Upgraded my gaming OS install to Windows 11. Took several hours because of me trying to be “clever” with bootloaders back when I was installing 10.

So, error 0x800701b1 when updating means Windows is confused about UEFI boot entries. In my case, the Windows SSD had no ESP (just the one NTFS partition… that did have an EFI directory on it somehow?!), while the other SSD had everything on its ESP — rEFInd, FreeBSD loader.efi, and Windows Boot Manager. It all worked fine, but turns out bcdedit is really confused about this setup and spews some error about a nonexistent or unrecognized device. Fiddling with it and stuff actually broke my Windows install in a weird way (first it booted into safe mode, then any boot would result in a BSOD related to kernel exception something). Booting a Windows-to-Go install from an external hard drive, shrinking the NTFS partition (damn that takes ages on a 2TB SSD) and adding an ESP fixed the install, and I was able to update to Windows 11 just fine.

This is kinda my fault for ending up with such a bizzare setup but I still wanna say, “ARRGGHHH Stupid Windows!!”

Current Windows 10 has a feature called “Windows Sandbox” which spawns a tiny Hyper-V VM with allegedly a very smart slim disk image thing that shares the OS files with the host, and smart memory management, and so on.. and virtualized GPU support, like virgl in the free world.

So can it run Crysis, or at least Quake? Is it what we need for isolating old games? Well.. it has the ability to load up the host GPU with work and to show the results, but it’s absolutely unsuitable for gaming in its current state. Seems like it uses regular RDP for the window, and there aren’t any special optimizations that make 3D fast. The frame pacing is awful, framerate is weirdly limited, etc.

Also, this is not obviously found on google right now: if you have a compressed disk, you need to decompress C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Containers for it to work.

Wow. Windows will no longer require admin rights to create a symlink. Amazing.

So it’s possible to control an external monitor’s brightness over DDC/CI. There’s e.g. ClickMonitorDDC for Windows. Why the hell doesn’t Windows support this natively?! It shows the native brightness slider for laptops, but not for desktops!?

PSA: if you’re using VirtualBox on Windows and you need USB passthrough, do not install usbpcap when installing Wireshark.

Installing “Ubuntu on Windows”. While it’s downloading, the ConEmu taskbar icon shows a progress bar. I’m pretty impressed.

The Windows install on my desktop suddenly decided to start resetting some settings every time I log in. The wallpaper, Start and taskbar pinned items, Firefox profile… Thankfully, not the Steam profile :D

Oh, by the way, recently I was reminded of one of the most infuriating Windows things. It’s 2016 and Windows is still not UTF-8 everywhere. The cmd console is whatever (CP1251 for Russian locale), Visual Studio saves by default in whatever (I’ve seen CP1251 and… UTF-8 with BOM). There’s also the \r\n newline stuff. And Windows users are convinced that Windows defaults aren’t the problem, it’s those weird Unix people who cause problems.

You know the operating system chooser light blue screen that pops up when you upgrade to a new build of Windows 10?

I just saw that it can become “not responding” for a moment – complete with a white overlay and spinning circle cursor!

A fresh install of Visual Studio 2015 RC w/o any optional things is 7 GB. Seven. Gigabytes. Why.

(also, “close VS to reduce the probability of required restart” is a lie, it required a restart anyway)