Chipp.in Tech News and Reviews

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?