Microsoft Windows - Tumblr Posts

Am i the only one out here who knows of the hidden catalog of royalty free music hidden deep in the windows directory??? Is it just me??? in the clipart library specifically????

i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

microsoft windows humanization sketches

Windows Neptune

Windows 95 & 98 / Early webcore aesthetic graphics stuff!!

→ browser tabs aesthetic - dividers

like and reblog are much appreciated ♡

Why turn clients into beta testers first when alpha is also possible.

mod

07.19.2024 A failed update has caused chaos worldwide! Apparently, someone thought that cost-cutting couldn't be ambitious enough.

Flyer for the Windows 7 Ultimate pack in Japan, featuring Windows 7 mascot Nanami Madobe.

those speeder bikes were way too colorful for star wars. what do you think this is, favreau, star trek? that shit has to be BEIGE

"WebP is more efficient than pngs though!" yeah and I am sure ancient space rocks are more valuable than USD, but that ain't gonna mean SHIT if i can't use the damn things anywhere or sell them. when programs start to recognize webp files (and google lets me consent to downloading the fuckers instead of forcing it on me), THEN I will start to take them seriously.

Dear anyone who hates Aptos...

I have an easy fix for you that doesn't involve fighting with the back ends of MS Word's settings. In Word, open the design tab, click font, and then select Office 2013-2022 from the drop-down menu: this changes your entire document fonts (including headings) into the previous default formatting.

This works on pre-existing documents too.

Hope this helps!

PS. In the 'design' tab, you can select the 2013-2022 default as a format - this doesn't change font: just layout and colours :)

PPS. THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW ABOUT AUTOMATIC REFERENCING IN WORD TERRIFIES ME. You don't have to type out APA references, just use the tool in word, it makes the reference list for you. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-bibliography-citations-and-references-17686589-4824-4940-9c69-342c289fa2a5 It's not as good as the likes of EndNote or Zotero but it's decent enough to save your grade in a high school project.

To anyone wondering why this faulty update got pushed so widely (and also why a company would allow this to install automatically), it was apparently an update to malware definitions. Those are MEANT to be pushed as often as possible, and there’s many factors at play that could’ve caused the update to turn out faulty - the root cause I recall is an access violation when trying to parse a definition file, and because the process is very highly privileged on Windows (understatement, but whatever), when the OS kills the program, it brings itself down as well.

That explains why CUSTOMERS of the software fell for this bug. How CROWDSTRIKE managed to push the update faulty is beyond me - it could be anything really. They’re also meant to push definition updates as often as possible, and I guess “don’t bring down the operating system” isn’t something worth testing in their eyes. Or maybe it was environment discrepancies, bad management, it was Thursday and everyone was too drowsy to properly test, management was too busy compiling… loads of options.

If their parser is really able to produce an access violation, I am truly surprised that it didn’t happen sooner.

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.