Almost nine gigabytes in size: Windows update 24H2 creates an undeletable cache file

Hi. Microsoft employee here. That's happening because we don't give a shit and we are being replaced by folks from India

I hope you're having an amazing day! I am a windows fan and user, just like YOU! I will do my very best to help you solve your issue. I know you have had a bad experience and it must have been very hard for you. But rest assured, i will help you to the BEST of my ability!

Please try running the troubleshooter.

(troubleshooter doesn't fix anything)

Try reinstalling windows. Goodbye!

And then they fuck off and stop reponding.
- This is every forum response on MS forums, it’s infuriating.
  
  “I have super specific error code with super specific driver that was changed with super specific windows update.”
  
  “Me too!”
  
  “Same, here’s some more info from event viewer”
  
  “Maybe try uninstalling the device”
  
  “Uninstall my WiFi card?”
  
  “Hi I’m bob from Microsoft you should run sfc scan now and that will fix it”
  
  “That didn’t fix it”
  
  “Ok here’s how to reinstall windows”
- It's better than the Linux Mint support forums that blocks VPN users and the power users just deny that they're blocking VPN users.
Also try SFC /scannow
- And then try DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Scanhealth and DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth that'll get rid of the 9GB file for sure. If not, reinstall everything again and again and again.
- Does it fix anything btw? I'm just wondering how it does work after all
As former MSFT employee who just got replaced by India... I'm kind of relieved I'm gone. Working for them felt like working for the bad guys
- What did you expect? That corps would solve climate change or what?
  
  The pigs on the very top are secured and that's enough
As someone working in the Microsoft ecosystem at an MSP, we seriously wonder what the fuck goes on over there. We’re supposed to defend everything y’all do which is getting really hard to justify without sounding like idiots.
- Hey there. Learn how to stop carrying. A job doesn't define who you are and you're at least free to be anyone outside the working hours.
  
  I learned to be a cog in this inhumane machine in exchange for a paycheck
Won't someone please think of the investors...!
- If you dive into who owns Microsoft, you'd be very surprised

This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

I’m honestly waiting for a crowdstrike level BSOD from one of their updates at some point. At that level, corporations would recover in the same way they did from crowdstrike, but consumers who didn’t understand how to roll back, or restore from backup, restore windows, etc would be livid and hopefully it would create some awareness on better understanding and control of the products you buy and use
- Microsoft has largely mitigated this concern by pushing all their fresh updates to the consumers for testing before pushing them to their sensitive business customers.
- Except most of those people who don't know enough to recover most likely also use the default "all your data are belong to OneDrive" and thus won't lose absolutely everything and no one group of livid people will both be livid enough and big enough at the same time for a lot to change...
They also released an update that broke dual boot Linux installations. Still feeling that one
- Oh right! Forgot about that one! FOUR major screw ups.
- They've done that periodically for years.
  
  I don't dual boot anymore but when I did I kept each installation on a separate hard drive for that reason.
Remember the dozens of times a Windows 10 update could potentially wipe your personal data?
- Your files are EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT THEM
Part of my job is keeping all of the endpoints my work manages up to date with patch compliance. I've had to create exceptions for the past two windows 11 updates because they won't run on most machines for no reason. It's been a pain in the ass. I can't just add the machines to the exception list without doing basic troubleshooting because "procedure" and I've spent so much time doing absolutely unnecessary shit.
I have avoided Win 11 by disabling TPM in BIOS. Because I expect MS would eventually figure out some way to install 11 otherwise.
- Just so you know, if your UEFI isn't password protected, Windows can change settings in there. I haven't heard of that ever happening but I wouldn't be surprised if it would some day.
That's not even counting the ones that make your user experience worse on purpose
I'd say they started the misstepping after they "fixed" Vista with windows 7. After that, they tried to hard instead of slow rolling. Windows 10 was good but 11 is just....windows 8 again.
- Windows ME was the original mistake edition. It was terrible.
- Windows has always had broken versions. The old advice was to always skip every other version.
  
  NT, Millennium, Vista, 8... 10... 11... More misses than hits really. And the bad updates are turning hits into misses.

Nothing that cannot be fixed by a Linux install.

For personal computing, sure. For enterprise environment, eh not really.
- With the amount of money corporations and governments have spent on Microsoft — the last decade alone — they could have filled the gaps in linux and the annual cost for ITSM would be significantly cheaper. Instead they've spent more and have grown far more dependent on proprietary software, they don't own or control, to manage their core business ops and data; the longer their dependence on SaaS, the more they'll pay.
- The only (larger) enterprises that insist "we depend on Windows" are those with shitty corporate IT :)
- Yes corpo IT doesn't have the skills other than buy the easiest options and raise tickets to vendors.
  
  Those people choose to live the techno-dystopia for the sheer convenience of it.
  
  They will just copy whatever the rest of the industry does.
- Or if you're into online gaming.
  
  I have to fend off linux nerds with a bat. The bottom line is "that's cool and all but there are a lot of things that I can't do with linux and I'm not willing to make that big of a change"
Man, I've been trying to migrate to Linux as my daily driver desktop over the last week. I love Linux passionately. But multi-monitor and 2.5Gb/s NIC support is just a disaster, basically to the point of completely unusable. It's so frustrating. It keeps pushing me back to Windows, because Windows just works when it comes to hardware.
- those are two of the easiest features to support.
  
  what distro is giving you trouble?
- For multi-monitor: use Wayland. For 2.5Gbps Ethernet NICs, they never work properly on any system in regard to performance, but I presume you are referencing the subpar Realtek NICs not connecting? Depending on the distro, you likely won't have the driver and/or firmware package preinstalled to make it work.
- I run two multimonitor systems with different DPIs and 2.5gbe and they both run great. What issues are you hitting?
- Multi monitor issues are purely on your distro - and are pretty easy to fix. At least for me on arch and bspwm (I haven't touched a Debian based install or full DE in years), setup was as easy as making my randr script run when my WM starts up, I imagine it's even easier with a full DE.
  
