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Windows 11's 2025 Update Arrives (bleepingcomputer.com) 97

Posted by msmash from the new-OS-day dept.
Microsoft began rolling out Windows 11 version 25H2 today, delivering the annual update as a compact enablement package to users who enable the "get the latest updates as soon as they're available" toggle in Windows Update. The company tested the release in its Windows Insider Release Preview ring during the previous month before the broader rollout.Version 25H2 shares its code base and servicing branch with the existing 24H2 release. Both versions will receive identical monthly feature updates going forward.

The update removes PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows Management Instrumentation command-line tool to reduce the operating system's footprint. John Cable, vice president of program management for Windows servicing and delivery, said the release includes advancements in build and runtime vulnerability detection paired with AI-assisted secure coding. Microsoft designed the version to address security threats under its security development lifecycle policy requirements. The company plans to expand availability over the coming months and will document known compatibility issues on its Windows release health hub. Devices with detected application or driver incompatibilities will receive safeguard holds that delay the update until resolution.

Windows 11's 2025 Update Arrives More | Reply

Windows 11's 2025 Update Arrives

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  • Bad decisions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Morromist ( 1207276 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @02:58PM (#65693664)

    So they're removing PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows Management Instrumentation command-line tool to reduce the footprint of the OS but also bringing back video-wallpapers. Great exchange.

    https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09... [ghacks.net]

    • Re:Bad decisions (Score:4, Informative)

      by ambrandt12 ( 6486220 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @03:09PM (#65693702)

      "reduce the footprint"... how much space can both of those require?

      And, both of them are among the most useful things in Windows.
      (I know the *NIX users are going to chime in saying that we should all install *NIX... if it works for you, use it. Some of us use stuff that needs Windows)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        wmic is ~500kb. I suspect this is more a move to push people into powershell that to reduce the footprint.

        It was just way, way to practical and useful a utility for microsoft to just leave alone; and on top of that it takes users away from their sacred cow? Had to be killed.

        • Re:Bad decisions (Score:4, Informative)

          by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @06:24PM (#65694188)

          This is also a really really bad idea, because WMIC can do a lot of things easily that are not so quick and easy in Powershell.

          The other thing is a lot of existing software programs launch WMIC for different purposes And many legacy system management scripts use WMIC. Many admin manuals contain WMIC commands to run for certain tasks.

          It's just stupid to delete a simple vital utility that does what it's supposed to do and has no issues.

          I guess I would be fine with it if Microsoft had first removed WMI Services completely from all variants of Windows several versions ago, so the client would become irrelevent in that case. But as it stands today; wmic is the tried and true method to query certain system attributes such as Windows updates, etc. And it's going to be what every Windows admin already has in their pre-canned scripts, so Microsoft will be creating a ton of unnecessary work for a lot of people now, Or giving another reason to not adopt Windows 11 on the client.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            If that's true then a lot of software was broken a year ago when WMIC became an optional feature, not installed by default.

            Actually you raise a good point about one of the benefits of deprecating it. Old software, and especially old forum posts telling the use to "just copy/paste this into a command prompt" stopped working already, which is probably good because they will have been designed for Windows 7/8 era stuff.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mysidia ( 191772 )

              If that's true then a lot of software was broken a year ago when WMIC became an optional feature, not installed by default.

              Look.. I know of companies that use WMIC commands in their Windows user login script. The commands are used to save some diagnostic info during login and to perform some "System verification checks" - some are for security purposes and a failsafe check to make sure certain options and software is in place and running, before the user can gain access. For example if Windows defender

          • WMI remains, WMIC is nothing more than a tool with commands. 100% of those commands have an alternative in Powershell and WMIC hasn't been part of the default windows install for a while now. Update your scripts, RTFM a couple of times and move on from your legacy cruft.

            • Re:Bad decisions (Score:5, Funny)

              by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @08:55AM (#65695148)

              WMI remains, WMIC is nothing more than a tool with commands. 100% of those commands have an alternative in Powershell and WMIC hasn't been part of the default windows install for a while now. Update your scripts, RTFM a couple of times and move on from your legacy cruft.

              I like how people think it is the users job to snap to and play musical deck chairs with whatever insane non-legacy non-cruft tune the vendors wants you sing this time. It doesn't matter how inconvenienced you are or the cost vs benefit of the changes. What matters is everyone is stupid for failing to switch and failing to realize that some obscure CLI command was deprecated at some point on time.

              Was just looking and I actually use wmic to set RDP certs. The command line went something like this:
              wmic /namespace:\\root\cimv2\TerminalServices PATH Win32_TSGeneralSetting Set SSLCertificateSHA1Hash="..."

