Category: Software

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the price that organizations have to pay to extend Windows 10 support after October 2025. What Microsoft did not say was how much consumers will have to pay to keep their Windows 10 systems supported.

The Windows 10 operating system will reach end of support in October 2025. This means, that Microsoft won’t release security updates or any other form of update for the operating system after end of support.

There is a way out though. Extended Security Updates allow organizations and home users to continue using a patched system. Microsoft established ESU when its Windows 7 operating system ran out of support in 2020. Organizations could extend support by up to three years through extra payments.

To extend Windows 7 support, they had to pay $50, $100, and $200 in the first, second, and third year. Consumers were ignored back then, as Microsoft did not make an Extended Security Updates offer.

Windows 10: extended security updates

Microsoft announced that Windows 10 would also get Extended Security Updates. Unlike Windows 8, which ran out in 2023 and did not receive any, Windows 10 is widely used.

It is the most used Windows operating system today and hundreds of millions of users will still use it in the second half of 2025.

Extended Security Updates are available for organizations and consumers this time.

Microsoft announced the price that organizations have to pay yesterday. The company bumped the price significantly to $61, $122, and $244 respectively. Summed up, it means that organizations have to pay $427 to extend Windows 10 for three years for a single machine.

Other options are available, but they depend on the use of update management systems or Microsoft 365.

And consumers?

No information was provided. Price and conditions are unclear. Microsoft provided the following comment:

Final pricing and enrolment conditions will be made available closer to the October 2025 date for end of support.

It is almost certain that Microsoft knows the conditions and set the price for extended security updates for consumer machines already.

Keeping customers in the dark may give Windows 11 a push. Most Windows 10 customers are probably unaware of ESU and that the option will become available in 2025.

These may update their machines to Windows 11, if compatible, or even buy a new PC with Windows 11 as a consequence.

If Microsoft would tell them now that they could extend support for their current machine by up to three years, for this much, it would certainly slow down Windows 11 adoption further.

Consumer pricing is a wildcard. Clearly, Microsoft won’t charge consumers more than it charges organizations. Apart from that, anything is possible. From doubling the price each year or a fixed sum per year, to linking ESU to a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Would you pay for extended security updates for Windows 10? If so, what is your limit?

When Microsoft released Windows 10 in 2015, it introduced the new Settings app. Back then, Microsoft said that the app would replace the ancient Control Panel in the future.

And so it began. The initial version of Settings lacked many options that the Control Panel offered. Users and administrators had to juggle between the two to configure Windows.

While Microsoft moved some sections to the Settings app in the years that followed, the Control Panel is still going strong in 2024.

Take the “uninstall a program” option in the Control Panel. It is far superior to the “all apps” section of the Settings app. It features a table that lists more information and is fully sortable. It offers eight different views: five more than what the Settings app offers.

The Control Panel offers 38 different configuration options in the latest version of Windows 11. If Microsoft continues the snail-like pace, it may take very well until 2035 and Windows 15 before everything has been moved over.

The juggling between Control Panel and Settings app is just one of the issues that users may experience.

Is there any order in the Settings app?

The Settings app displays categories in a sidebar on the left. The main pane lists the configuration pages of the active category.

The order seems random in both panes. The sidebar begins with Home, System, and Bluetooth & devices. Apps is found after Personalization, and Windows Update at the very end. Maybe it is the most popular options that you find nearer to the top, but is Bluetooth & devices really more popular than Personalization?

Similarly, when you open a category, you get an unordered list of pages. System lists Display, Sound, and Notifications at the top.

Apart from that, you may also sometimes have trouble finding something. All Start and taskbar settings are found under Personalization, but when you want to enable scroll bars for all windows, you have to visit Accessibility to do that. There, you also find the option to change the mouse pointer or text size.

Nearby sharing is found under System, even though it might fit better under Network & Internet, or Bluetooth & devices.

A search is provided, which is helpful, provided that you know the name of the setting. Type “mouse”, and you get every setting related to the term.

Microsoft could introduce sorting options or favorites to improve accessibility.

All Settings is awol

The Settings app offers no list of all settings that it contains. It would be useful to get a full list, especially if it could be sorted by name.

Unless you really know the Settings app, it may simply take too long to find something. Search is useful to a degree, but if your search term is too broad, you get lots of results.

