Windows’ Hidden Self Destruct Code

erek

[H]F Junkie
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"There was once a piece of code, buried deep within Windows, designed to detect competitor operating systems, and upon finding them, CRASH... or at least, make the user feel like something was seriously wrong. This was Microsoft's attempt to truly kill Digital Research's DR-DOS, and although it worked, it wasn't long until the true nature of Microsoft's practices was uncovered."

 
Good thing they never did that again.
unsupported-hardware-600x390.png
 
Good thing they never did that again.

What version of Windows is this? and what hardware? Even before Windows 7 went EOS I hated reinstalling it for clients because there was 300+ updates and the update system took many hours only for me to come back and it failed to install over 150 of them so another 1.5 hours latter it is done. Windows 10 is much better in the update system.
 
What version of Windows is this? and what hardware? Even before Windows 7 went EOS I hated reinstalling it for clients because there was 300+ updates and the update system took many hours only for me to come back and it failed to install over 150 of them so another 1.5 hours latter it is done. Windows 10 is much better in the update system.
It's Windows 10 and/or 7 artificially detecting hardware that "isn't compatible" with it, even though it is very much compatible.
I have Windows 7 still running for gaming and editing applications on AMD Zen+ and Zen 2 platforms, and despite the drivers working 100%, Windows 7 still displays that nonsense message to 'scare' the user into upgrading.

Microsoft, and it's licensed operating systems, can go fuck themselves.
 
What version of Windows is this? and what hardware? Even before Windows 7 went EOS I hated reinstalling it for clients because there was 300+ updates and the update system took many hours only for me to come back and it failed to install over 150 of them so another 1.5 hours latter it is done. Windows 10 is much better in the update system.
Microsoft repeatedly broke the update system in Win 7 after 8 came out. The last couple of Win 7 installs I did towards the end of the support cycle required manually fixing the update system 2-3 times while getting updated from the latest build available to DL, I probably should have slipstreamed all the updates but I think they had made that difficult in some manner as well.

It's possible that the update issues were due to ineptness but I think they were doing it intentionally to push people to win 8/10.
 
It's Windows 10 and/or 7 artificially detecting hardware that "isn't compatible" with it, even though it is very much compatible.
I have Windows 7 still running for gaming and editing applications on AMD Zen+ and Zen 2 platforms, and despite the drivers working 100%, Windows 7 still displays that nonsense message to 'scare' the user into upgrading.

Microsoft, and it's licensed operating systems, can go fuck themselves.
can it be patched / cracked
 
It's possible that the update issues were due to ineptness but I think they were doing it intentionally to push people to win 8/10.
After Windows 10, and Microsoft got a new CPU, the ineptness absolutely took over.
In fact, Microsoft themselves have so little faith in their updates and update system that they now have a "best practices" tertiary-level update recommendation.

Three levels for pushing updates to corporate/enterprise systems - that is beyond lazy, and lousy.
Microsoft is the same company in name-only compared to what they once were.

heatlesssun was the only one here who ever gave me any hope for Microsoft products, as he worked extensively with them and always saw the positive side of their products.
Without him around, Microsoft products are completely dead to me, and I only use them when absolutely necessary when WINE, VMs, or emulation won't cut it.
 
can it be patched / cracked
Sure, it can be 'fixed' with a registry change, but the fact that this artificial 'check' even exists is just absurd and, at best, is a scareware tactic from Microsoft.
 
Ironically it does that with anything past 7000 series intel.

It's odd because 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000 are all skylake.

Arbitrary warning is arbitrary.
Exactly, and Microsoft also did this artificially to try and prevent Windows 7 from becoming another Windows XP event where, despite going EOL, the world continues to use it instead of Windows 10.
Instead of offering useful features and interfaces, Microsoft just breaks their own products before they are EOL to scare their loyal customers into buying the latest and greatest.

Yeah yeah, I get Windows 10 is "free" with the upgrade still offered from Windows 7.
Just remember though, when something is free, you are the product.
 
"There was once a piece of code, buried deep within Windows, designed to detect competitor operating systems, and upon finding them, CRASH... or at least, make the user feel like something was seriously wrong. This was Microsoft's attempt to truly kill Digital Research's DR-DOS, and although it worked, it wasn't long until the true nature of Microsoft's practices was uncovered."



Self Destruct still exists... it was just renamed to Windows Update.
 
