Micro$oft

Reason 498603986 For Not Installing Windows 11

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If you haven’t been paying attention; Windows 11 has been recently added as an optional upgrade to Windows 10 users clinically insane enough to upgrade to an open beta… especially if they have an AMD CPU.

Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos Panay once said “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you.” Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it’s turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That’s according to AMD themselves, who announced in a support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in “games commonly used for esports.”

There are currently two problems; L3 Cache Latency, and Microsoft forgetting how to utilize AMD’s core scheduling technology. There was a similar issue that took place years ago under Windows 7 with AMD’s “Bulldozer” processors, but in this case it’s entirely an issue with Windows 11 not working properly. The L3 Caching issue is kind of interesting; what is so different between 10 and 11 to cause such a performance loss?

Either way I spent most of my time under Linux these days… so. 😛

In Other News: Windows Update Still Sucks

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It’s a good thing I spend about 97% of my time under Linux, plus also run a neutered Win 10 Pro install. This recent update sounds like a special level of fuck to those who were unfortunate enough to have it forced through an update.

The latest offender was “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221”, a Windows-recommended driver for AMD users. The problem? The driver was stopping some users’ PCs from booting, and the patch has since been pulled from the Windows Update list.

But the real problem here, as noted by Windows Latest, is that Windows Insider users had already flagged the driver as being dodgy. It was bad enough that users had to resort to some command line kung fu to nuke the update, which is a whole nightmare that nobody should have to go through.

Of course, this only affects owners of systems that run AMD motherboards. If I ran a typical Windows 10 install where it updated to the latest of everything this would have knocked me offline. This is why I spend most of my time under Linux. I can update at a time convenient for me to make sure I have enough time to fix shit if things happen to go awry. 😛

Windows 10: Store Edition

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Remember when Microsoft made a version of Windows for some of their tablets that only ran their own store apps, and people were upset when they found out they couldn’t install their regular programs? Welcome to Windows 10 S, because clearly we need to have

Microsoft expects that the “majority of customers” will enjoy Windows 10 in its new S mode, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows wrote in a blog post Wednesday night.

The stunning endorsement of Windows 10’s S mode—which was formally confirmed as a mode of Windows 10 just about a day ago—was made by Joe Belfiore, who told me via Twitter that he expected the transition to take place in 2019. Belfiore’s blog post set an even more aggressive timetable, claiming that customers would be able to buy a PC with Windows 10 S mode at or near the time when the next feature update to Windows 10 drops. That update, known as Redstone 4, is expected to appear on PCs in early April

Of course you can opt out of S mode if need be, and the reasoning behind this mode is to improve performance… which I can see if you consider it won’t be able to run anything outside of the Windows Store. :v: