#windows-nt

#windows-nt

He stormed up to my desk, leaned over my partition, and began his rant before I could so much as say hello. He screamed about the rubbish laptops and IT systems we had, nothing ever worked, all the usual stuff. The user's rant ended with a thundered 'Just FIX IT!'

The long-dormant DR-DOS.com website is alive again, and DR-DOS 9.0 is in development. There have been six preliminary releases so far this year. The current work-in-progress version is version 9.0.291. This is not the same OS as the DOS-compatible OS that Digital Research developed back in the 1980s, working on the basis of its multitasking multiuser Concurrent DOS OS.

It was the time of Novell networks, RG58 cables, and bulky tower PCs. It was also a time before the telemarketer's IT department employed specialists. Carter and his two colleagues - boss Mike and part-time student Stefan - therefore handled tasks ranging from programming to support, and everything in between.

It's the story of why the 16-bit version of Digital Research CP/M was late, but the delayed arrival of this now-obscure OS is what catalyzed the development of a different, but source-level compatible, OS. That OS started Microsoft on its way to its current $3.5 trillion capitalization, and is also what led to the development of OS/2, Windows, and indirectly Linux.

Microsoft is warning organizations about the impending end of support for several Windows products from 2016. These include Windows Server 2016, Windows 10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB, and Windows IoT Enterprise LTSB 2016. According to Microsoft, these products are approaching the final stage of their lifecycle, which has direct consequences for organizations that still depend on this software. The lifecycle documentation on Microsoft Learn shows that Windows Server 2016 has not received regular support since January 2022 and is now fully in the extended support phase.

But are things getting worse? According to Register readers, and the company's own release health dashboard, the answer has to be yes. It isn't just you. The frequency of emergency out-of-band releases for the company's operating systems has been rapidly increasing to the point where, for every Patch Tuesday update, there'll likely be at least one out-of-band patch to fix whatever got broken.

A few months ago, I decided to breathe new life into a 2019 Dell XPS 15 that had been collecting dust for a couple of years. Despite its (at the time) high-end Core i7 CPU and 32GB of RAM, Windows was frustratingly slow on it. The fan was constantly at full throttle even when the machine was idle, and it regularly failed to install updates.

Windows cloud PCs have gone from Microsoft's side project to the centerpiece of its post‑Windows‑10 strategy. But the story in 2026 is less "death of the PC" and more "merger of PC, cloud, and AI under Microsoft's terms." Today, the most interesting question is not whether Windows moves to the cloud, but how much local control users are willing to surrender in exchange for AI‑infused desktops.

HP-UX had a good run, after a long and very varied history. The first version ran on the HP 9000 Series 500 range of 32-bit machines based on the HP FOCUS multi-chip CISC processor. In 1984, the Hewlett-Packard Journal ran a detailed article on how that port was created, based on a kernel called SUN - not related to Sun Microsystems' SunOS.

The gist of the idea is to run the whole user environment, desktop and all, inside WINE. So it's something like a bare-metal WINE sitting on top of the Linux kernel, with just enough plumbing to connect them up. This is significantly different from the current way, which is to run a completely Linux-based stack - the kernel, an init, a userland, a Linux display system, and a Linux desktop, and then run Windows programs inside that.

The issue focuses on how Windows handles these directories for specific user sessions. Because the kernel creates a DOS device object directory on demand, rather than at login, it cannot check whether the user is an admin during the creation process. Unlike UAC, Administrator Protection uses a hidden shadow admin account whose token handle can be returned by the system when calling the NtQueryInformationToken API function.

January 13 marked another milestone for legacy systems, as support for the software - codenamed Longhorn Server - expired for customers that bought Microsoft Premium Assurance (PA). Extended support ended for Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020. It was possible to keep the lights on until January 10, 2023, via Extended Security Updates. A fourth year came courtesy of Azure, which took the code to January 9, 2024, but that was it for anyone without PA.

Microsoft's .NET Framework 3.5 development platform, which dates back to November 2007, is no longer included as an optional Windows component. Microsoft has changed its deployment model to standalone installer status for future Windows versions. In a bulletin published February 5, Microsoft said that beginning with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27965, .NET Framework 3.5 must be obtained as a standalone installer for applications that require it on newer major versions of Windows.