Is Windows 11 acting up for you? This might be why

By Willow Roberts Published December 5, 2024

The Surface Pro 11 on a white table in front of a window. — Luke Larsen / Digital Trends

This year’s big Windows 11 update, 24H2, started a phased rollout in October and just became available to more PCs yesterday, December 4, as spotted by Windows Latest. To check if your PC is ready for it, just head to the settings page and check for updates — if an update is not there for download yet, you’ll have to wait until later in the rollout process.

Getting new things first isn’t always a good thing when it comes to software, however. It can take quite a while for a new Windows build to be announced as “stable,” and 24H2 is far from earning that title at the moment.

Recommended Videos

The list of bugs related to the new update is pretty long, and while some people are lucky enough to encounter very few of them, others are running into problems left, right, and center. If you’re worried about that kind of thing, you can check the Windows blog to see a list of confirmed bugs and view their current status. Here are some of the more prominent examples:

Some Ubisoft games can stop working
USB scanners might stop working with your PC
You might not be able to change your time zone in Windows Settings
Devices running the VoiceMeeter app are incompatible with 24H2
Some Asus devices fail to install the update
Using your device’s camera can make some apps crash
Older versions of Easy Anti-Cheat are incompatible with 24H2
Wallpaper customization apps might stop working

These are bugs that Microsoft has confirmed, and there were a few others that have already been resolved. As is always the case with bugs, they won’t happen to everyone and you might not be able to reproduce them if you try — so even if you play Ubisoft games and use a USB scanner, there’s no guarantee that you’ll experience problems.

Alongside these official bugs, however, there’s also a whole load of unofficial ones that users have reported online. These include a range of things like disappearing mouse pointers, internet connection problems, broken clipboard history, broken network sharing, and printer issues.

If you want to try out the update and also make sure you’re not inconvenienced by any potential bugs, the safest thing to do is try it out on a secondary PC. If you don’t have another eligible PC to hand, just be aware that you could run into a few problems if you decide to update.

Topics

Computing Writer

Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…

Computing

Microsoft warns that the latest Windows 11 update may crash PC games now

Gaming PC on a desk.

Microsoft has once again temporarily halted the rollout of its latest major Windows 11 update, also known as 24H2. This time it is for systems running select Ubisoft games following widespread user reports of crashes and performance issues. The affected titles include Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Assassin's Creed Origins, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Common complaints include black screens, freezing, and unresponsiveness during gameplay or while loading these titles. "I just bought a new gaming laptop with RTX 4080, Intel i9 14900hx. I can't play the game (Origins) even for 5 minutes because it crashes to a black screen, with audio, and the only way to close it is from task manager. Impossible to play," one user shared on Reddit. Others reported similar frustrations, citing the persistent error “NTDLL.dll” that renders their games unplayable.

Computing

Nearly six months later, you can finally try out Windows 11 Recall

Recall promotional image.

After a tumultuous initial reaction and months of reworking, Microsoft is finally releasing the first preview of its controversial Recall feature today. If you're a Windows Insider with a Qualcomm Copilot+ PC, you can install a new build of Windows 11 that includes both Recall and Click to Do.

If you're not part of the Windows Insider Program but you want to try out this feature, it's pretty easy to sign up on the Microsoft website. Recall was first announced back before any of the Copilot+ PCs were released and was meant to be available at launch, but an outcry of privacy and security concerns forced Microsoft to delay it.

Computing

The Windows 11 24H2 update is causing even more problems

The Windows 11 24H2 update had already been giving users a real headache with problems such as bugs for visual layouts and flaws for certain wallpaper apps. And now, as Microsoft confirms in a support document, some people without administrative privileges can't change the time zone in the Date & Time view, among myriad other issues related to the important Windows 11 update.

A Feedback Hub post also reports a time issue after exiting Sleep Mode, specifically after about one out of every five overnight sleep cycles. There is also a report that the time is not syncing correctly following daylight saving time. Put differently, the update doesn't break the time zone, but only affects the toggle or makes it very difficult to modify it.