Closing Words

It is time for Windows to get a central location for settings. The current state of the Settings app is lacking, especially when it comes to finding a specific page.

What is your take on the Settings app? Do you still use the Control Panel?

If you share a Windows PC with others, you may have noticed that users may appear as signed in after you log in to the operating system. A click on the Start button and another click on the user profile icon may reveal this.

Should not Windows sign out users when the system is shut down? Windows used to to this prior to the release of the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10.

When you shut down Windows then, all users were signed out automatically. You may have gotten a prompt reminding you that users were still signed in, but you could shut down the system and all signed in users were signed out as part of the process.

This changed with the release of the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10 in 2017. All Windows releases since then behave in the same way, including Windows 11.

Microsoft’s explanation for the feature

Updates for Windows require user specific processes that need to run before the installation of the update completes. These require that users are signed-in.

Previously, users had to wait for the completion of these processes after update installations.

Winlogon automatic restart sign-on is the official name of the feature introduced in the Fall Creators Update. Microsoft describes what it does in the following way:

When Windows Update initiates an automatic reboot, ARSO extracts the currently logged in user’s derived credentials, persists it to disk, and configures Autologon for the user. Windows Update running as system with TCB privilege initiates the RPC call.

In other words: Windows copies the current user’s credentials, copies them to disk and enables automatic sign-in for the user. The user will be signed in automatically after the final update reboot. The device is locked to protect the user’s session.

Managed and unmanaged devices are treated differently. Managed devices need TPM 2.0, SecureBoot, and BitLocker. Device encryption is used on unmanaged devices, but it is not a requirement.

How to sign out all users on shutdown in Windows

Microsoft introduced a new option in the Fall Creators Update that triggers the functionality. It is enabled by default.

Here is how you change the behavior on Windows 11:

1. Select Start and then Settings.
2. Go to Accounts.
3. Select Sign-in options.
4. Scroll down to “additional settings”.
5. Toggle “Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up after an update” to Off.

The path is slightly different on Windows 10 devices. You need to go to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options instead. There you find the preference under Privacy.

All users are signed out when the system is shut down from that moment forward.

Group Policy

You may also make the change to the configuration using the Group Policy Editor (not on Home editions, and requires Windows 10 version 1903 or newer):

1. Open Start.
2. Type gpedit.msc and load the Group Policy Editor result.
3. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows sign in Options.
4. Double-click on Sign-in and lock last interactive user automatically after a restart.
5. Set the policy to Disabled.
6. Close the Group Policy Editor.
7. Restart the PC.

Registry

You can also make the change in the Registry. This works on Home editions as well:

1. Open Start.
2. Type regedit.exe and select the Registry Editor result.
3. Confirm the UAC prompt with “yes”.
4. Go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
5. If the Dword DisableAutomaticRestartSignOn does not exist, do the following:
   • Right-click on System and select New > Dword (32-bit) Value.
   • Name it DisableAutomaticRestartSignOn.
6. Double-click on DisableAutomaticRestartSignOn and set its value to 1 to disable the feature.
7. Restart the PC.

Microsoft continues to enhance Notepad, the plain text editor of the Windows operating system. After adding features such as tabs, auto saves, or text formatting to Notepad, it is now testing spellchecking support.

The latest version of Notepad, version 11.2402.18.0, includes the functionality. It is available in the Canary and Dev development channels only. Not all testers get the feature right away, as Microsoft is — once again — rolling it out gradually to users. It can very well take weeks or months before a particular feature reaches all testers.

Microsoft describes the functionality on the Windows Insider Blog:

With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes. We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typing mistakes as you type.

Notepad Spellchecking

Microsoft notes that misspelled words are highlighted automatically by the editor. They appear in red. A click or tap on the word or phrase displays spelling suggestions. The keyboard Shift-F10 does that as well, but it appears less practicable to use.

Select a suggestion with the mouse, by touch, or keyboard, and it takes up the place of the misspelled word.

An option to add words to the dictionary is provided. This is useful if a word is spelled correctly but marked as misspelled by Notepad. There are also options to ignore words in a single document.

Spell checking is enabled for some file types only. For others, including log files and some files used for coding, it is turned off. Options to change the behavior are available in the settings.

AI or not?

