Almost nine gigabytes in size: Windows update 24H2 creates an undeletable cache file

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 495 points –
digitec.ch
146

Hi. Microsoft employee here. That's happening because we don't give a shit and we are being replaced by folks from India

I hope you're having an amazing day! I am a windows fan and user, just like YOU! I will do my very best to help you solve your issue. I know you have had a bad experience and it must have been very hard for you. But rest assured, i will help you to the BEST of my ability!

Please try running the troubleshooter.

(troubleshooter doesn't fix anything)

Try reinstalling windows. Goodbye!

And then they fuck off and stop reponding.

This is every forum response on MS forums, it’s infuriating.

“I have super specific error code with super specific driver that was changed with super specific windows update.”

“Me too!”

“Same, here’s some more info from event viewer”

“Maybe try uninstalling the device”

“Uninstall my WiFi card?”

“Hi I’m bob from Microsoft you should run sfc scan now and that will fix it”

“That didn’t fix it”

“Ok here’s how to reinstall windows”

It's better than the Linux Mint support forums that blocks VPN users and the power users just deny that they're blocking VPN users.

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Also try SFC /scannow

And then try DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Scanhealth and DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth that'll get rid of the 9GB file for sure. If not, reinstall everything again and again and again.

Does it fix anything btw? I'm just wondering how it does work after all

If I remember correctly, it scans system files and replaces broken/corrupted ones. It can work on some issues, but it's not a fix all thing.

It should fix system files that are not in expected state (I assume corruption, missing, wrong permissions etc.). Maybe it was more useful in the past, but after trying it couple times around 8 years ago and never seeing any benefit, I have never thought of using it since.

My colleague said it fixed some random issue once or twice after he was out of ideas.

If system is truly messed up, it's often faster and more reliable to just reinstall it, especially if you do not have much custom config.

As former MSFT employee who just got replaced by India... I'm kind of relieved I'm gone. Working for them felt like working for the bad guys

What did you expect? That corps would solve climate change or what?

The pigs on the very top are secured and that's enough

As someone working in the Microsoft ecosystem at an MSP, we seriously wonder what the fuck goes on over there. We’re supposed to defend everything y’all do which is getting really hard to justify without sounding like idiots.

Hey there. Learn how to stop carrying. A job doesn't define who you are and you're at least free to be anyone outside the working hours.

I learned to be a cog in this inhumane machine in exchange for a paycheck

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This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

I’m honestly waiting for a crowdstrike level BSOD from one of their updates at some point. At that level, corporations would recover in the same way they did from crowdstrike, but consumers who didn’t understand how to roll back, or restore from backup, restore windows, etc would be livid and hopefully it would create some awareness on better understanding and control of the products you buy and use

Microsoft has largely mitigated this concern by pushing all their fresh updates to the consumers for testing before pushing them to their sensitive business customers.

Except most of those people who don't know enough to recover most likely also use the default "all your data are belong to OneDrive" and thus won't lose absolutely everything and no one group of livid people will both be livid enough and big enough at the same time for a lot to change...

They also released an update that broke dual boot Linux installations. Still feeling that one

They've done that periodically for years.

I don't dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.

In this case it didn't matter how it's installed

If windows is on a separate drive it's hard for it to actually ruin the Linux install. The fix was to use a USB boot drive to launch Linux and fix the boot manager.

Part of my job is keeping all of the endpoints my work manages up to date with patch compliance. I've had to create exceptions for the past two windows 11 updates because they won't run on most machines for no reason. It's been a pain in the ass. I can't just add the machines to the exception list without doing basic troubleshooting because "procedure" and I've spent so much time doing absolutely unnecessary shit.

Remember the dozens of times a Windows 10 update could potentially wipe your personal data?

I have avoided Win 11 by disabling TPM in BIOS. Because I expect MS would eventually figure out some way to install 11 otherwise.

Just so you know, if your UEFI isn't password protected, Windows can change settings in there. I haven't heard of that ever happening but I wouldn't be surprised if it would some day.

