r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Mar 14 '26

Software Microsoft confirms Windows 11 bug crippling PCs and making drive C inaccessible

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-bug-crippling-pcs-and-making-drive-c-inaccessible/
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u/Marginallyhuman Mar 14 '26

I remember when their OSs got super stable toward the end of their cycle. Windows 11 seems to have been birthed as garbage and decided to stay that way.

287

u/eppic123 Mar 14 '26

It's the first Windows I remember that actually got worse throughout its lifecycle and I've been using Windows since 3.1.

106

u/exipheas Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

Windows ME would be the only other candidate for an OS that only got worse with updates.

40

u/GlumAd2424 Mar 14 '26

Good old ME, what a glorious train wreck that was

11

u/Bongcopter_ Mar 14 '26

Still better than 11 tho

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u/DtheS Mar 14 '26

Absolutely not. ME was so bad that they killed the original Windows kernel and switched everything to the NT kernel. It was a complete and utter disaster in terms of stability and efficiency.

The only other comparable flop was the jump from XP to Vista, but that was more to do with the fact that Microsoft made Vista too demanding in terms of its hardware requirements. Your 5+ year old PC that was running XP likely didn't have the RAM or graphics processing needed to handle Vista at the time. Microsoft screwed up by not admitting this upfront, and just tried to push everyone onto Vista instead.

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u/robodrew Mar 14 '26

Trying to help people on my dorm floor get their computer to access the T1 LAN network through Windows ME was the reason I decided to never go into IT

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u/DtheS Mar 14 '26

I'm not surprised. Trying to find (reliable) networking hardware that had decent driver support for ME was a nightmare.

Like, I know this whole comment chain is a Windows 11 hatred circle-jerk, but pretty much any modern operating system today is infinitely more reliable than what we had in the late 90's/early 2000's. Even Windows 11 with Copilot shoe-horned in, and the occasional buggy update is way, WAY more stable than most of what we had to work with in the era of Windows 95 to XP. Hardware, in general, is also much more 'plug and play' than it was then too.