April updates for Windows 10 and 11 break some VPN software, Microsoft says

VPN connection bug affects all supported versions of Windows 10, 11, and Server.

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[real mikeb_60]

I wonder if this is behind some of the failures or slow connect with Cloudflare Warp that I've had recently. Seems worse in Win11 than in 10, and interrupts Onedrive sync while Cloudflare is trying to connect. Eventually, everything connects and settles down, but startup is kind of unsettled and takes a while.

 

[real mikeb_60]

Actually that number is probably a bit higher if you consider Windows Holographic, Windows 10 Team (Surface Hub), Xbox Dashboard, Windows Embeded POSRready 7, Windows IoT.

And there's my lil ol (never to be upgraded) pink tablet, running Win10 "Core" (variously listed as that or Home in various About descriptions) 32-bit. And it's fully upgraded. Since it doesn't use a VPN (even Warp) it hasn't had any connection issues recently (used mainly for streaming internet radio or USB stick files to an older (no built-in networking) receiver in the living room).

 

[real mikeb_60]

What makes you think that they are cleaning out anything and removing technical debt? All bugs seem to affect all editions of Windows still under support. To me, that means that most useful things were written 10 years ago and current employees struggle to keep it working while patching it.

That is certainly true of the printing stack or other things which break several times each year and are no longer caught in time due to the outsourcing of compatibility testing to the end-users.

Windows 11 started out as the new channel for non-security updates of Windows 10. It still appears to some web sites as Windows 10, since the version is still reported as 10.xxxxxxxxx.

 

[real mikeb_60]

I'm not sure that demanding new hardware is going to save you from this problem. Reducing the number of variables is unlikely to hurt if your testing is inadequate; but you don't break a pure software device in a way that (at least according to initial reports) does not seem to correlate to any hardware specifics(no 'on AMD APUs' or 'with Intel wifi 6 and 7 chipsets when using WPA3') because those mean consumers won't shut up and buy Windows 11-ready AI PCs like you've told them to.

There are places, like when they decide to futz with the WDDM, where it would undoubtedly save them a lot of trouble if they could just write off any hardware whose vendors can't or won't come up with a driver that targets the new hotness; but they appear to be being bitten by the morass of complexity that lives well above the hardware in this case.

I like my 10th-gen i5 tower. Runs Win11 well, and manages a bunch of storage and a low-end RTX video card for low-end gaming and a little graphics editing. It's actually faster than my 11th-gen i7 laptop for most things (perhaps the 16GB RAM in the desktop vs 8GB in the laptop contributes), despite being hobbled by SATA3 disks (boot is a old-style SATA3 SSD). Unless MS wants to use the GPU for AI, it'll never do that, but my tasks don't require AI so why bother.

I long since reached the point where hardware was seldom the limitation for my purposes. Software has been, since it seems to keep growing to require more hardware to accomplish the same tasks. I'm firmly stuck on older versions of several things because of that, and also the move to subscriptions rather than one-time purchases. Backward compatibility has been a major reason for staying with Windows (btw, the other day I reinstalled a piece of software originally for XP; it works great!).

 

[real mikeb_60]

It hasn't been downhill since Windows 11. It's been normal. Windows 11 was always going to suck. Every other major version of Windows has sucked, since Windows 3.0.

3.0 sucked. 3.1 didn't suck. 95 sucked. 98 was good. ME sucked. XP was good. Vista sucked. 7 was good. 8 sucked. 10 was good. And now 11 sucks. Totally expected. I predict that Windows 12 will be great.

I have to agree, and my progression has been similar. (TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2 BASIC-TRSDOS-LDOS then) DOS3.1/5.0-Win3.0-3.1-98-XP-7-10-11. I do hope 12 is an actual improvement over 11, which mainly seems to be 10 but requiring double the RAM with a Fisher-Price interface.

 

[real mikeb_60]

You know, back in 2001, people were calling Windows XP's interface "Fisher-Price"...

Yep, and Win11 looks like a regression to that style.

 

[real mikeb_60]

Original XP (as launched) was complete crap. It was so buggy and awful and slow. And yes, it looked like gummi candy vomit, designed by a toddler.

But unlike ME, which they just gave up on, they spent years fixing XP. It wasn't till SP3 that it became the dependable workhorse (and hardware had caught up to it) - and at least you could disable the candy vomit, there was a built in UI option to go back to flat (Win2K-like) UI, no need to registry edit or anything!

Win 11, on the other hand, started out pretty innocuous but just gets worse with every update.

The hidden fix with XP was that its display style could be set to Windows 2000. It worked fine if you chose that.

 

[real mikeb_60]

I can't believe I've found a TRS-80 Model I buddy. I thought I was the last survivor.

I still have my fully loaded Model 100 with SuperROM including Lucid, but it needs some work. Also some homemade cables for the parallel and serial ports.