That's not even counting the ones that make your user experience worse on purpose

I'd say they started the misstepping after they "fixed" Vista with windows 7. After that, they tried to hard instead of slow rolling. Windows 10 was good but 11 is just....windows 8 again.

Windows ME was the original mistake edition. It was terrible.

Lol look who forgot about Win 98, the version so bad they made an SE version with a free upgrade.

MS has been alternating good releases and bad releases for most of my life.

Well yes. But in more recent times for the examples I was giving

The 17th anniversary of vistas release is coming up in January of next year.

Wonder what's next for Microsoft to fuck up. I was the equivalent of Linux minimal but for windows 11.... I guess I want server core.

Its all mostly moot to me. I have a windows 10 drive in my computer. Its full of old games I might move back over and play again. I haven't booted it at all this year. I work on winblows at work and come home to Linux. Its been that way since for twenty years.

At work I block a lot of 'telemetry' including microsoft. I've considered a full asn block of microsoft for user machines since I use WSUS. Microsoft has decided to depreciate it. Probably due to me stopping them from installing office 365 trials and copilot garbage. I'm sure I'm not the only one doing that. Far too much garbage for me to trust them at home.

Duuude, my WSUS has been miserable to work with. I switched most of what I can get away with to PDQ deploy. My office setting will not allow copilot or 365. Im doing my W11 deployment this week and last, it's been fine. But WSUS going down is gonna make things way harder. But apparently it'll still work, it just won't be developed anymore.

Microsoft won though ...I'm pricing out intune and azure hybrid systems now.

Windows has always had broken versions. The old advice was to always skip every other version.

NT, Millennium, Vista, 8... 10... 11... More misses than hits really. And the bad updates are turning hits into misses.

That list mixes NT kernel OS's with Win95 OS's to support a bad hypothesis.

The NT line is:

NT 3.1, NT 3.51, NT 4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, 7,8, 10.

NT 4, 2000, and XP were all great. Vista was good on good hardware. 7 was good. 8 was bad, 10 good, 11 bad.

If you take the 95 path it's 95 good, 98 good, Me bad.

The only pattern is 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good, 11 bad.

Anyone who says NT was ever bad is out of their mind. That was the thing that saved Windows since 95’s kernel wasn’t modern. Anything that crashed took the entire system down. Yeah, that was fun times kiddos.

Well 11 is NT as was 8. Although it's only problem was the UI.

Anything past 98 was/is NT. My point is NT’s kernel is actually quite good, it’s the rest that people complain about.

Me came after 98 and wasn't NT. There was also 98 SE.

But I agree with you.

I don’t count ME, that was basically 98SE as a hot garbage patch. I’ll concede on 98SE, that was the best of that kernel and I do have found memories of it in the good old Unreal (not engine) days.

Also realize that I HATE Windows. Too much legacy that no one allows them to dump and then complains that it’s got a bad UI. Personally, my favorite is 11. I’m a macOS/*nix lover but I’m forced to use 11 at work. I appreciate Microsoft unifying the UI into something that doesn’t look and work like a decade old system. But then it still has problems like system search being abysmal, the registry still getting clogged with garbage, wake from sleep being 10 seconds or more long (even on high end equipment). It’s just, ancient at this point. There’s no good reason our personal devices give a much better experience these days.

If Me is a 98 patch then 8 is a patch too.

11 is bad primarily because of privacy. There are also problems like Control Panel and Settings are still separate with overlapping controls. You never know where to look. It's been 12 years of confusion.

There are also minor annoyances like the start bar can't be moved to the sides. They coded that into Windows 95 in a few months decades ago but can't add it after 3 years now.

Windows 98 sucked. Windows 98SE was... well I won't say good, but it was ok.

Vista was good on good hardware

That's a hell of a caveat for an OS meant to be run on consumer hardware. You might get away with that kind of caveat if MS only offered in on good hardware and people went and put it on non-recommended hardware on their own accord. But that's not the case, Vista sucked when running on hardware that met MS's specs, so it sucked.

