Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste (theregister.com)

63 pointsby Alephinitesimal2 hours ago27 comments

xvxvx 2 hours ago

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

baal80spam an hour ago

> in QA

No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026

ainar-g an hour ago

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

xvxvx an hour ago

I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.

kenhwang an hour ago

For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.

Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.

WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.

Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.

alphager 39 minutes ago

Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).

noisem4ker an hour ago

Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.

</meta>

hacker_homie 41 minutes ago

I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.

The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.

At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.

nickjj 21 minutes ago

What kind of research did you do?

I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.

Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.

I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.

It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.

gib444 an hour ago

> issues should have been discovered in QA

Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!

xvxvx an hour ago

That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.

moepstar an hour ago

> remote access and pasting issues

And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...

mikestew 33 minutes ago

it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.

You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.

(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to.)

EvanAnderson 29 minutes ago

> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.

They were. QA is paying Customers now.

Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.

xlayn 26 minutes ago

Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that

(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...

doron 18 minutes ago

but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!

taviso an hour ago

A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.

htrp 2 hours ago

> "The paste operation might fail silently," according to Microsoft.

> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."

How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?

cube00 2 hours ago

Similar behaviour here:

> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.

> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."

This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.

yukIttEft an hour ago

There is not a single component in Windows that is not riddled with bugs, its infuriating.

I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/05/satya-nadell...

markus_zhang an hour ago

The culture of QA sailed off like 10-15 years ago I think.

PowerElectronix an hour ago

Sounds like Microsoft, yes.

bakugo 30 minutes ago

I keep hearing about how software development is a solved problem in the age of AI... and then reality hits, like we see here.

tencentshill an hour ago

They must have forgotten to prompt "bug-free and make no mistakes". It happens to the best of us.

al_borland 44 minutes ago

Also, “maintain all existing functionality.”

I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.

everyone an hour ago

MS is forcing everyone to vibe code right? Like they utterly fucked Minecraft with many baffling bugs fairly recently afaik.

tylerchilds an hour ago

Ty here from Sillyz.Computer pointing out once again, software authorship is and has always been political and not technical.

AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.

The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.