Windows 11 Customizable Context Menu: Microsoft's Compromise and the PC Revenue Slump

Microsoft began rolling out a customizable context menu on October 28 — a belated fix for Windows 11 users. The same week, Microsoft's CFO confirmed that Windows revenue from PC makers fell by more than a quarter in the three months ending in September. The two developments colliding makes for a telling contrast: the operating system is working to patch its experience, while its commercial foundation is under pressure.

An interface rollback targeting an old problem

Windows 11's previous context menu tucked common commands like "Send to," "Print," "Cut," "Copy," "Paste," and "Properties" behind a row of icons and a submenu called "Show more options," forcing users to click an extra time to get back to the familiar path. The new preview update adds a "Customize menu" button; opening the settings page lets users toggle each command on or off individually, and also display Print, Cut, Copy, and Paste as text rather than icons. The same batch of updates also brings a "Cloud Rebuild" feature that can reinstall Windows over the internet even if the machine can no longer boot. It behaves like a clean install, so apps and files are not preserved.

The interface-level adjustment looks like a minor tweak, but placed in the feedback arc since Windows 11's launch, it responds to a design decision that has drawn persistent complaints. The longest reply chain on Hacker News began with a reader saying "Windows 10 was nearly perfect, and almost every change since has made Windows worse," followed by someone rebutting that this is absurd, since plenty of people complained about Windows 10 at the time too, attributing it to the "good old days" bias. Another reader offered a pendulum explanation: every other major version, after a bad release, there's always a widely accepted one.

There were more concrete complaints in the discussion too. One reader, helping his sister fix a laptop she'd bought a year earlier, found the 1TB drive full — half of it taken up by the Windows.old folder, the old installation backup left behind by the last major update. Every built-in Windows removal method failed, and he eventually booted Linux from a USB drive to delete it. Someone pointed out that Storage Cleanup can handle it and guessed the machine had accumulated years of upgrade residue; the reader responded that cleanup had already failed, and the machine had shipped with Windows 11 preinstalled only a year earlier.

Windows.old is a backup folder Windows automatically creates during feature updates or major version upgrades, usually located in the root of the system drive. It preserves system files, program files, and some user configuration from the previous version of Windows so users can roll back if problems arise with the new version. By default, Windows automatically deletes the folder 10 days after the upgrade completes, but deletion may fail if the upgrade process is abnormal or disk space is insufficient. The folder typically occupies anywhere from several GB to tens of GB, and because it is protected by the system, ordinary users cannot delete it directly through File Explorer — they need a disk cleanup tool or must take ownership and remove it manually.

Setup accounts and encryption: the overlooked chain reaction

The mandatory online Microsoft account during setup is why another reader avoided Windows 11 entirely. Replies offered workarounds: enter a command during installation, reboot, and get a local account. But others warned that such bypasses are being continually blocked, and one said the trick no longer works in the current Home edition installer.

More alarming is a chain reaction: one commenter set up a no-online-account environment for his mother's sewing-machine laptop, and then an update pop-up quietly signed her into a Microsoft account, which in turn triggered drive encryption, ultimately leaving the laptop stuck on a blue screen demanding a long recovery key. Cases like this show that when convenience changes at the interface layer are coupled with account and encryption policies, the cost to ordinary users can far exceed expectations.

BitLocker Drive Encryption is a full-disk encryption feature available in Windows Pro and above; the Home edition equivalent is "Device Encryption." Once enabled, the system drive is encrypted and identity verification is required at boot. On modern devices equipped with a TPM chip, device encryption may be enabled automatically after signing in to a Microsoft account, with the recovery key escrowed to that account. If a user is unexpectedly signed in to a Microsoft account, encryption may be silently activated; once hardware changes or boot configuration changes, the system will demand a long recovery key. Ordinary users often don't know the key has been uploaded to the cloud, leaving them stranded at the blue-screen recovery screen.

PC market pressure: the backdrop to falling Windows revenue

Microsoft's CFO attributed the Windows sales decline to two factors: users concentrated their upgrades last year ahead of Windows 10's end of support, pulling demand forward; and the new PC market weakened overall. Research firm Counterpoint's figures show global PC shipments fell by about a fifth over the same period, with memory, storage, and processor prices all rising.

This explains a seemingly contradictory phenomenon: Microsoft is making concessions on the software experience just as its licensing revenue contracts. For home users, a customizable context menu is a visible improvement; but for Microsoft's real revenue source — enterprise customers — such changes carry limited weight. Someone in the discussion pointed out directly that home users aren't Microsoft's real customers — enterprises are; and someone immediately shot back asking how much better Windows has become for enterprises.