So the real pattern is Win 3.0 sucked, 3.1 ok, 95 sucked, 95B ok, 98 sucked, 98SE ok. Windows Me? OMG let's just move everyone over to NT and never talk about this again!

2000 was good. XP wasn't great but improved after awhile. Vista sucked. Windows 7 was peak windows, it was downhill from here. 8 sucked, 10 was ok, and 11 is shaping up to be complete dogshit.

So it's not precisely every other release is bad, but close enough to see a pattern. I guess you could say 2000-> XP doesn't follow the pattern, but Me->XP does. And since 2000 and previous NT versions were meant for servers, not home PCs, while XP was meant for home PCs. It would make more sense to look at the pattern of releases for PC releases rather than mixing in server releases.

When MS has an OS that works decently they tend to try to cram in a bunch of shit into the next release which causes problems. Then they either remove the shit (or at least make it work better) for the release after that so they have something that works ok again. Then it's back to adding a bunch of shit into the next one.

Win95 did not suck. 3.1 was trash compared to 95. 95 has a real desktop UI, tcpip built in and a 32 bit preemptive kernel.

98 was great. It wasn't any more buggy than 95.

You ignored NT 4.

I'm speaking from experience in using theses OSes, not from a list of features they had. I didn't use NT 4 personally (and that's way outside the scope of personal computer OSes), so I didn't talk about it.

So you continued to run 3.1 after Win95 came out? I listed the features because it's why it was so much better for me and everyone.

Trumpet was amazing because it worked, not because it was reliable. Win95 was far more stable than 3.1 because the tcpip stack, along with much of the OS was preemptively multitasked.

The desktop UI feature was far more usable than Win3.1 progman. You needed to install Norton or Symantec Desktop to get an equivalent experience.

If you claim that the desktop UI doesn't matter because it's a feature, then Windows 8 becomes a great version. Because it's only problem was the UI. It's speed and stability was better than 7.

If NT is out of scope because it's not consumer then you can't have Windows 2000 in your list. Consumer NT kernel OS's started with XP.

People used 3.1 and 3.1.1 for years even though it was running on top of MSDOS but show me someone who used 3.0? Or 1.x, 2.x? Unheard of. Version 3 started off with some problems that needed a more or less immediate large update.

Yes people used 3.1. I used 3.1. Windows 2.1 was very popular because of Excel and Word. The Windows/386 version of 2.1 gave 32bit preemptive multitasking to DOS. It was a big enough hit that MS gave up on OS/2 which was 286 only.

But Win95 was on a whole new level. That's why I said Win3.1 was trash compared to Win 95.

Nothing that cannot be fixed by a Linux install.

For personal computing, sure. For enterprise environment, eh not really.

With the amount of money corporations and governments have spent on Microsoft — the last decade alone — they could have filled the gaps in linux and the annual cost for ITSM would be significantly cheaper. Instead they've spent more and have grown far more dependent on proprietary software, they don't own or control, to manage their core business ops and data; the longer their dependence on SaaS, the more they'll pay.

Yep, Imagine how good the software would be oif we had all the governments and enterprise paying into open source instead of Microsofts pocket.

Can you imagine a world where public money was only spent for the public good? What a world!

The only (larger) enterprises that insist "we depend on Windows" are those with shitty corporate IT :)

And several governments from various countries and at various levels (municipal, state, federal)

there's

  1. US government, with a mandate to use Windows for the same reason that Boeing CEOs of the past decade aren't in jail for hundredfold manslaughter
  2. other governments, where again, "shitty corporate IT" applies, but with s/corporate/administrative

Even worse: governments using Windows are absolutely giving the US services direct access to all their confidential files & communication.

It's an adoption problem. My company only supports windows because all our customers use windows. All our customers use windows because all their vendors only support windows.

Potential solutions:

  • move to web-based SW - platform-agnostic, so it's pretty easy to support other OSes (oh, and you get mobile almost for free)
  • start submitting patches to get stuff working on macOS and Linux - once the barrier to supporting other OSes is low enough, they may let you officially support it

I get that there are solutions to the problem, but there's no way a team of 10 can port 35 years of win32 dependence and keep the business solvent. Maybe incrementally, over the course of 10-15 years. We're just now migrating off of .NET 4.8 because we use WCF so much.

