State of the Windows: What is going on with Windows 11?

Summary

Hi! Long time no see, huh? 🙂 It’s been three years since my last State of the Windows article, which was about the inconsistencies in the Windows 11 user experience. Since then, Microsoft (and the world as a whole to be quite honest) has gotten through a lot of changes, especially since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and in our case, most importantly, Microsoft Copilot. Until a few years ago, Windows was Microsoft’s crown jewel (or as they said in the Windows 7 commercial, the heartbeat of Microsoft), an impressive operating system that had the purpose to be a common platform for all devices. However, since the launch of Windows 11, which at first had the purpose to somewhat modernize the look and feel of the OS, it seems that priorities have changed quite a bit. Today we are going to talk about the perceived drop of quality in Windows, from fundamental issues like critical bugs and incidents from the last 3 years to how everything’s become a Copilot upsell funnel mechanism. So, without further ado, let’s go! First, let’s talk about the current, show-stopping errors that appeared with the latest January 2026 update, and how to fix them. 1. PCs that wouldn’t shutdown – January 2026. This is one of the bugs that I’ve actually encountered a few days ago at work – people would come in saying that their PCs would either act unresponsive after shutting down (as in, they wouldn’t start up again the next day), or it would reboot immediately after shutting down. This issue was introduced with the January 2026 update, KB5073455 and it is more prominent on newer platforms, especially Intel’s Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake. Reportedly this issue is caused by the System Guard Secure Launch, a virtualization-based security component which, as the name implies, protects the boot process by using DRTM, or Dynamic Root of Trust for Measurement. More information about this technology can be found here. Since last Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released a patch for this issue, KB5077797,...