              Totally sane, obvious and rational command to begin with. I'm sure whatever the powershell replacement is will be equally sane, obvious and rational. While it isn't worth my time to look it up I'll do it anyway.

              Get-WmiObject -class "Win32_TSGeneralSetting" -Namespace root\cimv2\terminalservices | Set-WmiInstance -Arguments @{SSLCertificateSHA1Hash="..."}

              Wow, what an improvement! This is so much clearer and better, what a time saver!! What a fucking a joke.

      • Perhaps they meant 'attack surface'.

        • Perhaps they meant 'attack surface'.

          Yes, Microsoft meant and said it, when they announced WMIC's deprecation nine years ago, in 2016.

          https://techcommunity.microsof... [microsoft.com]
          "Removing a deprecated component helps reduce complexity while keeping you secure and productive."

          Less legacy code to maintain means fewer opportunities to get it wrong.

          As much as I'm used to doing "wmic bios get serialnumber" as a quick & dirty way to get a machine's details, I guess I'll learn to fire up PowerShell and do "Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Bios | Select-

      • Out of curiousity, how much does removing the telemetry and spyware reduce the footprint (of win7 where you could remove it)? For example, how much space is freed running a script like this? https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

        • It's not so much about what space that frees up... the telemetry stuff is built into Explorer and such... it's mainly registry entries that enable that stuff. As far as I know, there isn't one specific program hiding in Program Files32 or someplace that does all that.

          • This stuff?

            @echo off

            %windir%\system32\reg.exe query "HKU\S-1-5-19" 1>nul 2>nul || goto :eof

            echo.

            echo Processing telemetry blocking tweaks

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate /v DisableOSUpgrade /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

            reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update" /f /v IncludeRecommendedUpdates /t REG_DWORD /d 0

            reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade" /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade /v AllowOSUpgrade /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Appraiser" /v HaveUploadedForTarget /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

            reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\AIT" /v AITEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\ClientTelemetry" /f

            reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\ClientTelemetry" /v DontRetryOnError /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

            reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\ClientTelemetry" /v IsCensusDisabled /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

            reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\ClientTelemetry" /v TaskEnableRun /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

            reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags" /v UpgradeEligible /f

            reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Appraiser" /f

            reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\TelemetryController" /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\IE /v CEIPEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\IE /v SqmLoggerRunning /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Reliability /v CEIPEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Reliability /v SqmLoggerRunning /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows /v DisableOptinExperience /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows /v CEIPEnable /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows /v SqmLoggerRunning /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            sc.exe config DiagTrack start= disabled

            sc.exe stop DiagTrack

            reg delete HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\WMI\AutoLogger\AutoLogger-Diagtrack-Listener /f

            reg delete HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\WMI\AutoLogger\Diagtrack-Listener /f

            reg delete HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\WMI\AutoLogger\SQMLogger /f

            reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection /f

            reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics\DiagTrack /f

            reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Diagnostics\DiagTrack /v DiagTrackAuthorization /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

            takeown /f %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Diagnosis /A /r /d y

            icacls %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Diagnosis /grant:r *S-1-5-32-544:F /T /C

            del /f /q %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Diagnosis\*.rbs

            del /f /q /s %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Diagnosis\ETLLogs\*

            schtasks /Change /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser" /DISABLE

            schtasks /Change /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\ProgramDataUpdater" /DISABLE

            schtasks /Change /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\AitAgent" /DISABLE

            schtasks /Change /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\PerfTrack\BackgroundConfigSurveyor" /DISABLE

            schtasks /Delete /F /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser"

            schtasks /Delete /F /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\ProgramDataUpdater"

            schtasks /Delete /F /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\Application Experience\AitAgent"

            schtasks /Delete /F /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\PerfTrack\BackgroundConfigSurveyor"

            TIMEOUT /T 5

            or this https://www.lastos.org/forum/i... [lastos.org] ?

        • This isn't about reducing any footprint. That's a line completely made up by msmash that appears in no articles about this nor the Microsoft announcement.

      • It's Powershell, it probably takes up 2gb in libraries.

      • Re:Bad decisions (Score:5, Informative)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @06:10PM (#65694156)

        What are you actually using that is useful? I suspect you've not fired up PowerShell 2.0 in about a decade since it was depreciated in 2017. Powershell 3.0 was shipped with Windows 8, Powershell 5.1 with Windows 11. None of those are going away.

        Same with WMI. That is staying. What is disappearing is WMIC. In fact Microsoft's official announcement is that due to the removal of WMIC you should be using ... Powershell commandlets which are 100% feature comparable and more capable than WMIC was.

