[lemonish97]

From the article: "Additionally, AI features in Notepad settings has been renamed to Advanced features and it allows users to toggle off AI capabilities within the app."

I honestly don't mind this, as long as it's not being forced. And I believe this feature exists only within their npu PCs.

[hootz]

But it's just so unnecessary. Everyone has always expected Notepad to be a simple utility as it has always been, why does it need optional AI features? It just feels like bloat.

[lynndotpy]

When I stopped using Windows, it was because it required so much constant upkeep and maintenance to stay usable. You had to stay on top of the latest tool that disables tracking, things like Cortana you'd want to remove, the latest toggles you have to disable, what toggles revert themselves when you update. These all exist behind different shifting UI toggles which are not accessibly automatable. And all the while, you have to hope your registry edits don't force you to a lengthy reinstall where you have to redo all of these.

I could be wrong, but as far as I know there's not one "Fix Windows 11" tool maintained to do all this for you.

"You have to toggle AI features off in Notepad, and they changed the name to Advanced Features now," is just another heaving brick on the pile.

[trueno]

> When I stopped using Windows, it was because it required so much constant upkeep and maintenance to stay usable.

i actually had to spin up a windows vm last week to fix some dumb excel workbook vba nonsense a coworker was having issues with.

i laughed so hard at the amount of "debloat" powershell tools out there for windows that are basically a non-negotiable now to have a normal operating system experience. just surfing around the web and seeing people say "yeah install OS then run _ tool" like that is a normal "this is fine" thing was so entertaining.

i destroyed that VM when i was done. then took a shower

[vbezhenar]

You do you, but I never bothered with anything like that and just used Windows as it is. It works. Yes, it probably tracks me and sends some stuff to MS servers but I don't care. I trust them enough to run their proprietary code on my machine with the highest privileges, anyway.

The problems with VM experience is because Windows seems to perform some tasks after installation or after long absence, like installing updates and stuff. That makes it slow for a while. But when you use it every day, it's not an issue.

[supertrope]

That's the same reason I deleted my Facebook account.

[tracker1]

I really think MS should have just resurrected the "Wordpad" app name for what the new "Nptepad" does. It would be far less annoying if they'd just done that.

[delecti]

Based on the timelines, it seems like the WordPad EoL was going on at the same time as the plans to add crap to Notepad. They might well have killed WordPad so that they could turn Notepad into the pile of crap it became.

[trueno]

lol holy moly i totally forgot about how annoying it was when something opened in the bastard child that was wordpad.

kinda crazy to me how terrible the entire windows experience is as a whole, i really think people have just lost sight of how computing should be.

there's just too many cats outta the bag here that microsoft is going to cling to for dear life, they can back pedal all they want in blogs promising different, but we can already see here they're not willing to let go of the stuff they've woven into things that people hate.

im gonna be blunt, windows kinda sux. this is already not a promising outlook for windows enjoyers. and it's only been what, like 2-3 weeks since they were putting out this nonsense

> "You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad."

let me guess: copilot stuff remains on by default. lol, lmao even

[tracker1]

> im gonna be blunt, windows kinda sux.

No argument from me... I switched my personal devices off Windows several years ago... I still use a Mac laptop, and that may even be my last Apple device.

I really wish that MS would have spent far more time making Win11 consistent instead of introducing so many new features throughout... Win7 was the last version of Windows that even resembled consistent. That doesn't even go into a lot of the bloat and stuff that doesn't necessarily belong in an OS imo. Completing the UI transition should be the second priority only after long standing bugs and usability issues. The AI enshitification is horrible. I'm not even against an option for AI tooling... give me a selection dialog/wizard ONCE on account login/creation... then leave me alone.

[philistine]

I’d argue it is Microsoft’s own damn fault. They seem to have completely abandoned improving their system, in favour of dumping everything in their apps. Apple has introduced writing tools at the OS level, so you can use their LLM in TextEdit and no one complains.

[pbhjpbhj]

With Apple, can you leave the LLM features turned off?

[LetsGetTechnicl]

Yes you can keep Apple Intelligence turned off at the system level, which I do

[vbezhenar]

I complain. I don't need AI on OS level.

