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Microsoft broke Windows Update on Windows 7 (again)
Jul 4, 2025 · original
Earlier this week, users of Legacy Update started reporting errors when checking for updates on Windows 7. The most common variant of this is error 80728015 when checking for updates. That error code is documented with the message: An operation did not complete because the registration of the service has expired. Interesting - “registration” of “services” usually relates to Microsoft Update, which extends Windows Update (the naming is terrible, I know) with the ability to receive updates beyond just Windows itself, including updates for Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, and SQL Server, as well as free software offers such as Windows Search, Microsoft Security Essentials, and Microsoft Edge. Rather than an error code, some users instead got a very misleading error dialog: Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your com
What is going on with Windows Update and drivers?
Jun 28, 2025 · original
Just wanted to write up some thoughts about Microsoft’s recent announcement that old drivers will be removed from Windows Update. The short version of it is that “legacy drivers that have newer replacements” will soon be hidden from Windows Update, and in 6 months’ time, depending how the industry responds to this, they may be fully deleted. As you might imagine , that “legacy” keyword has brought some curious questions my way. There is some real ambiguity to what Microsoft is trying to do here. Here is how I understand the timeline of what will be happening with drivers. This is only my interpretation, and I can be wrong about any or all of this. At some point in the near future, Microsoft will perform a soft deprecation of all versions other than the latest of each driver, such that they are no longer offered in WSUS as an option to deploy to devices. The drivers will likely still be a
Making sense of the Windows NT 4.0 Start menu banner claims
Jul 24, 2024 · original
Dave Plummer, a former Windows engineer who you may know from his YouTube channel Dave’s Garage, recently tweeted the following: If I had a LinkedIn bio, I'd definitely mention that I wrote the Windows Start Menu. Well, the non-resume version is that I wrote the code that custom-paints the Start menu, draws the sideways text, background gradient, and so on. It had been done with a Bitmap in Windows 95, but for WindowsNT that would mean doing it in N languages for V variants of server, workstation, and so on. That would be a lot of bitmaps with text in them. I wanted to render it live. There's probably a way to render text sideways now, but there wasn't at the time. Fortunately, with NT, unlike 9x, you could rotate the device context itself. I'd only been coding for Windows a few months at that point, so it was cool to discover it was even possible. I tried a quick test and it worked! I u
Features controlled by iOS 17.4’s eligibility system
Apr 23, 2024 · original
With massive thanks to plzdonthaxme for helping with research, we now know most of what’s going on with Apple’s feature eligibility system. As a quick recap: The eligibility system works with a file on Apple’s servers that tells iOS which conditions must be met for a country-specific feature to be enabled. They can change this file at any time, and all active iOS devices should apply the update within a few days. You can visit The Apple Wiki article about Eligibility for the most current (and detailed) info, but here’s a summary of what we found: Unless I specifically call it out, all of these features are iPhone-only, and the country requirement applies to both your physical location, and your Apple ID’s country setting. App marketplaces If iOS determines you’re in the European Union, you can install app marketplaces (3rd-party app stores), and install apps offered in them. Or, coming i
How I tricked iOS into giving me EU DMA features
Apr 20, 2024 · original
I’m in Australia, but as far as my iPhone knows, I’m in Italy. How? In iOS 17.4, Apple introduced a new system called eligibilityd . This works with countryd (which you might have heard about when it first appeared in iOS 16.2 ) and the Apple ID system to decide where you physically are. The idea is that multiple sources need to agree on where you are, before giving you access to features such as those mandated by the Digital Markets Act . A plist file downloaded from Apple declares “domains”, which are individual features locked behind a location wall. At the time of writing, there are 24 (although one is missing), and the file was last updated on the 5th of April. We weren’t tracking updates to it before this week, so I don’t know what changed exactly. As a reminder, iOS 17.4 launched on the 5th of March, and was in beta from the 30th of January. Probably to obscure what they are, thes
The iOS 17.4 app marketplace flow is a disaster