        Fun fact, if you had some weird use case for WMIC it hasn't worked by default for over a year anyway on a new Windows install. Microsoft relegated it to an optional feature last year.

        • Never had a reason to really use powershell unless entering license keys behind the scenes. It's all about the software that we use to do daily crap... sure, you'll say "use LibreOffice"... and, I'll direct you to: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] (and it's child comment from me) Win10 works for me, without issue, so does Office 2016.

        • wmic.exe is a fantastic way to visually explore what WMI offers. Removing it is a crime, but, allowing the task bar to put on the left side was also removed for the same reason, few people use it. Sure, it is over a million people who use it, but compared to the billions that use the operating system, those people are a tiny slice.

          I mean, who cares if a million people suffer as long as it is not themselves?

          • allowing the task bar to put on the left side was also removed for the same reason

            That just goes to show how little you know. No the ability to dock the task bar to the left was not removed for the same reason. The reason that was removed was due to a complete architectural re-write of how the UI elements are drawn in windows explorer. The minimum viable product delivered it on the bottom, and not enough demand existed to justify creating an option to put it on the left.

            On the flip side here we have a tool that is essentially a kludge hobbled together because Powershell in the day wasn't

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        There seems to be some confusion here. Powershell isn't going away, just that old version of it that was kept around for compatibility with some old scripts. WMI isn't going away either, it's integrated into Powershell. It's just the old CLI tool that is deprecated, i.e. the one you can use from the old Command Prompt interpreter.

        • Powershell isn't going away, just that old version of it that was kept around for compatibility with some old scripts.

          Python, is that you?

          Leave it to Microsoft to fail at backwards compatibility when that used to be their excuse for existence.

    • Re: Bad decisions (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @03:36PM (#65693798) Homepage Journal

      What it really means is that those things are failures from a security standpoint, and Microsoft has no idea how to make anything secure.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      All in a day's work when you are hard at enshittifying your products. As Microsoft has been for a while now.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Also, is there still a real shell, or is Win11 now "no user serviceable parts inside"?

      • They never got rid of cmd exe, it's still there faithfully executing cmd and bat scripts since olden times.

        PowerShell has stupid syntax. Command lines wind up being miles and miles long. I knew this was going to happen when they introduced it.

        • Wow how fucking stupid: cmd [dot] exe is in the block list, not just the word filter, it gets you stopped by cloudfuck. This fucking site is pathetic.

    • Re:Bad decisions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@@@worf...net> on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @03:51PM (#65693868)

      Given PowerShell is at 7.5 right now, deprecating the version shipped inside Windows might not have been a bad idea. (PowerShell is also open-source and available for Linux, macOS and others as well).

      Heck, even the Windows 10 PowerShell was constantly reminding you probably want to install PowerShell 5 when you invoke it.

      Same goes for WMIC, since everything it does is doable via PowerShell since WMI APIs are still available and PowerShell can interface with them directly.

      It's really about removing ancient versions of software that are no longer maintained by the Windows team and replacing it with software that is maintained by a separate team - PowerShell is now maintained outside Windows, and WMIC was for when PowerShell didn't exist or was poorly understood. Nowadays people aren't using batch files or CMD scripts, they've moved to PowerShell scripts.

      • Just because it's OSS and available on macOS and Linux it doesn't stop being a big steaming pile of shite

      • deprecating the version shipped inside Windows might not have been a bad idea

        They aren't depreciating the version shipped inside Windows. They are completely removing a version that was depreciated in 2017 and was shipped with Windows 7. Windows 8 already had 3.0 Windows 11 has 5.1 None of those are going.

      • That's Powershell Core, which for some reason is different from Powershell. The latter is at 5.1. There's some inconvenience in what works in each.

    • Yeah probably is a great exchange. I mean you are speaking from emotion as a techie, Microsoft are speaking with the power of telemetry. There's no point in having PowerShell or WMI installed by default on non-corporate, non-poweruser desktop OSes, and that translates to "most machines".

    • Does anyone believe "... reduce the operating system's footprint... " matters even slightly to MS?

      So what's the real reason here? Users had too much access/control?

    • Removing Powershell 2 is a good move. It's been deprecated for some time and presents a security risk. Removing it has been a basic security measure for a while now.

      I didn't know they were removing WMIC, don't know why and am not sure that's a great idea. It hasn't really been needed since Powershell replaced everything it does, but it isn't like removing it saves a lot of space. I guess it won't hurt, it's not like there are going to be a lot of current scripts that use it.

