This article immediately reminded me of a video I saw a while ago.[1]
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
I know we're basically comparing anecdotes, but I've been surprised at how much more I've come to trust my windows workstation than my Mac in the past few years. I can't actually remember the last time my Windows workstation crashed outright (if ever?) but my Mac locks up at least 2-3 times per week. I also have to be extremely careful to avoid high memory pressure under Big Sur now, otherwise Finder spirals into a restart loop that can only be fixed with a hard reset. I also had to give up my Mac Thunderbolt setup because I've been fighting the same Thunderbolt crash that many people have been complaining about since Catalina was released in 2019 ( https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/16/gameover/ ).
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.
I've been mostly Linux since 2011 and the few times I had to install Win10 for something I've been very displeased. We've fallen quite far in Windows, with ads everywhere, hundreds of services that do God-knows-what, fresh installs that break as soon as the updater runs for the first time. I'm really not impressed and I try to use it as little as possible. Just a bloated, unstable mess designed to sell Microsoft's value-added services.
Wells Fargo and the US Army are well capable of paying Microsoft enough money to change their incentives.
This is why things like security audits exist - you can't judge a software product's internal quality from just what the salespeople tell you and what you see by running it, so you demand as a condition of purchase that someone look (with an appropriate NDA) at the internals and deliver a second opinion as to whether it's competent-looking code. This is also why things like PCI exist - you certainly can process credit cards without being careful about anything, but the credit card companies have decided (with an eye their own long-term profitability) that you only should process them with at least a little bit of care, even if that doesn't produce a visible functional difference. Yet.
Now, I'm not saying these are perfect processes by any stretch, but they absolutely act to prevent a company from laying off a division that provides an important but unseen function and coasting on reputation for several years.
No company the size of Microsoft is going to develop good software out of the kindness of its heart or a sense of professional pride or responsibility. Individuals do this all the time, of course - that's why Linux exists in the first place. But once you put a company around it, you should expect that it's going to have MBAs who don't want people to spend their time doing things that don't bring profit, and the customers should interact with the company accordingly: make sure the things you do want them doing bring them profit
I agree that any sort of data loss is completely unacceptable, especially given the amount of force with which MS has been pushing automatic updates and making it difficult to completely disable.
> Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life.
I on the other hand would never voluntarily set my foot into the walled garden. That might be suitable for some users, but for readers of HN it shouldn't be necessary. I'm happy to run Gnu/Linux even on my phone, even if that might cause occasional inconvenience with the current duopoly in that segment. Freedom is freedom after all.
Well, to be honest I much prefer - and trust - fully automated test pipelines to manuality. It affords more frequent and thorough verification of the final artifacts.
The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing.
The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests rather than flag the problem and dedicate budget and effort to redesign the existing for testability.
That’s where guidance and oversight are key, and more often than not, sorely lacking.
The really sad part about this is that Microsoft was the systems programming startup. Their software engineers changed the world. Of course, that was 40+ years ago, but it's sad to see them turn away from their technical roots.
Windows 10 has been the most reliable, productive, stable system for me over the past few years. No doubt they use a lot of automated testing -- how could they not? But today's Windows 10 is -very- reliable.
Having used Windows for decades, I more pleased with Windows update now than I remember ever having been. Although some of that may be because I don’t have a team responsible for patching Windows servers anymore. But my workstation performs great and the update process for Windows 10 has seemed very reliable (relative to versions past).
AFAIU Windows updates roll out to regular users first, and to corporate customers much later (perhaps depending on how the admin configures it). In a way, regular users are test monkeys. But this makes it less likely to brick corporations. (Of course this can still happen to due unique corp settings).
It's sad to say but I've had more hassle with Windows 10 than any previous (NT based anyway) release. 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 all served me well. 10 has done everything from deleted my files (thanks, October 2018 Update) to DESTROYING my Linux boot loader that was placed on a separate hard drive.. it has no business touching that!
I always looked at Linux as not being worth the hassle.. now it's not worth the hassle to use anything else.
Windows's quality has been downhill quite a lot. For the past more than a year, I struggle with intermittent touchpad scroll failure on multiple laptops (including surface pro, thinkpad, etc). Of course, the only support you can get from searching the web is to update the driver. In this case, I don't think driver is the problem, the windows multi-touch and precision touchpad component has internal bug, the cause scrolling, either touchpad or touchscreen, to loss response every a few minuets for 15s-ish period. Super annoying when you browse web without a mouse. I don't see any solution in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, I cannot just dump all my windows PC and switch to either mac or linux, because I stuck with a few CAD software that only runs on windows.
