home playthings. The PC largely created the industry that the …

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Tips and tricks for making Microsoft leave you alone while you use your PC.

IBM's SAA and CUA brought harmony to software design… until everyone forgot //

In the early days of microcomputers, everyone just invented their own user interfaces, until an Apple-influenced IBM standard brought about harmony. Then, sadly, the world forgot.

In 1981, the IBM PC arrived and legitimized microcomputers as business tools, not just home playthings. The PC largely created the industry that the Reg reports upon today, and a vast and chaotic market for all kinds of software running on a vast range of compatible computers. Just three years later, Apple launched the Macintosh and made graphical user interfaces mainstream. IBM responded with an obscure and sometimes derided initiative called Systems Application Architecture, and while that went largely ignored, one part of it became hugely influential over how software looked and worked for decades to come.

One bit of IBM's vast standard described how software user interfaces should look and work – and largely by accident, that particular part caught on and took off. It didn't just guide the design of OS/2; it also influenced Windows, and DOS and DOS apps, and of pretty much all software that followed. //

The problem is that developers who grew up with these pre-standardization tools, combined with various keyboardless fondleslabs where such things don't exist, don't know what CUA means. If someone's not even aware there is a standard, then the tools they build won't follow it. As the trajectories of KDE and GNOME show, even projects that started out compliant can drift in other directions.

This doesn't just matter for grumpy old hacks. It also disenfranchizes millions of disabled computer users, especially blind and visually-impaired people. You can't use a pointing device if you can't see a mouse pointer, but Windows can be navigated 100 per cent keyboard-only if you know the keystrokes – and all blind users do. Thanks to the FOSS NVDA tool, there's now a first-class screen reader for Windows that's free of charge.

Most of the same keystrokes work in Xfce, MATE and Cinnamon, for instance. Where some are missing, such as the Super key not opening the Start menu, they're easily added. This also applies to environments such as LXDE, LXQt and so on. //

Menus bars, dialog box layouts, and standard keystrokes to operate software are not just some clunky old 1990s design to be casually thrown away. They were the result of millions of dollars and years of R&D into human-computer interfaces, a large-scale effort to get different types of computers and operating systems talking to one another and working smoothly together. It worked, and it brought harmony in place of the chaos of the 1970s and 1980s and the early days of personal computers. It was also a vast step forward in accessibility and inclusivity, opening computers up to millions more people.

Just letting it fade away due to ignorance and the odd traditions of one tiny subculture among computer users is one of the biggest mistakes in the history of computing.

1/11/24 update added below.

Windows 10 users worldwide report problems installing Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday updates, getting 0x80070643 errors when attempting to install the KB5034441 security update for BitLocker.

Yesterday, as part of Microsoft's January 2024 Patch Tuesday, a security update (KB5034441) was released for CVE-2024-20666, a BitLocker encryption bypass that allows users to access encrypted data.

However, when attempting to install this update, Windows 10 users are reporting getting 0x80070643 errors and the installation failing. //

When installing the KB5034441 security update, Microsoft is installing a new version of the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) that fixes the BitLocker vulnerability.

Unfortunately, Windows 10 creates a recovery partition, usually around 500 MB, which is not large enough to support the new Windows RE image (winre.wim) file, causing the 0x80070643 error when attempting to install the update. //

Microsoft releases script to install fix

Microsoft has released PowerShell scripts that automate the installation of the BitLocker CVE-2024-20666 security patch to the Windows 10 Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).

These scripts do not install the KB5034441 update but rather mount the WinRE partition, copy over the images from a dynamic update, and unmount the partition again.

The WinRE partition will now contain the latest files, including the BitLocker fix, effectively eliminating the need for the KB5034441 update on these machines.

Windows users are currently migrating to Windows 11 from Windows 10, with earlier operating systems such as Windows 7 and Windows 8 taking up a small percentage of total Windows users. Notably, Windows 10 remains the dominant Operating System with a massive 71.64% market share. More interestingly, Windows 10 market share hasn't changed for the past year, as figures from September 2023 are identical to September 2022.

Microsoft announcing its ending support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, is clearly a move to get users off of old operating systems onto new versions

Windows is live on Git

Over the past 3 months, we have largely completed the rollout of Git/GVFS to the Windows team at Microsoft.

As a refresher, the Windows code base is approximately 3.5M files and, when checked in to a Git repo, results in a repo of about 300GB. Further, the Windows team is about 4,000 engineers and the engineering system produces 1,760 daily “lab builds” across 440 branches in addition to thousands of pull request validation builds. All 3 of the dimensions (file count, repo size and activity), independently, provide daunting scaling challenges and taken together they make it unbelievably challenging to create a great experience. Before the move to Git, in Source Depot, it was spread across 40+ depots and we had a tool to manage operations that spanned them.

Even though Microsoft reimplemented the new Windows 11 taskbar from scratch as was mentioned in the previous blog post, the old taskbar code was left beside the new one, and there are several ways to activate it. Here is a great summary of the options by Gaurav, but I’ll just mention the steps that worked for me:

• Install and configure ExplorerPatcher for Windows 11, a great project by Valentin-Gabriel Radu which brings back the old taskbar on Windows 11, and fixes some of the quirks that have to be fixed as a result.
• Install the latest beta version of 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (non-beta support will follow soon, keep reading for details).
• Enjoy Windows 11 with the good old taskbar tweaked to your taste.

Update (October 22): Windows 11 with Windows 10’s taskbar is fully supported starting with 7+ Taskbar Tweaker v5.12.

Here is the list of the apps created by the Winaero project. Actually, we have created many more tools, but some of them are already discontinued. Most of the discontinued apps are integrated into Winaero Tweaker. If you are interested in checking the list of our legacy apps, you can find it here: Winaero legacy apps.

Here's how to download Windows 7 games for Windows 10