  • Here we go (Score:4, Funny)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @03:04PM (#65693684)

    I look forward to the many Slashdot articles in the next few weeks about the way Microsoft has broke things again with their latest "upgrade".

    • Hehe
      Yeah... get rid of the things that get used most when installing programs, and the two things that powerusers rely on the most.

      • It's just 2.0 from what I understand, 5.1 and 7.x are still there.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Windows is a toy and MS clearly views it as such. This change just makes that a bit more obvious. They will continue to make Windows worse until they have no users left.

    • I look forward to the many Slashdot articles in the next few weeks about the way Microsoft has broke things again with their latest "upgrade".

      It's a great way for idiots to advertise their stupidity. I can't wait to see who will admit to having critical systems depending on a tools which were formally depreciated almost a decade ago. If you depend on Powershell 2.0 (depreciated in 2017) or WMIC (replaced with feature complete PowerShell tools back in the early days of Windows 10) then maybe you shouldn't be a system admin.

      • It's a great way for idiots to advertise their stupidity. I can't wait to see who will admit to having critical systems depending on a tools which were formally depreciated almost a decade ago. If you depend on Powershell 2.0 (depreciated in 2017)...

        So is not knowing the difference between "depreciate" and "deprecate".

        /oblig

        • Help me out here, English isn't my first language. I looked it up and down and checked the definitions of both and still have no idea what you were talking about? Were you making a joke I didn't get?

          • "Depreciate" means the monetary value of something goes down over time. For example, after you buy a new car, it's worth less one year later than it was when you bought it.

            "Deprecate" means a feature that's planned to be removed.

  • Version 7 of PowerShell isn't going anywhere.

  • Look at the numbers (Score:4, Informative)

    by n0w0rries ( 832057 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @04:19PM (#65693942)

    If you consider Windows 11 fully updated will consume 40-50GB of disk space.
    Removing those two apps will save approximately 50MB of disk space.

    Microsoft... we lie to you... now upload all your stuff to the cloud so we can mine it.

    • The announcement isn't that they are removing just these two to save disk space. It's that they are cutting a lot of legacy and depreciated tools from the package. PowerShell 2.0 hasn't been installed by default in Windows 11 ever (optional) and WMIC became optional last year already.

      The only one lying to you is msmash, as neither Microsoft's announcement nor TFA mention anything about OS footprint. But good work you fell for Slashdot's ragebait.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 )

      If you consider Windows 11 fully updated will consume 40-50GB of disk space.

      I bought one of those Beelink NAS devices on special, it comes with a 64GB MMC drive preloaded with Win11.

      Added Plex server (couple hundred MB) and let it do its Windows updates. Turns out it could not perform the larger updates as there's not enough disk space - I had to symlink a folder on another drive as the download cache to get it to work.

      Win11 is bloated far beyond what an OS should be.

      The NAS itself has been fine - not that fast at data ingestion (50-60MB/s) but perfectly fine maxxing an outbound

  • Neither TFA nor MS's official announcement, nor MS's specific pages about the removal of Powershell 2.0 or WMIC mention this has anything to do with saving space.

    Also thanks for omitting from TFS that only Powershell 2.0 (depreciated in 2017) has been removed, and that this version hasn't been shipped by default since Windows 8 (which came with Powershell 3.0). Thanks also for omitting that WMI remains, only the one command line tool wmic (for which Powershell has feature complete alternate commands) is bei

  • Anyone know if this will upgrade seamlessly on a computer that doesnt officially support Windows 11 running 24H2 via Rufus installer?
    Or will it need to be full install using an upgrade option?

    • After making a full drive backup (which you should be doing anyway), try it.

      If it fails, recover from your backup.

  • The update removes PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows Management Instrumentation command-line tool to reduce the operating system's footprint.

    MS doesn't give a rat's ass about the OS's footprint.

  • who enable the "get the latest updates as soon as they're available" toggle

    Where's the "Stop borking my computer with your bloatware I never asked for, and start fixing actual bugs" toggle?

  • It's going to be so great that I still am happily using Windows 10. No matter how much it is complaining and nagging an trying to trick me to "upgrade". It's pretty telling that basically everybody expects a new product from MS to be significantly worse than its' predecessor. Must be feeling great to work for a trainwreck of a company like that. They literally have given software development a bad name.

    • Same here. Ultimately... they remove Powershell and WMIC because they "can be attack vectors"... that, of course, only matters if you allow malicious software onto your computer (downloading Candy Crush from some random site that isn't the companies site, that sorta thing). Basic system security... if it's an untrusted website, don't use it, and you won't get your computer infected!
  • They don't seem to be making it better, just making yours--theirs.

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