I help run a service that uses hundreds of Windows boxes, and at any one time two or three of them always seem to have a borked windows update state. Recovery is utter fucking voodoo, and it's usually better to flatten a machine than attempt to repair things.
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
Just in the last few weeks, I’ve had two instances where I let Windows update and a whole bunch of system stuff (including Windows Update itself, once) proceeded to break, even through a few reboots.
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
It was reasonably common advice, (around 2000-2004) in the MS Small Business Server groups to tell people to wait for a few days before installing updates, to see if other people had problems.
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
I'd be very curious to see a deep root-cause-analysis of this, especially because it seems to be SSD-specific and in the "detect if the drive is an SSD and do something slightly different" way, which IMHO is not good behaviour in general as it is leaking the abstraction.
I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
Looking beyond the obvious problem here, just curious why the admin ran chkdsk /f for no reason, then did it on 6 more systems after observing it caused ntfs failure.
https://m.xkcd.com/242/ maybe. One hopes the reporter had backups (or was testing on disposable systems) before trying to reproduce a data-loss condition.
Yep, this happened to me. Destroyed my entire data on my SSD, and forced me to Linux. Now I've literally ditched Windows, save for MS Office, and am currently using Linux for code, and even recently games, since they seem to run faster in Ubuntu.
I have a very strange SSD related bug at the moment on that Windows version too:
I've downloaded my Google Takeout Backup, so 74 4GB sized zips. After I was done extracting them and storing them on Dropbox, I tried to delete the zip files, but my machine froze without so much of a bluescreen. After a hard reboot, I could reproduce the behavior. I can still change the focus of apps, but everything that requires the ssd to do anything is waiting for i/o until the system freezes completely.
Unplugging the notebook seems to help, sometimes, but I can't make this work coherently at the moment.
Until this post I thought my SSD (Samsung Evo 970 Plus) was faulty, despite working perfectly for everything else.
I ran into what I believe was this issue last week, BSOD stating Stop error NTFS File System. Couldn't boot, startup repair did nothing, and then the worst thing occurred was no restore points were available. Even if system restore is ON it will periodically remove/clean them up which I never knew. Since reading about this issue I was trying to recall my steps of recovery frustration, but I think ended from the startup repair opening up the command prompt and issuing a chkdsk and rebooting a few times initiating automatic repair and finally came back to life.
This must be an older bug because after an upgrade ~2 months ago an automatic chkdsk run when fastboot was enabled took down all partitions on a SSD where I had Windows 7 installed. Intel system.
I wonder if it's just a case of running chkdsk or if there's something more endemic on the filesystem.
My friend woke up two days ago to find out that 500gb of source video and 24 hours of edits from Adobe Premier were mysteriously missing from her computer having only recently copied them there.
If this was macOS this post would be at least a 10x the upvotes in 0.1 the time, full of testimonials from people about to lay their last Mac in a grave.
But we’re too desensitized to news about shit like this happening in Windows. Why?
I just walked past an ATM with a blue screen of death. Business as usual.
First of all there's no reason to ever run chkdsk/f in the first place if there are no problems with your SSD.
Secondly, just never use chkdsk /f - chkdsk /scan is faster, requires no restart and no further action is needed if no problems were found. Problems can be fixed using chkdsk /spotfix otherwise, which doesn't cause any problems.
[+] [-] game_the0ry|5 years ago|reply
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/former-microsoft-employee-ta...
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.
[+] [-] ashleyn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|5 years ago|reply
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/macos-big-sur-update-br...
Dropping quality is happening everywhere.
[+] [-] geofft|5 years ago|reply
This is why things like security audits exist - you can't judge a software product's internal quality from just what the salespeople tell you and what you see by running it, so you demand as a condition of purchase that someone look (with an appropriate NDA) at the internals and deliver a second opinion as to whether it's competent-looking code. This is also why things like PCI exist - you certainly can process credit cards without being careful about anything, but the credit card companies have decided (with an eye their own long-term profitability) that you only should process them with at least a little bit of care, even if that doesn't produce a visible functional difference. Yet.
Now, I'm not saying these are perfect processes by any stretch, but they absolutely act to prevent a company from laying off a division that provides an important but unseen function and coasting on reputation for several years.
