Execs at Microsoft have been taking note that Windows 11 users have been unhappy with the wave after wave of buggy updates over the past year. No amount of Copilot assistance can overcome the many issues faced by Windows 11 users since Windows 10 was officially retired last fall, and their frustration has seemingly at least been acknowledged by Microsoft. According to a report by The Verge (via TechPowerUp), Microsoft’s engineers are now tasked with repairing the current OS in an effort to improve it.
“The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year, you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.”
– Pavan Davuluri, President of WIndows and Devices
The Verge’s sources tell them that engineers are now engaged in a process called “swarming” to work on fixing the many messes that have plagued the operating system. While Windows 11 has outpaced Windows 10 by a little over four months in having over a billion users, it’s been a very bumpy ride that saw a heavy push for AI features that alarmed users when it came to privacy, and then also constant ad pop-ups and prompts. Beyond that, folks never knew what to expect after an update was installed and how long of a wait it would be until the next fix was rolled out, or what new issues would be introduced when it was.
Aside from broken features, BSODs, crashes, and disabled peripheral devices, such as keyboards and mice, there have also been degraded gaming performance issues introduced by updates, which, oddly enough, required NVIDIA to step in with its own driver updates to fix. It was also recently revealed that Windows 11 is using an older legacy hard drive driver for SSDs when an update for servers rolled out. A new driver, which can be found in some versions of Windows 11 or can be manually installed, has yet to be officially turned on, but testing by brave souls has shown some significant speed increases for NVMe drives. Hopefully, this will be among the many items on the Microsoft engineers’ task lists, and with any luck, 2026 will be a better year for Windows users than 2025 was.
Discussion (5 replies)
Join Discussion →It works fine in my mini PCs idk.
if they could stop releasing updates that break all kinds of software that'd be great
It's not just bad updates
Ads
AI everywhere
Hoovering of your personal data and not being transparent about it
Edge keeps mysteriously setting itself to default...
WTF happened to notepad?
All these years later and it's still a mashup of old and new UI elements - the classic Control Panel vs Settings
I wish it would just make up it's mind if it wants to remain a legacy support system, or a new and fresh OS. Can't really do both.
My brain is a bit mush right now but I know I've encountered a couple of things on our home machines (2 desktops and 2 laptops) and then at the day job I've seen a good share oddities between two dozen laptops and the same amount of desktops. I can usually get whatever it is sorted out but almost always points back to an update that failed to install or cause an issue after it did. Funny part is it has rarely ever been the same exact thing twice and varies from machine to machine so each one has been a new experience, oh joy, and normally an hour or more of time lost to address.
Wow you think they would learn. But they are targeting enterprise that wants zero day patches more than they want stability from their desktop OS's. Also why a lot of dev's are starting to work on mac's.