Depending on the implementation, WCF can be really easy to adapt to new clients. If you wanted to support Linux, macOS, or web, you just implement the part of your service that make sense for those platforms.

I obviously don't know your app at all, but it sounds like a 10 person dev team could probably build a new app in just a few months since the backend is already there. It wouldn't have all of the features, but generally speaking it's a lot easier to rebuild an app than refactor an existing one. Whether that would bring value is another concern entirely.

That's why I put the (larger) there - if you are a small company maybe you can not keep up a separate office infrastructure from your deployment / test systems in case of SW development. If you are a large enterprise and use Microsoft infrastructure, then either the people making the decisions in IT are getting a lot of bribes, or they are really really stupid :) Or both.

And I mean that absolutely without anger against Microsoft, and purely in terms of security nightmare and waste of office productivity because using a contemporary windows system wastes so much more time of any given user that each desk worker probably loses 20-70% productivity compared to a lean operating system (and that would include something like Windows 2000 / XP).

Yes corpo IT doesn't have the skills other than buy the easiest options and raise tickets to vendors.

Those people choose to live the techno-dystopia for the sheer convenience of it.

They will just copy whatever the rest of the industry does.

It's funny how you think that every single company just lets their IT choose what the best course of action is. Sometimes management just doesn't care.

Competent IT with good bullshitters can steer their way to anything but my current take is that they can't because they don't even know any other way except for the lies and manipulations crammed in by certification peddlers and proprietary software salesmen

Or if you're into online gaming.

I have to fend off linux nerds with a bat. The bottom line is "that's cool and all but there are a lot of things that I can't do with linux and I'm not willing to make that big of a change"

What are the issues? Genuine question.

Not the person you replied to but they’re probably talking about anti-cheat

I heard there were issues with those, but not sure on the specifics

Most games with anti-cheat refuse to run on Linux even if the anti-cheat itself supports it. And some anti-cheats just don’t work on Linux anyway, I believe the ones that do only support it by just not running when they detect they’re on Linux. If you’re interested you can check which games are supported here: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ but bear in mind it could change at any time (for example Rockstar broke GTAV a few weeks ago)

This is great, thanks for that link!

Pretty much every multiplayer online game will at best lose its shit and not run, and at worst, ban you instantaneously if you try to access it with Linux

And the main issue there tends to be anti-cheat, and that's a chicken-and-egg problem:

  • game devs won't support Linux/macOS because players don't use Linux/macOS
  • players won't use Linux/macOS because game devs don't support it

The more people we can convince to use Linux as a daily driver, the more game devs will notice and the more likely they are to support Linux. We've seen a lot of game devs make an effort since the Steam Deck became a thing, and it's always getting better.

It's totally fine to dual boot, but spending some amount of time gaming on Linux (where possible) helps send the message that Linux support is wanted and is profitable.

What are the issues? Genuine question.

Man, I've been trying to migrate to Linux as my daily driver desktop over the last week. I love Linux passionately. But multi-monitor and 2.5Gb/s NIC support is just a disaster, basically to the point of completely unusable. It's so frustrating. It keeps pushing me back to Windows, because Windows just works when it comes to hardware.

those are two of the easiest features to support.

what distro is giving you trouble?

For multi-monitor: use Wayland. For 2.5Gbps Ethernet NICs, they never work properly on any system in regard to performance, but I presume you are referencing the subpar Realtek NICs not connecting? Depending on the distro, you likely won't have the driver and/or firmware package preinstalled to make it work.

Yup, and installing the proper driver is usually pretty simple. If you post the hardware (or just the output of lspci) and your distro, we can probably find the package for you.

I run two multimonitor systems with different DPIs and 2.5gbe and they both run great. What issues are you hitting?

Multi monitor issues are purely on your distro - and are pretty easy to fix. At least for me on arch and bspwm (I haven't touched a Debian based install or full DE in years), setup was as easy as making my randr script run when my WM starts up, I imagine it's even easier with a full DE.