What version of Windows is this? and what hardware? Even before Windows 7 went EOS I hated reinstalling it for clients because there was 300+ updates and the update system took many hours only for me to come back and it failed to install over 150 of them so another 1.5 hours latter it is done. Windows 10 is much better in the update system.

Would this be the Windows10 that wouldn't update any of the yearly mega updates on one of my laptops? A 2016 i5 Skylake based system that took me 6 hours of messing with it earlier this year to try to get the updates (stuck at 2017 version of W10) to work before just using WSUS. Which fixed the problem in 10 minutes. But hey, I learned what Microsoft wanted people to do to try and fix the failed updates. I learned they don't work often and it takes a non MS product to get systems updated properly.
 
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Windows 10 is much better in the update system.

This is Windows 10 update system:
d422e488510277f2b0b9-20-dumpster-fire.rsquare.w700.gif

Literally every major Windows 10 update is a steaming dumpster file that causes bricked machines and massive data loss. Not counting the millions of machines bricked by shitty forced updates from Windows 7 and 8.x

Microsoft's QA department is a chimp pressing a big red button that says "RELEASE THE LATEST TEST CODE TO THE WORLD" in perpetuity. Their customers have become their guinea pigs, basically paying for untested software.
 
funny how this article gets posted around the same time that i'm looking for a solution for why windows photo viewer (from win7) stopped working on win10. Keeps saying i dont' have enough ram to open any jpg's when i have 32GB installed. Seems to be a common error for which the only solution is to "use a different program".
 
Microsoft believed the hype that pc's were dead and mobile was the future.
They tried to reinvent themselves and ended up inventing a turd of a company.
 
erek This happened 29 years ago, wasn't in the RTM release, and has been beat to death. I can understand posting this a a flashback Friday or whatever but at least add some context to the OP.

Yeah. Microsoft's explanation at the time--and people are free to not believe them--was that DR DOS manipulated undocumented data structures that MS changed (IIRC), and that the changes could lead to Windows crashes when using DR DOS instead of regular DOS. Plus, it was the Windows 95 beta, so, as exiled350 said, an ancient story.

Now, MS could've talked to the DR DOS guys and told them to update their product, but their attitude was "why should we help our competitors?"
 
This is Windows 10 update system: [trash fire]

Just because the updates are a trash fire, doesn't mean the update system is. The update system in some of the older windows (maybe XP or 7) was a trash fire --- if you installed fresh or had a old system that was offline for a long time, the update system would churn for hours and not make any progress, until you figured out you needed to install a couple updates manually. For Windows 10, I haven't heard of too many update system problems (although, I had one on a small drive where it repeatedly downloaded one of the 'feature releases', then failed to install it because out of disk space, and didn't tell me, several months later I figured it out when I didn't have features everyone else had, and had to manually do that one).

Microsoft's QA department is a chimp pressing a big red button that says "RELEASE THE LATEST TEST CODE TO THE WORLD" in perpetuity. Their customers have become their guinea pigs, basically paying for untested software.

In case you forgot, they laid off most of their operating systems testing group in 2014, and restructured what remained into a shadow of what they used to do for OS testing. I'm not surprised quality has fallen, when they no longer have anywhere near the testing they used to have.
 
Yeah. Microsoft's explanation at the time--and people are free to not believe them--was that DR DOS manipulated undocumented data structures that MS changed (IIRC), and that the changes could lead to Windows crashes when using DR DOS instead of regular DOS. Plus, it was the Windows 95 beta, so, as exiled350 said, an ancient story.

Now, MS could've talked to the DR DOS guys and told them to update their product, but their attitude was "why should we help our competitors?"

The video makes a pretty compelling case that it was intentional unless everything in it was completely fabricated, the alleged emails are particularly damning in regards to intent.

The funny thing is I don't recall DR DOS being popular as an alternative OS in the late DOS era, OS/2 was the popular one back then for IBM compatible computers and Amiga was the popular proprietary OS. I was more aware of it earlier when DR, MS, and IBM were all slugging it out to become the dominant DOS and then later when it was useful for creating bootable floppies for utilities such as ones to flash firmware.
 
erek This happened 29 years ago, wasn't in the RTM release, and has been beat to death. I can understand posting this a a flashback Friday or whatever but at least add some context to the OP.
I wasn't aware of this, and the video itself was just released.
So in a sense, for many of us who were too young to have experienced these things, or weren't there to do so, this is absolutely tech news.

If you don't like this, then why don't you post your own tech news instead of bitching about others, who also happen to post many fascinating and interesting articles for free no less.
I also don't see any rules about not being able to post retro or historic tech-related news, and you aren't a mod, so I guess you can deal with having to skip over a thread or two you happen to not like. :meh:

Are you going to bitch and moan about the news post made on the Z4 computer from 1945?
I mean, that was 75 years ago, and has been beat to death even more (even though many of us had never heard of it before), so by your logic, something like that should never be posted here, too, right??? :rolleyes:


Everyone has a right to their opinion, though I do think the snowflake "I don't like this because it's OLD" attitude really needs to be quelled.
Whiny posts like yours are far more annoying than any post about historic tech news.
 
I wasn't aware of this, and the video itself was just released.
So in a sense, for many of us who were too young to have experienced these things, or weren't there to do so, this is absolutely tech news.

If you don't like this, then why don't you post your own tech news instead of bitching about others, who also happen to post many fascinating and interesting articles for free no less.
I also don't see any rules about not being able to post retro or historic tech-related news, and you aren't a mod, so I guess you can deal with having to skip over a thread or two you happen to not like. :meh:

Are you going to bitch and moan about the news post made on the Z4 computer from 1945?
I mean, that was 75 years ago, and has been beat to death even more (even though many of us had never heard of it before), so by your logic, something like that should never be posted here, too, right??? :rolleyes:


Everyone has a right to their opinion, though I do think the snowflake "I don't like this because it's OLD" attitude really needs to be quelled.
Whiny posts like yours are far more annoying than any post about historic tech news.
...sooo if you had read my post you would see I was simply stating that more context was needed in the OP, that does not equal bitching about the content. Reason being is almost every post before mine is people rambling on about win 7/ 10 which has nothing to do with the video.

Also the Z4 news article was about an even that happened on or shortly before Sept. 22 2020, hardly 75 years ago.

Plus my post, which again if you had actually read my post, is far from snowflake bitching rather trying to help erek improve his news posting to increase clarity.
 
...sooo if you had read my post you would see I was simply stating that more context was needed in the OP, that does not equal bitching about the content. Reason being is almost every post before mine is people rambling on about win 7/ 10 which has nothing to do with the video.

Also the Z4 news article was about an even that happened on or shortly before Sept. 22 2020, hardly 75 years ago.

Plus my post, which again if you had actually read my post, is far from snowflake bitching rather trying to help erek improve his news posting to increase clarity.
I don't think it was lacking in context considering the description started with "There was once a piece of code, buried deep within Windows", it also mentioned DR DOS and if those weren't enough context the retro interface on the freeze frame for the video should have tipped you off.
 
Never even heard of DR-DOS, so it's news to me. Got started in the Win 3.11 era, so I used some MS-DOS for sure and heard of OS/2 but never used it.

And knowing Microsoft back then, I absolutely could believe it was intentional. I mean, tech companies still do stuff like this today. Didn't Apple get sued for making older iPhones slower or something?
 
The video makes a pretty compelling case that it was intentional

Of course it was intentional. I don't think Microsoft said anything about it at all until someone disassembled the code and proved it, and then they came right out and said they'd done it on purpose because in their testing DR DOS could cause Windows crashing because, as I said in my first post, it was messing with undocumented data structures that they'd changed. People can agree with them or not, but when they got caught they said why they'd done it.
 
Just because the updates are a trash fire, doesn't mean the update system is. The update system in some of the older windows (maybe XP or 7) was a trash fire --- if you installed fresh or had a old system that was offline for a long time, the update system would churn for hours and not make any progress, until you figured out you needed to install a couple updates manually.

What exactly has Windows 10 improved in regards to updates? If you have an offline Windows 10 system and bring it online for updates, it can have the same problem where updates sometimes won't install, or WU gets stuck in a failed logic loop it can't think itself out of. If that's not bad enough, if you have a failed update with cryptic error messages that causes the whole machine to go down or have problems in general, Microsoft made it as difficult as possible for you to remove that update. Hell, when Windows 10 was first released, it was actually not possible to remove updates because Microsoft wanted complete control of your machine. It wasn't until much later after user revolt that they threw out a half broken bastardized tool to manage specific updates on the machine. But if that wasn't already bad enough, Microsoft also made it very difficult to block specific updates from being installed on your machine that you don't want installed, like the dozens of bad updates Microsoft has released over the years that brick machines. Then there's the whole other problem of Windows overwriting drivers you install with hideously out of date drivers from Windows Update. They bury the setting to stop this, and conflate it with several other unrelated things, meaning to disable one bad feature, you lose other features you may want.

This is in sharp contrast to every version of Windows that came before it that had online Windows Update support. The user had complete control over what was installed on their machine, and that became a very important thing late in the life of WIndows 7 and later 8 and 8.1 when update quality went into the toilet.


In case you forgot, they laid off most of their operating systems testing group in 2014, and restructured what remained into a shadow of what they used to do for OS testing. I'm not surprised quality has fallen, when they no longer have anywhere near the testing they used to have.

Jerry Berg (barnacules) had a whole video on this several years back, but it was pretty well known by then that Microsoft software updates had turned into a dumpster fire.
 
While clearly this happened quite a long time ago, recent issues of suspicion or just plain cumbersome/frustrating elements regarding Windows havent' exactly diminished. This does however highlight the contrast between a proprietary OS such as Windows (or MacOSX ) and a free/libre open source one such as Linux! It would be highly unlikely for such functionality to be included in Linux without notice. Even if the code was obfuscated or perhaps included in some binary module, its likely that the cause of it would be narrowed down and outed through troubleshooting, as it would be possible to eliminate other possibilities in a way that is much more difficult in a proprietary OS.

There are many benefits to supporting open source alternatives and, while more limited vulnerability to this kind of issue is not likely to be a chief reason for many users to seek out an alternate OS, its just another positive in Linux's corner.
 
Ugh, I wish I could be done with Windows. I hadn't used it in more than 18 months, but when COVID hit and I had to go all online for work there was no choice. The Linux version of Zoom is stripped of all of the audio options I need so I'm stuck with Windows until this is over. My wife has gotten sick of my yelling "F%^$#@! Windows" every time an update breaks one of our machines (and it's happened to both of us, and we're both using machines that are less than 8 months old).
 
What version of Windows is this? and what hardware? Even before Windows 7 went EOS I hated reinstalling it for clients because there was 300+ updates and the update system took many hours only for me to come back and it failed to install over 150 of them so another 1.5 hours latter it is done. Windows 10 is much better in the update system.
When you've killed the competition and entrenched yourself into the marketplace and demonstrated the willingness to kill a competitor (unopposed), no investors will invest against you. You can drop the games. People just knowing you're willing to play them, is enough.
 
After Windows 10, and Microsoft got a new CPU, the ineptness absolutely took over.
In fact, Microsoft themselves have so little faith in their updates and update system that they now have a "best practices" tertiary-level update recommendation.

Three levels for pushing updates to corporate/enterprise systems - that is beyond lazy, and lousy.
Microsoft is the same company in name-only compared to what they once were.

heatlesssun was the only one here who ever gave me any hope for Microsoft products, as he worked extensively with them and always saw the positive side of their products.
Without him around, Microsoft products are completely dead to me, and I only use them when absolutely necessary when WINE, VMs, or emulation won't cut it.

You can still find him on /r/linux_gaming trying to convince people to use W10 instead.
 
A bit off topic, I'm dyed in the wool Linux supporter.... but I do see an interesting "trend" that is coming to play in Linux more and more, and I don't particularly like it. This new trend is, "if Microsoft no longer supports it, we need to not support it either". This is becoming more and more popular. The reason I don't like this is that of Linux's strengths is its ability to support "older stuff". And you'd think with a of the "green dealers" out there, that the idea of keeping things out of our landfills longer would be a good thing. But I've noticed a trend mostly over the past couple of years to deprecate that we haven't seen in Linux. Just an observation. There was a time when Linux was more in control of "setting the tone" for doing "right things". I think we're rapidly losing control and adopting a "follower" mentality.

Sometimes the deprecations are due to "security" issues. For example, don't use http, because it's clear text. However, when we say, we're ripping http support out (this is a fabricated example) to "protect the people", because they are too dumb to keep themselves alive, we're probably creating a problem. Hey, want to protect your child, keep them locked up under the stairwell. Probably not the answer, you know? When we attempt to adopt "all or nothing" policies with regards to technology, I'm going to argue that we probably are making a mistake. "Outer space" is dangerous.... therefore, don't go?? Adopting all or nothing rules with regards to what is "right" or "wrong", by telling people what they can and cannot use "because they are all stupid".... it's just not the sort of thing I want to hear.

Anyway, leaving my soap box (I probably violated some law, after all).
 
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