  For 2.5 gb/s internet... I've never run into any problems or even had to configure anything. Fresh barebones arch install with lan, 2.5 gb/s out of the box. If you're getting less (my guess is 1 gb/s?) it's almost certainly a hardware issue (motherboard/network card is only 1 gb/s, port on router and/or switch is 1 gb/s, etc)
  
  If you're having trouble with something, I highly recommend searching for the problem after checking a relevant wiki (archwiki is an awesome resource if you're on arch). If you're having issues you can't find problems to, feel free to shoot me a message and I'll try to help you out. I'm no expert, but I've been exclusively on Linux for 3 years (since I graduated and no longer was required to be on windows at all) and haven't run into any issues that I didn't find a relatively easy fix for)
This is very true. I remember back in the day I tossed my old drive full of viruses and windows and I started using Linux. That was 1998? No, it was definitely 2000 already. That was a really easy erase. I guess you could also just reuse the same drive. But that one has the click of death, so no.

All this shit is because some exec had a revelation that windows didn't need QA anymore.

There was a former employee that talked about it, they moved from actually testing on real hardware to automated VM testing and started missing a lot more
That's the most generous interpretation

You could fit an entire modern OS in that space, together with all the drivers, a web browser, an office suite, graphics editor, an IDE and a compatibility layer for running Windows applications.

Yup, my Linux install is a bit over 10GB, which honestly surprises me and means I probably should clean stuff up, because usually my Linux base install is around 8GB. After a quick look, I have several old versions of compilers and runtimes that can be cleaned up w/o breaking anything.

I can't imagine thinking that an 8GB cache is fine, and that's nothing compared to the size of the rest of the OS...

Wasn’t this reported as being a result of the preview build?

It was released. Did you read the article?
Yeah, but don't get in the way of the Windows evil, Linux savior movement here on lemmy or you'll get downvoted to oblivion. Pointing out simple facts apparently means you're a shill.

At least that's what I've seen in all the Windows posts over the last couple months. Not sure what changed from before that, but something definitely did.
- Not sure what changed from before that, but something definitely did.
  
  People got fed up with Microsoft putting undeletable 9-gigabyte cache files on their systems? And AI junk that screenshots everything you do? And surveillance? And making the OS more hostile and worse in general with every release?
  
  Lemmy exists because people got fed up with the corporate analogue. You'll see a lot of the same sentiment in other matters too.
- Yeah, but
  
  Actually no, but don't let either of you failing to read the article get in the way of making your smug little screed.
- 1 downvote so far
- Pathetic, try again

Linux Mint. You are welcome.

After trying Zorin and having a host of issues, I'm slowly replacing that dual boot option with Mint. Excited to give it a shot.
i installed a dual boot for mint a little bit bac and just recently wiped out my windows boot partition. could not be happier. nobody try to sell me on any other distros I'm still figuring out what a wayland is
- Mint is absolutely awesome, I hope you enjoy.
  
  If you ever get annoyed at it and want to try something else, you know where to find us. :)
How is fractional scaling on Mint? On Ubuntu 24.04 it's really crap (slow, blurry, flickering cursor, weird artifacts etc)
- That depends on the DE, not the distro.
- I'm honestly not sure as I don't have a display where I need to worry about that.

Hold my beer while I boot to linux.

buT sToRAgE iS cHeaP!!11!1!

I mean, having windows in your cache is already bad luck

Reading all this makes me sad; and I’m relieved to have switched to Mac years ago…

Me when I move from cheap spyware to premium spyware.
Yeah, I've been avoiding this stuff the past few months by only letting my laptop online for quick essentials things. It's windows, I can't replace it with a mac so it's gotta be linux. Most online stuff I can do on my phone. But I can't put it off forever; I'm going to have to try the linux dual boot thing sooner or later. I've been putting it off because I've not used linux since the 90s and I really don't have time to re-learn. Gotta be done tho.

Edit - your semicolon inspired me to try one of my own!
- Linux is a lot, lot, lot easier to use now than the 90s.
- Just a warning, Windows doesn't always play nice when installed on the same drive as Linux. If you have two drives, try installing them on different ones. If not, there's a risk that a Windows update can mess some things up. Usually it's fine, just I've had issues with it and so have others.
  
  Anyway, Linux is really easy now. I would recommend something with KDE, like the Fedora KDE spin as an example. KDE is very familiar to Windows users, though very customizable if you want too. It should be a very easy transition, as long as you go in not expecting it to be identical to Windows. You have to meet it where it is, which does require relearning a few things.
  
  If you have questions feel free to ask. There's also plenty of other users on Lemmy who would be happy to help.
- I never used linux and was surprised how easy and almost seamless the transiton was.
- dual boot is very simple and stable, I've been using Ubuntu / windows 10 for years after following a 10-minute YouTube video and basically only switch over to windows for games.
  
  It's a great setup overall If there are some windows applications you prefer or are more convenient.
- I have nothing to add to this conversation, but properly used semicolons always make me smile.