For 2.5 gb/s internet... I've never run into any problems or even had to configure anything. Fresh barebones arch install with lan, 2.5 gb/s out of the box. If you're getting less (my guess is 1 gb/s?) it's almost certainly a hardware issue (motherboard/network card is only 1 gb/s, port on router and/or switch is 1 gb/s, etc)

If you're having trouble with something, I highly recommend searching for the problem after checking a relevant wiki (archwiki is an awesome resource if you're on arch). If you're having issues you can't find problems to, feel free to shoot me a message and I'll try to help you out. I'm no expert, but I've been exclusively on Linux for 3 years (since I graduated and no longer was required to be on windows at all) and haven't run into any issues that I didn't find a relatively easy fix for)

This is very true. I remember back in the day I tossed my old drive full of viruses and windows and I started using Linux. That was 1998? No, it was definitely 2000 already. That was a really easy erase. I guess you could also just reuse the same drive. But that one has the click of death, so no.

All this shit is because some exec had a revelation that windows didn't need QA anymore.

There was a former employee that talked about it, they moved from actually testing on real hardware to automated VM testing and started missing a lot more

You could fit an entire modern OS in that space, together with all the drivers, a web browser, an office suite, graphics editor, an IDE and a compatibility layer for running Windows applications.

Yup, my Linux install is a bit over 10GB, which honestly surprises me and means I probably should clean stuff up, because usually my Linux base install is around 8GB. After a quick look, I have several old versions of compilers and runtimes that can be cleaned up w/o breaking anything.

I can't imagine thinking that an 8GB cache is fine, and that's nothing compared to the size of the rest of the OS...

Wasn’t this reported as being a result of the preview build?

Yeah, but don't get in the way of the Windows evil, Linux savior movement here on lemmy or you'll get downvoted to oblivion. Pointing out simple facts apparently means you're a shill.

At least that's what I've seen in all the Windows posts over the last couple months. Not sure what changed from before that, but something definitely did.

Not sure what changed from before that, but something definitely did.

People got fed up with Microsoft putting undeletable 9-gigabyte cache files on their systems? And AI junk that screenshots everything you do? And surveillance? And making the OS more hostile and worse in general with every release?

Lemmy exists because people got fed up with the corporate analogue. You'll see a lot of the same sentiment in other matters too.

I'm just pointing out that it's a sudden and extreme change in commentary with no ramp up. The kind of thing that in other contexts, like politics, often comes from something like a coordinated attack or disinformation scheme.

Real world testing of a new propaganda campaign system on a topic most users don't give a shit about (Windows vs Linux), in a niche corner of the internet (Lemmy), isn't exactly an unlikely scenario.

Nah, this is just what it's been like from the moment Lemmy got momentum. The fediverse is pretty fundamentally aligned with the goals and interests of the same people who are part of the FOSS and Linux philosophy. From where I joined more than a year ago, it's been more or less the same.

If that's the case and I've somehow managed to just never see any of those threads until recently...

They might want to know that constantly saying "Windows bad, Linux good" in every thread doesn't convert people, it just gets annoying. That in turn makes people dislike the group and dismiss what they say without a second thought, even if they're right.

You seem to misunderstand. Here on the Fediverse, Linux users are NOT such a minority as on the rest of the Internet. Most people here do not need "converting". They already have. Again, you're not on Reddit or Twitter. You are literally surrounded by open source enthusiasts.

Oh I don't misunderstand at all. They're preaching to the choir and thinking they're doing something. Like idiots.

Yes, it's called a circlejerk. Happens on many forums where people agree on something. It's not that serious.

...and as Internet has turned in to a myriad of echo chambers, circlejerking and trolling is all there is anymore.

Using Windows on purpose because of a couple annoying nerds is quite the self-own

Posting as if your choice of OS is inherently superior to other choices is just pathetic.

Actually, I saw enough comments about people switching to Linux that I finally said "what the hell" and took the plunge! Very glad I did, as I read more and more crap Microsoft is doing.