Microsoft makes no mention of AI in the Windows Insider blog. The spell checking feature seems to run locally on the system. I cannot test it, thanks to Microsoft’s habit of rolling out features over a long period of time.

It looks to be a local feature that checks words using a local dictionary. Again, I could not confirm this at this stage.

Closing Words

Spell checking is a useful feature, even for a plain text editor like Notepad. Users who do not need it can turn the feature off in the settings.

With Wordpad deprecated, it looks as if Microsoft is putting the focus on Notepad. While it is not a full replacement, it is now getting features that Wordpad never supported.

Notepad is one of the few native Windows apps that I use regularly. What about you?

Microsoft released the Windows 11 update KB5035942 earlier this week. The update for the Windows 11 Release Preview channel includes several new features. One of them is that widgets may now be displayed on the lock screen.

Wait a minute, was not this just introduced already? Yes and no. The Windows 10 update KB5035941 for the operating system’s Release Preview channel introduced the change as well. It was released prior to the Windows 11 update, making it one of the rare occasions that Windows 10 got a feature earlier than Windows 11. Prior in this case means a few days earlier, but it is still remarkable enough to mention it.

Here is what Microsoft says about the addition of widgets on Windows 11’s lock screen:

New! This update adds more content to your lock screen. In addition to weather, sports, traffic, and finance content will appear. To turn on this feature, go to Settings > Personalization > Lock screen. Note this feature might not be available to all users because it will roll out gradually.

The lock screen cards display at the bottom of the display. They offer weather, finance, traffic, and sports information when enabled. The information appears to be similar to the content that Windows 11’s Widgets Board provides.

Windows Lock Screen Widgets

It appears, from Microsoft’s description at least, that users need to turn on the cards actively before they become available. This is done under Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen. Could change in the future.

Like the Windows 10 version, it is an all or nothing setting. Either you enable the feature and get all four cards on the lock screen, or you keep it disabled and get none. There is no option to select just some of the cards for display on the lock screen.

Since Microsoft pushed the new feature to Release Preview machines, it is only a matter of time before the change lands in stable versions as well.

It could be as early as on the April 2024 Patch Day for Windows 11, which is going to be on April 9, 2024.

Closing Words

It is up to each individual user of the operating system to decide whether lock screen cards are a useful feature. If you ask me, I have no use for it, but I do not really use the lock screen for anything other than to sign in.

Now You: what about you?

A new version of WingetUI, a universal UI for package managers, is now available. WingetUI 3.0 features a fully redesigned interface that the developers promise is more responsive and visually pleasing.

Packages should load faster under in the new version, and the application’s package importing and exporting functionality has also been improved.

You can check out my review of WingetUI to find out more about the software. Only this much: the app gives you access to several popular package managers, including winget, but also others such as Chocolatey. You may use these to install new programs on Windows machines, upgrade installed programs, and also uninstall applications.

These operations work in batch mode or for individual apps.

Note: the application will be renamed to UnigetUI in the future. This is done to reflect that it supports multiple package managers and not just winget.

WingetUI 3.0

The latest version of the open source tool requires .NET 8. Missing components will get installed on Windows machines during installation.

The new interface looks different when compared to the old. The main access points were moved from the top to the sidebar. There you find the options to discover packages, view installed packages and package bundles, check software updates, and more.

Some sections displays filters when opened. When you launch discovery, which you use to find new apps, you get a list of filters to customize the output. These allow you to change the search mode and filter by package manager.

It still takes just a couple of clicks to install one or multiple applications. The assortment of optional actions does not appear to have changed and is still displayed at the top. You may use them to install apps as an administrator or skip integrity checks. These may still look confusing to new users, as only a few have text labels. You may hover over them to get a tooltip though.

One of the best features of winget, and thus also WingetUI, is the ability to upgrade all supported applications at once. WingetUI checks for updates on launch and displays all of them in the update section.

Closing Words

The new version of WingetUI worked well during tests. It had a slight display problem on a laptop that used the recommended 200% scaling. If you check the screenshot, you will notice that the sidebar’s scrollbar overlaps it slightly.

Other than that, it worked well during tests. You may still use winget for all the operations, but this requires running commands from Terminal. Also, you do not get extra access to other package managers and tools.

In closing, WingetUI 3.0 improves the application further without taking anything away from it. You can download the latest version from the project’s GitHub repository.