No company the size of Microsoft is going to develop good software out of the kindness of its heart or a sense of professional pride or responsibility. Individuals do this all the time, of course - that's why Linux exists in the first place. But once you put a company around it, you should expect that it's going to have MBAs who don't want people to spend their time doing things that don't bring profit, and the customers should interact with the company accordingly: make sure the things you do want them doing bring them profit
[+] [-] userbinator|5 years ago|reply
The previous huge fuckup that caused data loss is still a fresh memory to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
[+] [-] usr1106|5 years ago|reply
I on the other hand would never voluntarily set my foot into the walled garden. That might be suitable for some users, but for readers of HN it shouldn't be necessary. I'm happy to run Gnu/Linux even on my phone, even if that might cause occasional inconvenience with the current duopoly in that segment. Freedom is freedom after all.
Well, people seem to make different choices...
[+] [-] eecc|5 years ago|reply
The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing.
The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests rather than flag the problem and dedicate budget and effort to redesign the existing for testability.
That’s where guidance and oversight are key, and more often than not, sorely lacking.
[+] [-] apfsx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dixie_land|5 years ago|reply
Probably came from the same MBA: let consumers be lab rats to for big enterprise customers
[+] [-] anoncow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jemm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _wldu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aksss|5 years ago|reply
Having used Windows for decades, I more pleased with Windows update now than I remember ever having been. Although some of that may be because I don’t have a team responsible for patching Windows servers anymore. But my workstation performs great and the update process for Windows 10 has seemed very reliable (relative to versions past).
[+] [-] jakub_g|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refracture|5 years ago|reply
I always looked at Linux as not being worth the hassle.. now it's not worth the hassle to use anything else.
[+] [-] ycui1986|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k_sze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timvisee|5 years ago|reply
I don't understand how such core things break in Windows.
[+] [-] causality0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuaissac|5 years ago|reply
1. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
[+] [-] kabdib|5 years ago|reply
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
[+] [-] stqism|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|5 years ago|reply
Did you cross over from a parallel universe, because Windows Update always was, to use the term of endearment, a shitshow:
https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+update+deleted+docum...
[+] [-] worble|5 years ago|reply
Now you're forced into it, like it or not.
[+] [-] sq_|5 years ago|reply
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
[+] [-] DanBC|5 years ago|reply
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
EDIT here's one thread talking about installing some, but not all, patches and updates: https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.backoffice.smal...
[+] [-] contingencies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
[+] [-] magoon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|5 years ago|reply
He only found that there was a problem when the ones started earlier finished and rebooted.
By then it was too late for 7 machines but he was able to stop it on the rest.
[+] [-] andreareina|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diegoperini|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astronautjones|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fakedang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roritharr|5 years ago|reply
I've downloaded my Google Takeout Backup, so 74 4GB sized zips. After I was done extracting them and storing them on Dropbox, I tried to delete the zip files, but my machine froze without so much of a bluescreen. After a hard reboot, I could reproduce the behavior. I can still change the focus of apps, but everything that requires the ssd to do anything is waiting for i/o until the system freezes completely.
Unplugging the notebook seems to help, sometimes, but I can't make this work coherently at the moment.
Until this post I thought my SSD (Samsung Evo 970 Plus) was faulty, despite working perfectly for everything else.
[+] [-] pbowyer|5 years ago|reply
After an evening of trying to fix it, I restored from a backup. Thank $deity for Macrium Reflect and nightly disk imaging.
[+] [-] sumoboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roody15|5 years ago|reply
Machines back to running perfectly after downgrade.
Feel like these builds are just Beta builds and they are using a staggered release for consumers to be the testers
[+] [-] bitL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jemm|5 years ago|reply
Data was all still there but it rendered the drive unbootable. Very annoying.
[+] [-] BuildTheRobots|5 years ago|reply
My friend woke up two days ago to find out that 500gb of source video and 24 hours of edits from Adobe Premier were mysteriously missing from her computer having only recently copied them there.
[+] [-] Razengan|5 years ago|reply
But we’re too desensitized to news about shit like this happening in Windows. Why?
I just walked past an ATM with a blue screen of death. Business as usual.
[+] [-] sfgweilr4f|5 years ago|reply
wusa /uninstall /KB:4592438
should I?
[+] [-] qayxc|5 years ago|reply
First of all there's no reason to ever run chkdsk/f in the first place if there are no problems with your SSD.
Secondly, just never use chkdsk /f - chkdsk /scan is faster, requires no restart and no further action is needed if no problems were found. Problems can be fixed using chkdsk /spotfix otherwise, which doesn't cause any problems.
[+] [-] Lendal|5 years ago|reply
So many people are claiming they loved Windows 7 so much, but the irony is Windows 7 was the last Windows OS where chkdsk /f was actually needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection