[HN Gopher] What if you delete the "Program Files" folder in Win...
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What if you delete the "Program Files" folder in Windows? [video]
Author : redbell
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-12-12 12:58 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| cainxinth wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/delete-system32
| hbn wrote:
| That's interesting that it started reverting into Windows 10.
|
| It makes you wonder how the thing is built. Like rather than
| modifying the code, Windows 11 is like a service that run on top
| of 10 and modifies a few UI things near the end of the startup
| process. Was that just some kind of hack due to time constraints?
| Or is the Windows codebase really that much of a delicate
| ecosystem when it comes to not breaking legacy software so they
| couldn't even modify the taskbar or file explorer without
| wrecking something?
| anoonmoose wrote:
| Recently, I was required to use a PC that had Windows 11 on it.
| I tried to set it up like the rest of my computers, which
| involves moving the task bar from the bottom of the screen to
| the side, which I've done for years in Windows.
|
| Yeah, W11 doesn't support that. If you do some digging you'll
| find MS claiming it's a large technical lift that they have no
| current plans to do.
|
| What does this mean with regards to your question? Not much.
| But that regression in functionality, in an area that every
| other OS I use supports and has supported for years, definitely
| suggests the thing is a hack. In my humble uninformed opinion.
| stagger87 wrote:
| They have since added the ability to do this.
| mikebridgman wrote:
| Do you have a link? It seems it still requires a 3rd party
| app.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| The location of the Windows 11 taskbar cannot be set
| through any UI options. They do not officially support
| changing the location of the taskbar according to available
| documentation. The upgrade message inside Windows 10
| explicitly calls out this deficiency along with other
| before continuing. There are registry hacks that change the
| location, but this is unsupported.
|
| Docs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-
| use-the-t...
| TrevorJ wrote:
| That kind of comports with how the UI in windows has behaved
| from 98>XP>7>8>10. In 10, you get the windows 10 UI on most of
| your top-level interfaces, but once you dive into a sub-menu
| you get some legacy UI and if you dig down deep enough you get
| UI from what feels like windows 98.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Did you intentionally skip Vista?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Funny how I totally forgot that one existed. The only time
| I saw it in use was a friend's laptop. And it was laggy
| like hell and he soon installed XP.
| kace91 wrote:
| Weirdly enough, that's one of the things that originally made
| me want to explore options outside windows.
|
| The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new
| experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows
| desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint
| over the old creaky house.
|
| I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android
| was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved
| the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click
| buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for
| the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed
| overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.
| vel0city wrote:
| It wasn't "Windows Phone", it was Windows Mobile or Pocket
| PC 2000. All the releases of Windows Phone definitely
| didn't have a UI like the regular desktop version of
| Windows and only existed after the release of Android.
| kace91 wrote:
| Yes, you're right! Windows mobile, I totally forgot about
| the actual windows phone, that came later.
| vel0city wrote:
| It is definitely a common mixup. Microsoft really dropped
| the ball on having a consistent product and a consistent
| name in their mobile play.
| TillE wrote:
| It's just some moldy old bits of UI, the actual Windows
| kernel itself has evolved substantially over the years.
| gumboza wrote:
| That's the sad thing. The core of windows is pretty good.
| It's just the mismanagement and shell that's a shit show.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something
| new.
|
| Well. There was plenty of "new" UI enhancements over the
| years which I resisted as much as possible. Imagine a meme
| of Garth from Wayne's World, "We fear change..."
|
| I always hated the more smooth and colorful Windows XP
| theme. Computers back then were resource constrained enough
| that you'd notice the fact that it wasn't "free". It wasn't
| until Windows 10 that I stopped trying to make the shell
| look as much like Win2k as possible. The extra UI eye candy
| on modern systems is as near as matters "free" now, as long
| as you have plenty of RAM.
|
| Now I am just trying to make Windows 11 look as much like
| Windows 10 as possible.
| gumboza wrote:
| It's worse. There's some windows 3.1 hiding in the ODBC
| configuration...
|
| https://imgur.com/XOmCyEG
| oblio wrote:
| Is this still there in Win 11 2022?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Just checked. It is.
|
| I am not surprised - I feel like I was marveling over
| some similar ODBC dialog back in 2009.
| unilynx wrote:
| An 'old' settings dialog in Windows is usually to support
| old drivers who still want/need to extend that dialog
| with driver specific options. You will probably still see
| it in the network settings too if you dig deep enough
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Turtles all the way down.
|
| Windows boots from some DOS and File I/O BIOS interrupts.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Maybe pre-UEFI, but the UEFI boot process is completely
| different.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| MS-DOS has never been used in Windows NT and its descendant
| operation systems to support booting.
|
| Prior to Windows Vista the real mode code in the MBR loads
| NTLDR[0] which switches to protected mode and runs
| osloader.exe to boot the kernel. Post-Vista this is handled
| by the BOOTMGR[1] bootloader.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booting_process_of_Windows_
| NT_...
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Windows NT and the systems based on it are not based on MS-
| DOS, _but use a virtual machine_ , NTVDM, to handle the DOS
| API.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API
|
| Games like Doom still run on Windows because of this DOS
| virtualization.
| helloooooooo wrote:
| No it doesn't. UEFI boots into bootmgr.efi, which loads up
| winload, which loads either ntoskrnl or hyperv
| microsoftdoes wrote:
| Not true since the Win 9x days.
| jesprenj wrote:
| Was 2000 already NT and free of DOS?
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Yes, it was the direct successor of NT 4.0. Windows 2000
| was still an OS aimed at the "professional" market,
| though. XP was the first consumer/mainstream oriented OS
| based on NT.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I used Win2000 as my main desktop for about 3-4 years
| back in the day. Very stable.
| adra wrote:
| I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play
| games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails
| because between the two, there were only a handful of
| win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up
| having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing
| endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best
| windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I
| "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support
| because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k
| compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.
| agumonkey wrote:
| PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of
| the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I
| decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea
| what NT was).
|
| It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used
| anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were
| absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level
| crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing
| more, it was insane.
| vel0city wrote:
| Windows 2000 was an NT release, but Windows Millenium
| Edition (Me) was the last generally released DOS-based
| desktop OS released by Microsoft. Windows Me was released
| after Windows 2000 by a few months.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| My Surface go 3 came with W11 looking like W10 (except the
| start menu/task bar). That confused me a lot (old right click,
| old settings). It came win W11 Home so I did a fresh W11 Pro
| installation (which for some reason accepts the built in key
| and is activated) and everything looked like W11.
| gumboza wrote:
| Windows is built like my old apartment was decorated. 20 layers
| of paint over the top of mouldy wallpaper.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| I developed windows during the Windows 10 timeframe. Although I
| left before windows 11 was conceived, it's painfully obvious
| that it is just a UI reskin on top of 10. This was preordained
| by certain organizational choices made during my time there;
| namely, that the "Shell" team responsible for the start menu,
| desktop, and other UI tidbits[0] was completely divorced from
| the rest of windows development, with their own business
| priorities and so on. This was the team responsible for Windows
| 8/.1, so as you can imagine they were somewhat sidelined during
| Windows 10 development. It appears they have their revenge,
| first and foremost from the promised-never-to-happen rebranding
| (whereby they jettisoned the Windows 10 brand which was an
| embarrassment for that team and that team only). That the
| result is only a reskinned 10 is the natural result because
| that is the only part of the product they have the authority or
| ability to change.
|
| The Shell team was trying to push this same new UI during my
| whole time at Msft, with at least three cancelled attempts that
| I was aware of even from an IC perspective. By the end the
| embarrassment was contagious.
|
| [0] Plus Edge, as part of the same vestigial business unit.
| This explains the central position of advertising in the
| reskin, because Edge in all of its forms was always meant to
| drive ad revenue. _That_ is the distinct business priority I
| mentioned earlier, which sets this organization apart from
| Windows (NT,win32,etc.) development proper, which was shifted
| to Azure.
| easton wrote:
| It is a pretty big hack. I seem to recall in 11 (at least
| around RTM time, maybe not now) that if explorer.exe died then
| all the windows lost their rounded corners. There was
| definitely a dev build where if the start menu crashed (also
| explorer.exe I think) the windows 10 one would reappear,
| although that might've just been because during development
| they shipped both start menus.
| voidfunc wrote:
| the tl;dw is "It breaks"
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| ...And for my next trick, `rm -rf /`!
| gradstudent wrote:
| Is it really the same? Or more like `rm -rf /usr` ? Was this
| folder always required to maintain the integrity of the system,
| or is this a more recent thing?
| chungy wrote:
| On most Linux distributions, it's basically the same. Your
| package manager tends to make no distinction between OS files
| and installed program files.
|
| FreeBSD does another approach, where user-installed packages
| go to /usr/local and don't get intermixed with the base
| operating system.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's actually quite similar; it used to be that all the
| "system" binaries were in /bin and /sbin and the "other
| stuff" was in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin but that has not been
| true for quite a while on many distributions.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| "back in the time", /usr could be on a network drive, and
| /bin had to contain just enough stuff to boot the system, set
| up networking and mount the /usr
| codetrotter wrote:
| Interestingly I actually did manage to make my /usr
| partition unmountable a few years ago on a system where I
| had changed the shell for the root user from /bin/sh to
| /usr/local/bin/bash and ever since then I have kept the
| default shell for the root user on my systems unmodified :)
| euroderf wrote:
| Back in PDP-11 days (Unix v.6) my boss managed to do a
| "rm -fr *" not in his personal bin (as he believed ATM)
| but in the system bin. Oooooops. (but Armando S was ready
| with functioning backups.)
| jesprenj wrote:
| https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Or chroot. And that is how docker was born.
| liminal wrote:
| The surprising this is that deleting those folders on Windows 11
| results in it presenting as Windows 10.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| In high school my friends and I had a basement drinking game
| called "System 32 Roulette." We had a fresh Windows 98 machine
| and you had to pick a file inside c:/windows/system32/ by random
| and forcibly delete it then reboot the machine. If the computer
| booted up and you could successfully get back to that folder,
| everyone else had to take a drink. If not, you had to finish your
| drink and then reinstall Windows.
