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Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Yes... and no.
Microsoft's operating systems have been very hit or miss - certainly their consumer operating systems - with the classic rule being "every other one is decent":
The more business focussed OS's like Windows for Workgroups, NT4, and 2000 were rock solid in fairness.
Their business practices have always been shady as fuck too. Embrace, extend, extinguish is firmly burned into computer hobbyists minds.
XP was the first one that had proper memory protection so that badly written programs would just crash instead of taking down the whole system.
It was a dramatic step forward compared to 98, where you'd be lucky to go a whole day without bluescreening. There's a reason XP hung on for so long. It was the first Windows version that was really good enough for most people.
It was the first commercial version, from the NT line that was user-friendly and capable enough for home users. Prior to that, it was difficult to get games to run on the NT line and permissions were more complicated than most home users wanted to deal with. After that, they were essentially the same product line.