Other tech developments the same week

This issue of HN Digest also covers several noteworthy stories. The final international draft of C++26 was rejected by national standards bodies in a vote that closed on October 23; German delegation member Andreas Fertig said that to his knowledge this is the first such failure in the language's history. The focus of the dispute is the contracts feature — which allows functions to declare conditions that inputs and outputs must satisfy, checked at runtime. Developers who write high-reliability C++ outside the standards process argued that contracts don't solve real problems in real code and are essentially syntactic sugar over C's oldest assertion checks; supporters called it an improved way to check runtime conditions, but "absolutely not worth killing a standard over." Fertig believes every remaining path will delay the next standard, and the committee's next meeting will attempt to break the deadlock.

Flipper Devices began locking in the FlipperOne Kickstarter price of $379 with a $20 pre-order voucher. The company says the memory shortage makes costs hard to predict, so parts must be ordered in advance; only a limited number of devices will get this provisional price, with later buyers paying more. Inside, the device runs Linux on a RockChip processor, with a separate Raspberry Pi microcontroller driving the screen, buttons, and power, so the screen remains usable when Linux is off. As a networking tool, it can connect to up to five internet connections simultaneously and switch when one fails, and can act as both a Wi-Fi hotspot and client at the same time.

A developer exported the hidden English word list from Apple's keyboard, reporting that Trump is the only living political figure flagged as sensitive, alongside Hitler and Osama bin Laden. "Sensitive" means the keyboard won't proactively suggest the word, but users can still type it. Biden and Putin have no flags, and lowercase trump (a card-game term) is clean too. About one in every 50 English words carries one of three levels of flag: vulgar, offensive, or sensitive. The developer read these flags through private system functions on the Mac, which Apple does not document.

Finally, an AI-related item: Simon Willison used a free Qwen model running on a laptop (27 billion parameters, about 17GB file) to reproduce the experiment of "identifying what game a small network is playing from its weights alone." Four small networks each played a classic game on a 10x10 grid, with no tools provided in the prompt. Qwen got three of four right — Pac-Man, Pong, and Breakout — misidentifying the obscure Atari game Freeway as a Pac-Man-like grid game, taking 46 minutes to over an hour per correct answer. Some readers felt the Freeway mistake actually shows the model was guessing well-known games rather than genuinely reading what the network computes; others tested with DeepSeek^Ad's Flash model, got a wrong Pac-Man answer, and attributed it to strong hints toward well-known games in the prompt. Willison himself said he still believes a skilled person with pen and paper and enough effort could do the same, and he isn't ready to declare that "machines editing their own weights will replace source code."

C++ contracts is a language feature proposed for the C++26 standard that lets developers specify preconditions, postconditions, and assertions in function declarations, checked by the compiler at runtime or compile time. Its goal is to make interface contracts verifiable constraints beyond the type system, improving code reliability. However, the feature is highly controversial in terms of syntax, check timing, and compatibility with existing code, and some developers believe it doesn't solve real engineering pain points. The rejection of the final international draft by national standards bodies means the feature may be modified, delayed, or removed, affecting the entire C++26 timeline.

Model weights are a set of parameter files obtained after a neural network finishes training, determining the model's behavior and capabilities. Normally users can only use a model through an inference interface and cannot directly view or modify the weights. The experiment described here has the model infer what game a small network is playing from the weight files alone — essentially testing whether the model can reverse-engineer the network structure from numerical parameters. This is different from having the model read source code or run a program. The significance of the experiment lies in exploring the model's ability to understand the "computation process" itself, not in replacing traditional program analysis or source code editing.

Summary

Making the context menu customizable is an interface fix targeting a real pain point, but it can't mask the revenue pressure facing the Windows business. From mandatory online accounts to update-triggered encryption lockouts, the problems users encounter in actual use are often harder to work around than surface design issues like menu hierarchy. For Microsoft, the real test isn't whether it can put common commands back one menu level up, but how to maintain enterprise and home users' trust in the platform during a cycle of contracting licensing revenue.

One-line Summary

Microsoft rolled out a customizable context menu to patch the experience, but Windows revenue fell by more than a quarter, and interface fixes can't hide the commercial pressure.

Paragraph Summary

On October 28, Microsoft rolled out a customizable context menu that lets users toggle common commands and choose text or icon display, along with a Cloud Rebuild feature. Yet the same week, Microsoft's CFO confirmed Windows revenue from PC makers fell by more than a quarter, with global PC shipments down about a fifth over the same period. Hacker News discussion revealed that mandatory online accounts and update pop-ups signing users in automatically can trigger drive encryption, locking users out at the blue-screen recovery screen. The article also covers the rejection of the C++26 draft over the contracts dispute, FlipperOne pre-orders, Apple's keyboard sensitive-word list, and the Qwen model experiment on identifying games from weights.