[philistine]

I'm sorry; I meant no one complains that AI is inside TextEdit specifically. People complain (including me!) about Apple's terrible AI strategy in general.

[Sharlin]

Reminder that this is the company that decided to replace Paint with something called "Paint 3D", the laggiest and bloatiest "literally nobody wanted this" drawing app I've ever seen.

[Rohansi]

It was never replaced. Paint 3D was an entirely different app for 3D art only. It's also been gone for a few years now.

[Sharlin]

It was absolutely sold as a replacement. And it's gone now because literally nobody wanted it, used it, or understood why it existed. Sure, you could still find the old Paint in a disused lavatory behind a locked door with a sign "beware of the leopard". It wasn't even installed by default, unlike the 3D version, or do I recall incorrectly? Even MS isn't so stupid as to ship two separate accessories both called "Paint" in the same OS by default!

[wlesieutre]

And a weird obsession with making it impossible to customize the sidebar in Explorer, so there was a “3D Objects” folder stuck there permanently unless you’re the kind of user who doesn’t mind a trip to the registry editor.

What percent of users ever found that useful? I think I’m being generous to guess one in ten thousand.

Absolutely braindead management running Windows development.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/remove-3d-objects-folder-wino...

[Barbing]

> one in ten thousand.

For their default file explorer experience, the prominent fourth option right in the sidebar. Oh my gosh, that is hilarious. Did someone think it made the computer look advanced (or did they want you to buy apps to uh make 3D stuff from them)?

[Sharlin]

Yeah, the "3D Objects" thing is just surreal. You can't make this stuff up.

[Rohansi]

pink is totally your colour gyal

[mlnj]

I remember how Skype, an awesome piece of software transformed into Lync, which worked fairly well, slowly transformed into whatever MS wanted to call it year after year, slower and more buggy than the year before.

[kalleboo]

Lync started out as "Office Communicator 2007" before being renamed Lync. Then Microsoft purchased Skype and rebranded Lync as "Skype for Business" even though it was still a completely unrelated product, with just some basic interoperability slapped on. Skype-the-consumer-app lived on separately as its original product in parallel.

Just another example of how Microsoft is utterly incompetent at branding - always have been and always will be.

[distances]

Looking back, I understood with Windows XP that I wasn't in the target group. Win 95/98 had a simple but functional file search. Being naive, I was expecting some power user features in the future, like regex search.

Win XP replaced the classic file search with one that had an animated dog in it.

The dog search was completely, utterly useless. You would not find anything with it. It was so bad I still vividly remember my bafflement about it.

[hydrogen7800]

Ugh, I can no longer press win key and type "p a i enter". I now have to find the old paint manually.

[idle_processor]

Give FlowLauncher[0] or Windows Powertoys Run[1] a shot.

There are some amazing tools like that (and Everything[2], which replaces Windows' inferior search) that really change how one interacts with Windows.

There are other tricks like putting scripts or shortcuts or executables in a directory referenced by your PATH variable, which can make the Win+R trick better too.

[0] https://www.flowlauncher.com/ [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run [2] https://www.voidtools.com/

[hilariously]

win+r - mspaint - enter

[hydrogen7800]

Thanks! Also useful for an old win10 machine I have, and probably shouldn't be using anymore, that no longer responds to clicking the start menu button...

[catlikesshrimp]

Don't throw it away. Install windows 8, and the last offline version of office you can find. It makes for a great distraction free workstation and a monitor for your android (scrcpy).

Or, you can install and reinstall linux distros and learn the ropes.

You should be fine as long as you use a proper firewall device and access only manually withelisted websites, but it is always better to keep it offline. That said, it can become your next firewall device.

[esafak]

They don't even do substring search??

[amlib]

Back in the 90s doing substring match was probably deemed way too expensive and so just calling the executable name directly was as optimized as it got... and it's beautiful :)

[xp84]

Apparently there’s a proper app launcher in PowerToys.

[dataflow]

Switch to Open-Shell's start menu and don't look back.

[MisterTea]

I think that crown belongs to the pile of pig shit that was the Windows 10 photo viewer. My first experience with that trash fire was opening a simple 2k photo which took 15 seconds and 150 MB of memory on a six core i5 with 16GB RAM. Viewing images was pain and suffering until I gave up and re-enabled the Win 7 viewer which was thankfully still included.