Apr 19, 2024 · original
The iOS 17.4 app marketplace flow is a disaster. While AltStore seems to have some problems itself (mostly due to a payment system that seems rushed), the majority of the problems are in Apple’s implementation. App installation has no progress prompts. The app-marketplace:// URL scheme , used by websites to tell iOS to begin installing a marketplace app, displays zero progress. It only has the ability to display error messages, such as telling you you’re not eligible (not located in the EU), or that you need to go to Settings to allow the app to be installed. Naturally, there’s no button that takes you to Settings, nor any explanation of what you do when you’re there. Let’s follow the process of being in an eligible country (currently being any in the European Union), though. In both prompts, the “Learn More” button takes you to this Apple Support article . Once you’re in Settings, a fol
Swift snippet: Get the SF Symbols icon for the user’s Mac
Apr 15, 2023 · original
Starting with the Mac Studio, and continuing with the 2022 and 2023 MacBook Air/Pro, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro, Macs no longer have identifying model names like MacBookPro16,2 or iMac14,2 . Instead, they’re now something like Mac14,9 . Using a simple prefix check to figure out which “class” of Mac the app is running on no longer works. As a new solution, you can query UniformTypeIdentifiers , which holds a comprehensive taxonomy of all PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon Macs released up to the point of the running macOS version. The upside is also that you can find tons of other information on the device, such as the visual design, which works great for picking the right SF Symbol. Here is the result of the below code on my 14″ MacBook Pro with M2 Pro: Really unfortunately, nothing similar seems to exist on iOS. It would have been great to have this considering we now have three m
Doing a respring the right way: Following up
Aug 25, 2019 · original
Respringing the “right way” allows SpringBoard to save battery usage data. Otherwise, the standby/usage times are lost and display useless “–” values until you fully charge again. I originally wrote about this way back in 2013 . What changed since then? Well, seemingly everything! In iOS 8.0, FrontBoard was introduced. Many of SpringBoard’s responsibilities were shifted from SpringBoard itself to the FrontBoard framework, allowing Apple to share SpringBoard code with watchOS and tvOS (which use their own Boards), even macOS . One of the responsibilities of FrontBoard is handling shutting down/restarting the device, and relaunching the system app (SpringBoard in this case). The -[SpringBoard _relaunchSpringBoardNow] method recommended in the 2013 post did still remain for some time, but was finally removed with iOS 9.3. The code isn’t as fun-looking as the old way, but it does give you a
A quick look at UIKit on macOS
Jun 7, 2018 · original
We all saw it coming, and this week, it happened. Apple announced the iOSMac project (a codename — also better known by another codename, Marzipan ), although not in the way we were hoping for… …but what did come in the initial beta of macOS Mojave were some real, working, iOSMac apps. News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos are all iOS apps ported to macOS and included in the initial beta of Mojave. Some of this has already been covered by people faster than me , but I’m posting research from the way I approached this. An effective way to get started investigating new frameworks like this is to review a real use case and work our way through the most obvious things. We’ll look at the simplest of the initial four apps — Voice Memos. Starting with the obvious otool -L shows a list of frameworks the app links against: $ otool -L /Applications/VoiceMemos.app/Contents/MacOS/VoiceMemos VoiceMemos
Using Linux or Windows as a Time Machine network server
Mar 24, 2018 · original
Samba , in its simplest form, is a program for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (via WSL ), etc. that enables you to share storage attached to a server with any other device in the network. It uses the SMB protocol, originally a proprietary protocol designed by Microsoft for sharing files between a Windows server and workstation. Nowadays, SMB is the standard protocol regardless of operating system. macOS’s amazing Time Machine feature can make backups either to a local drive (whether connected externally or internally), or to a network share. Unfortunately, the way Apple has implemented it, not just any network share can be used — the server has to mark it as a Time Machine-capable share. The Samba project recently merged the support necessary for macOS to “see” an SMB shared folder as capable of being a network Time Machine share. That’s the good news. The bad news is that your favorite Linux d

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