| zfxfr wrote:
| I wonder about the random part.. How did you achieve this ?
| Dice or something ? Be cause even with basic knowledge of the
| system it would have been easy (for a while) to delete only
| useless files.. It's a very original drinking game !
| mattigames wrote:
| The Windows CMD shell contains a built-in variable called
| %RANDOM% that can be used to generate random numbers.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| We weren't this sober. If I recall we just went into
| details view, held the down arrow, until someone yelled
| stop.
| nakts wrote:
| Doing that in 2022 with machines from back in high school would
| be a true test of patience
| samwillis wrote:
| I really feel this need be a YouTube series, "Hot Ones" style,
| while interviewing interesting people in tech.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Contrary to the sibling comment I absolutely adore this idea! I
| am definitely doing this sometime with my friends next time I
| can get them to come over to my place!
| whichdan wrote:
| My gut reaction was "wow that sounds boring" but then I reread
| it and realized I would have absolutely been excited about this
| in high school.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It was mostly a side attraction while we played Smash Bros or
| whatnot. But the best part is watching a super drunk person
| trying to install windows. It was hilarious.
| rayiner wrote:
| Or watching a straight to DVD sequel of starship troopers.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| ...why does this loudly ring a bell? Do I know you?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Was this off of CD-ROM or a stack of floppies? I think 3.11
| was the last of the floppies, but memory is hazy around
| what 95 install media was. Pretty sure 98 was CD, but that
| could be a fun "bonus round" to force an install from
| floppy.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It was a CD, but a really low quality burned CD that we
| eventually scratched the label side on, which stripped
| the data side off with it. So it was eventually hung from
| the ceiling with dental floss. We crossed out "98" with
| marker and wrote in "95", but to be honest, it didn't
| install anything by then.
| hermitdev wrote:
| I know I've installed Win95 off of floppies. Don't recall
| the exact number, but believe it was around 40-50 3.5"
| floppies. It came in a box about the length of a shoe
| box.
| PinkMilkshake wrote:
| It was 13. I only remember because that was when I first
| started learning about computers, and I needed them many
| times. My Mom loved me.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| In high school any excuse to drink with friends was most
| welcome.
|
| We'll, still is, but in high school too.
| oso2k wrote:
| Yeah...it's like Windows version of Jenga. Which piece will
| make the tower crumble?
| gxs wrote:
| Ah, the stuff on HN never ceases to amaze me. This is awesome
| and something my friends and I would have loved to play.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| Lots of things break if you move "C:\Program Files" to a
| different drive (and make it a mountpoint), updates try to RENAME
| from a temporary directory into it, but fails because it's a
| different filesystem instance. IIS used to also kernel panic in
| this case.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Can I use this thread about Windows to vent a bit? I don't use
| Windows but what a gigantic clusterfuck of a turd. Mother in law
| now wants "two monitors instead of one". Whatever... I took a PC
| with Windows 8.1, bought a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter (GPU has
| got two output but her monitors are only HDMI) and it's kinda ok
| but then "Windows 8.1 support expires on 2023-jan-10". OK, let's
| buy Windows 11. I try to install Windows 11, had to create a boot
| disk or something (because why not) using Ventoy in wich I put
| the Windows _.iso_ (just dd 'ing the .iso as with Linux won't be
| sufficient apparently) and I happily launch the install. Hardware
| not supported by Windows 11.
|
| OK, I'll give my mom in law my AMD 3700X and install Windows 11
| on that one instead (and I'll buy myself a 7700X). Same thing: _"
| Hardware not supported by Windows 11'_. WTF. That 3700X is a
| recent machine. And the error message it totaly uninformative: it
| just says _" hardware not supported"_.
|
| Well, good thing a few years ago I made her switch her SME to
| Google Workspace / GSuite only. She and her employees are doing
| everything from the paid version of GSuite (something like 50 EUR
| / employee per year).
|
| Guess what's installing atm on that 3700X for my mother in law?
| Ubuntu.
|
| I dd'ed the .iso and the install starts just fine.
|
| It's insane: you _want_ to give 145 EUR to Microsoft for their
| ad-ridden and keylogger infested spyware of an OS but they don 't
| let you. Unhelpful error message. Instead of saying what is not
| supported, they just say: _" Hardware not supported"_.
|
| So now it's going to be Ubuntu everywhere at her little SME and
| OS X laptops for when they're on the go.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Hint: you gotta enable TPM
|
| This is the first result when you google Windows 11
| requirements. https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
|
| All the rest of your complains boil down to being upset that
| Microsoft doesn't support old stuff forever... guess how long
| old versions of Ubuntu are supported? (Hint it's not forever)
|
| Also I could be wrong but pretty sure windows 8 still gets a
| free upgrade to Windows 10/11. They don't advertise it, but the
| licensing server still accepts old licenses.
|
| Also if you want you basically can do the iso onto a usb...
| bombela wrote:
| But the error message is completely optuse. How can you be so
| sure it's because of the TPM? The message says nothing but
| fuck you user.
|
| Also modern version of Ubuntu (and linux distribution in
| general) have no issues on decade old hardware (I have a
| couple machines that old).
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