[whynotmaybe]

Must be some Mandela effect but I'm sure that Paint.net was supposed to replace mspaint when it was started.

[cwnyth]

Paint.NET wasn't Microsoft's, but was an independent app: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET

[Sharlin]

It was supposed to be a third-party replacement, sure, but certainly not an official one. It started as a student project. It's just the prefix that tricks your brain to associate it with MS's own .NET branded applications.

[saghm]

To be fair, the .NET brand is already super convoluted (there's .NET framework, the .NET core, .NET runtime, the .NET desktop runtime, the .NET sdk, and I'm genuinely not even sure which if any of these might refer to the same thing), on top of it weirdly sounding like something internet related to a casual user.

[Sharlin]

Yes, "Copilot" is not the first brand that MS has tried to stick to everything while being just as confused about it as (inevitably) the consumers. Although somehow they did manage to keep .NET mostly aimed at developers - besides the actual frameworks there's Visual Studio .NET and other dev tools, but I'm actually a bit surprised that they never had "Office .NET" or "Outlook .NET" or even "Windows .NET Edition" or something like that. Maybe they still had some sane people in charge of marketing and brand management back then.

[xoxxala]

I don't need anything more than a simple text editor. Notepad worked fine for a long time, but the bloat is real. I tried a bunch of replacement editors, but none really scratched that Notepad itch. Surprisingly, I'm now a fan of MS Edit:

https://github.com/microsoft/edit

It's very simple and here's hoping they don't bloat this one out, too.

[Neikius]

I like kde's Kate. A bit more than notepad but not as crazy as notepad++. More like notepad 2

[raincole]

> Everyone has always expected Notepad to be a simple utility as it has always been

Except the youngest of the demography who don't have this expectation, and live in AI hype era since they're kids.

[saghm]

If I'm understanding correctly, you have to go into "advanced" features to turn off AI? So someone who doesn't think they're an expert who needs advanced features might not ever go and look there? I'd argue that "advanced" features are something that a casual user would expect to be off by default and need to go out of their way to enable.

[mcdeltat]

"advanced" in 2026 is closer to "using the app how you want to as rather than the way that will generate the corporation maximum profits"

[dataflow]

This stretches back much farther than the 2020s unfortunately...

[razster]

Even with it off, you can still see that it uses a lot of resources for a basic Notepad. I've ditched Windows for work, second drive now has Windows for gaming and that is all. I can do all my work on Linux and that is fine by me.

[BizarroLand]

I would prefer off by default.

No nags, just a simple, "We are offering you this feature, use it or don't, it's your computer".

[tosti]

IMHO they're just hiding the wolf in sheep clothing. Can't complain about AI if it's not called AI. Modern problems require modern solutions, you get the idea. The snark in TFA about shareholders and stakeholders hits the nail on the head.

[Topfi]

The "AI" additions to Notepad are not limited to systems with an NPU. Why would they be, it's powered by LLMs running on Azure [0].

These sudden additions also correlated with the first CVE [1] in Notepad since its inception, so maybe their attention isn't where it should be.

I for one very much mind this and many other inclusions including the metastatic takeover off Office. OneDrive also was forced upon and severely worsened functioning software, despite not being "AI", so there is precedent at least.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enhance-your-wri...

[1] https://infosecwriteups.com/the-dumb-editor-that-got-too-sma...

[noir_lord]

Be better if there was a global "Disable AI" option easily found in the settings that is a flag everywhere.

Some of us (including very much me) simply do not want Copilot/AI anything and playing whackamole with settings is annoying but we'll do it anyway and it leaves a bad taste.

Since it's the software equivalent of been in a filing cabinet in the basement behind a door that has a sign saying "Beware the Leopard".

In reality it's a moot point, I disable AI features and Windows is a gloried steamos box for me at this point, I do my actual computing booted into Linux and have for decades.

[jgalt212]

> I honestly don't mind this, as long as it's not being forced.

This is indeed a step forward. With QuickBooks, there is currently no way to disable their extremely intrusive AI. I may just vibe-code a browser extension to block it. Fight fire with fire.