And if you don't like comments that won't change anything and just annoy people...maybe you should reevaluate your bellyaching 😄

You're in a thread about MS fucking up and you're annoyed that people are... [Checks notes]... complaining about MS fucking up? What exactly did you come here expecting?

Hahahaha this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Lemmy being extremely pro-Linux is not new. Hell, you admitted it, this is a niche corner of the internet that's based around an open source alternative to a popular platform

I remember the browser wars, that's when microsoft exposed themselves how shitty they were to the world IMO.

That's a long time ago. Years and years.

The ramp up started then, IMO.

Yeah, but

Actually no, but don't let either of you failing to read the article get in the way of making your smug little screed.

Linux Mint. You are welcome.

After trying Zorin and having a host of issues, I'm slowly replacing that dual boot option with Mint. Excited to give it a shot.

i installed a dual boot for mint a little bit bac and just recently wiped out my windows boot partition. could not be happier. nobody try to sell me on any other distros I'm still figuring out what a wayland is

Mint is absolutely awesome, I hope you enjoy.

If you ever get annoyed at it and want to try something else, you know where to find us. :)

How is fractional scaling on Mint? On Ubuntu 24.04 it's really crap (slow, blurry, flickering cursor, weird artifacts etc)

That depends on the DE, not the distro.

Okay so how is it with Cinammon, mate xfce? I know it's crap with Wayland and Xorg especially with nvidia drivers.

Wayland KDE plasma scales great! Currently running unstable on NIXOS flawlessly on two different hardware platforms.

Good to hear! I surely will give it a try, I've used nixos as my work distro for a little bit last year but they forced us to switch to Ubuntu.

I had some wonkiness on KDE 6 on Wayland a bit ago, but I think it's resolved now (I ended up disabling scaling at the time). Basically, my problem was that I had two monitors, and dragging an application from one monitor to the other resulted in really weird scaling, though launching it on that same monitor was totally fine (specific application was LibreOffice, but I'm sure there are others).

I think it's working better now, but it's certainly new-ish to Linux, so there could still be hiccups.

I have had no issues with desktop apps with AMD integrated graphics. Tried 150%, 175%, and 200% scaling. Running Mint with Cinnamon.

Games will sometimes run at 100%, though. Making their text tiny.

I'm honestly not sure as I don't have a display where I need to worry about that.

Reading all this makes me sad; and I’m relieved to have switched to Mac years ago…

Me when I move from cheap spyware to premium spyware.

Yeah, I've been avoiding this stuff the past few months by only letting my laptop online for quick essentials things. It's windows, I can't replace it with a mac so it's gotta be linux. Most online stuff I can do on my phone. But I can't put it off forever; I'm going to have to try the linux dual boot thing sooner or later. I've been putting it off because I've not used linux since the 90s and I really don't have time to re-learn. Gotta be done tho.

Edit - your semicolon inspired me to try one of my own!

Linux is a lot, lot, lot easier to use now than the 90s.

I've been daily driving it for quite a while now and have had zero issues even with constant updates.

Just a warning, Windows doesn't always play nice when installed on the same drive as Linux. If you have two drives, try installing them on different ones. If not, there's a risk that a Windows update can mess some things up. Usually it's fine, just I've had issues with it and so have others.

Anyway, Linux is really easy now. I would recommend something with KDE, like the Fedora KDE spin as an example. KDE is very familiar to Windows users, though very customizable if you want too. It should be a very easy transition, as long as you go in not expecting it to be identical to Windows. You have to meet it where it is, which does require relearning a few things.

If you have questions feel free to ask. There's also plenty of other users on Lemmy who would be happy to help.

I never used linux and was surprised how easy and almost seamless the transiton was.

dual boot is very simple and stable, I've been using Ubuntu / windows 10 for years after following a 10-minute YouTube video and basically only switch over to windows for games.

It's a great setup overall If there are some windows applications you prefer or are more convenient.

I have nothing to add to this conversation, but properly used semicolons always make me smile.