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Thanks Fred, that’s useful to know.

As far as I am concerned, I’m happy to stick to 23H2 as long as possible, these differences are not really worth the hassle of updating to me (and probably to a large portion of users too):

1. AI-Powered Features for Copilot+ PCs => entirely useless, especially without a Copilot+ PC;

2. 2. Support for Emerging Technologies => likely useful only to a handful of users using these Wi-Fi 7 and/or Bluetooth LE Audio, but at least good to have for the future;

3. System Performance and Efficiency Enhancements => I will believe in these only when I see them;

4. User Experience Improvements => these are by far going to be the most disruptive changes, I already foresee headaches trying to restore UI and other stuff they are going to change to the currently optimum settings…

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Fred

Thanks, this seems to be what I need to finally manage updates to Edge manually!

Now we only need to figure out what’s causing certain MS Store apps to auto-update even when the relevant setting in Store app is turned off…

Have those two options disabled since ages, but Edge always autoupdated itself…

Same here, it’s several weeks now that I’ve noticed several Microsoft Store apps updating without my consent on my Windows 10 Home system, while it seems this does not happen on my Windows 11 Pro system. I only use a local account on both systems, both have automatic Store updates set to off in MS Store and I have even enabled the toggle in WUMgr to disable automatic updates for store apps, but I keep noticing some of these are somehow auto-updating on W10. No “updater” software is enabled on either system either.

Any ideas how to stop this automatic updating behavior? At this stage I’m going to remove all Store apps that are on my machine: most are the junk that comes with any regular Windows installation and I never install new apps from the MS Store anyway, but I’d prefer to avoid a total purge of the MS Store apps (at the very least Notepad and Calculator come in handy from time to time).

But I do have a question/comment about the next-to-last page of your article where several reviews are given. I note that Norton and McAfee are both mentioned more than once. My training is that these should be avoided because they are “memory hogs.” Perhaps the recommending folks are not really unbiased??

Exactly what I was thinking about. Also, an AV product from Avast is among the recommendations, but Avast was at the center of controversy a few years ago over sales of customers’ data they apparently made to third parties and it was recent news Avast is facing a huge fine at the FTC for those sale. As such, if I’m not to trust Kaspersky after they apparently admitted getting hacked, I’m not trusting Avast either because my data isn’t safe with them too.

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ernie

If that’s the case, it probably means I can probably uninstall without ill consequences? At this stage, unless there is feedback from other users, I will uninstall and report what happens.

Well, that might be an explanation if your Home edition hasn’t received that, but since you mention it’s a UK install then it is possible that you are not seeing it because this app is “targeted” to users in the EEA (and UK is not – no longer? – part of the EEA as far as I recall).

Just noticed that the Start Experiences App was apparently pushed to my machine at the same time as a Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime update, don’t know if there is any connection.

Updated 1 x Win11 Pro 23H2 machine with August CU (KB5041585), .NET Framework update, .NET 6 update, .NET .8 update and MSRT v5.127 without issues, except the minor annoyance that the system rebooted twice during installation, first time upon reaching 30% as usual, second time upon reaching 96% (no, I did not accidentally allow the system to reboot before any of the updates had finished installing).

Updated 1 x Win10 Home 22H2 machine with August CU (KB5041580), .NET Framework update, .NET 6 update and MSRT v5.127 without issues at all, system rebooted only once upon reaching 30% installation.

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jburk07

Well, apparently the (only) other option is to simply let Windows install the August updates. If you have already done so (or once you do that) you can entirely avoid any complication in order to disable IPv6. That said, Susan’s instructions at the top of this thread are very simple to follow and should be understandable by anyone with the bare minimum knowledge of Windows to disable IPv6.

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rc primak

Guess the most important thing to take note is that attackers need physical access to a vulnerable PC in order to exploit this vulnerability, which is probably what a lot of home/consumer users need to know to stop worrying.

Other than that, looks like I dodged the bullet this time: my latest Intel 13th gen custom build uses an Asus board with an AMI bios and the older Intel 6th gen build is installed on a board also equipped with an AMI bios.

BTW, I’m not entirely sure from reading the article whether Intel 6th gen (Skylake) CPUs are affected at all. In one passage, it is mentioned that the vulnerability applies to the last ten generations of Intel CPUs, implying Skylake would be “safe”: is this correct and does it mean that a system running a Skylake CPU off a board equipped with a Phoenix UEFI bios is not vulnerable?

Just finished installing May updates on my Windows 11 Pro 23H2 machine and everything appears to be still running properly.

I have yet to check if the May CU fixed that lingering issue from Explorer.exe throwing errors on shutdown on those systems with a xbox controller plugged in: the errors stopped after disabling the GameInput Service and I’m yet to test by re-enabling that service. Incidentally, the controller works just fine with the GameInput Service disabled, so I might just leave it disabled and forget about the whole problem.

Looking forward to those instructions on how to block those lock screen ‘widgets’ on Windows 11: totally don’t need widgets on my PC.

I remember Altavista from far more years back than I’d like to think about! Still, I seem to also remember that I mostly used Yahoo back in the day. Today, I’m sticking to DuckDuckGo on every browser and device.

Just in case this might be of interest to anyone here, it appears that the issue on systems with an xbox controller causing the Explorer.exe crash bug from a couple of months ago also affects the Win11 April CU. Users on reddit report that the bug was apparently fixed in the March Preview, but still happens with the regular April CU if the gameinput service is enabled and running.

Thanks Bob, just noticed the Copilot app got installed with the Edge update on my Windows 11 Pro 22H2 machine and I promptly got rid of that thing.

I use Firefox as my browser and keep Edge as a second browser for ‘backup’ (i.e. in case some site does not load in Firefox), but if that Copilot app gets re-installed whenever Edge updates I will take steps to uninstall Edge entirely and install an entirely different browser to serve as backup.

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LH, NaNoNyMouse