"The number of discrete GPU developers from the U.S. and Western Europe shrank to three companies in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "from around 10 in 2000." (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel...) No company in the recent years — at least outside of China — was bold enough to engage into competition against these three contenders, so the very emergence of Bolt Graphics seems like a breakthrough. However, the major focuses of Bolt's Zeus are high-quality rendering for movie and scientific industries as well as high-performance supercomputer simulations. If Zeus delivers on its promises, it could establish itself as a serious alternative for scientific computing, path tracing, and offline rendering. But without strong software support, it risks struggling against dominant market leaders.
This week the Sunnyvale, California-based startup introduced its Zeus GPU platform designed for gaming, rendering, and supercomputer simulations, according to the article. "The company says that its Zeus GPU not only supports features like upgradeable memory and built-in Ethernet interfaces, but it can also beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 by around 10 times in path tracing workloads, according to slide published by technology news site ServeTheHome." There is one catch: Zeus can only beat the RTX 5090 GPU in path tracing and FP64 compute workloads. It's not clear how well it will handle traditional rendering techniques, as that was less of a focus. In speaking with Bolt Graphics, the card does support rasterization, but there was less emphasis on that aspect of the GPU, and it may struggle to compete with the best graphics cards when it comes to gaming. And when it comes to data center options like Nvidia's Blackwell B200, it's an entirely different matter.

Unlike GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia that rely on proprietary instruction set architectures, Bolt's Zeus relies on the open-source RISC-V ISA, according to the published slides. The Zeus core relies on an open-source out-of-order general-purpose RVA23 scalar core mated with FP64 ALUs and the RVV 1.0 (RISC-V Vector Extension Version 1.0) that can handle 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit data types as well as Bolt's additional proprietary extensions designed for acceleration of scientific workloads... Like many processors these days, Zeus relies on a multi-chiplet design... Unlike high-end GPUs that prioritize bandwidth, Bolt is evidently focusing on greater memory size to handle larger datasets for rendering and simulations. Also, built-in 400GbE and 800GbE ports to enable faster data transfer across networked GPUs indicates the data center focus of Zeus.

High-quality rendering, real-time path tracing, and compute are key focus areas for Zeus. As a result, even the entry-level Zeus 1c26-32 offers significantly higher FP64 compute performance than Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 — up to 5 TFLOPS vs. 1.6 TFLOPS — and considerably higher path tracing performance: 77 Gigarays vs. 32 Gigarays. Zeus also features a larger on-chip cache than Nvidia's flagship — up to 128MB vs. 96MB — and lower power consumption of 120W vs. 575W, making it more efficient for simulations, path tracing, and offline rendering. However, the RTX 5090 dominates in AI workloads with its 105 FP16 TFLOPS and 1,637 INT8 TFLOPS compared to the 10 FP16 TFLOPS and 614 INT8 TFLOPS offered by a single-chiplet Zeus...
The article emphasizes that Zeus "is only running in simulation right now... Bolt Graphics says that the first developer kits will be available in late 2025, with full production set for late 2026."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader arvn for sharing the news.

With Microsoft ending free security updates for Windows 10 in October, millions of PCs that don't meet Windows 11's hardware requirements face an uncertain fate... Charities that refurbish and distribute computers to low-income individuals must choose between providing soon-to-be-insecure Windows 10 machines, transitioning to Linux -- despite usability challenges for non-tech-savvy users -- or recycling the hardware, contributing to ewaste. Tom's Hardware reports: So how bad will it really be to run an end-of-lifed Windows 10? Should people worry? [Chester Wisniewski, who serves as Director and Global Field CISO for Sophos, a major security services company] and other experts I talked to are unequivocal. You're at risk. "To put this in perspective, today [the day we talked] was Patch Tuesday," he said. "There were 57 vulnerabilities, 6 of which have already been abused by criminals before the fixes were available. There were also 57 in February and 159 in January. Windows 10 and Windows 11 largely have a shared codebase, meaning most, if not all, vulnerabilities each month are exploitable on both OSs. These will be actively turned into digital weapons by criminals and nation-states alike and Windows 10 users will be somewhat defenseless against them."

So, in short, even though Windows 10 has been around since 2015, there are still massive security holes being patched. Even within the past few weeks, dozens of vulnerabilities were fixed by Microsoft. So what's a charity to do when these updates are running out and clients will be left vulnerable? "What we decided to do is one year ahead of the cutoff, we discontinued Windows 10," said Casey Sorensen, CEO of PCs for People, one of the U.S.'s largest non-profit computer refurbishers. "We will distribute Linux laptops that are 6th or 7th gen. If we distribute a Windows laptop, it will be 8th gen or newer." Sorensen said that any PC that's fifth gen or older will be sent to an ewaste recycler.

[...] Sorensen, who founded the company in 1998, told us that he's comfortable giving clients computers that run Linux Mint, a free OS that's based on Ubuntu. The latest version of Mint, version 22.1, will be supported until 2029. "Ten years ago if we distributed Linux, they would be like what is it," he said. But today, he notes that many view their computers as windows to the Internet and, for that, a user-friendly version of Linux is acceptable. Further reading: Is 2025 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Windows Defender has begun identifying WinRing0 -- a kernel-level driver used by numerous hardware monitoring applications -- as malicious software, causing widespread functionality issues for affected tools. The driver, which provides low-level hardware access necessary for reading fan speeds, controlling RGB lighting, and monitoring system components, is being quarantined due to potential security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malware.

WinRing0 gained popularity among developers because it's one of only two freely available Windows drivers capable of accessing the SMBus registers needed for hardware monitoring functions. The affected applications include Fan Control, OpenRGB, MSI Afterburner, LibreHardwareMonitor, and multiple others that rely on this driver to communicate with system hardware.

Lenovo demonstrated "a laptop with a foldable screen and one that can get extra battery life from solar power," reports CNBC, emphasizing that "These laptops are just concepts, meaning they are not commercially available."

But "Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has a history of showing off imaginative concepts with some becoming reality, so it's worth keeping an eye on what the Chinese technology giant is up to..." The latest concepts were unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona... When fully unfolded, the screen is an 18-inch display [on the Lenovo ThinkBook 'flip' concept]... The screen can then be folded in half horizontally to create two screens — one on the front and one on the back. The entire display can be folded down flat so the laptop turns into a tablet-like device.
Lenovo also showed off a Yoga Solar PC concept, reports Gizmodo, calling it "relatively thin and light" despite a solar panel in its lid with "a supposed 24% solar conversion rate": Lenovo claims they achieved this by maneuvering the gridlines you usually find on a solar panel behind the solar cells, offering more real estate for energy absorption... Lenovo's software showed the power accumulation at around 7 V when facing away from the sunlight and 12 V when facing toward it. It could get more when getting direct sunlight. Despite the presence of the solar panel, the laptop still weighs a little more than 2.6 pounds, which isn't out of the realm of what to expect from most modern laptops.

We should note that the panel isn't generating the required power to run the PC continuously. Lenovo claimed that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will transform into about one hour of video playback battery life. Depending on the CPU and battery, that could be 1/20 of the laptop's battery life.
CNBC had slightly different statistics for the laptop's battery life. "Lenovo said that the solar panels can absorb even ambient light in a person's surroundings to give a user an extra hour of laptop use at the end of an eight-hour work day..."

In 2023, Microsoft began including a free VPN feature in its "Microsoft Defender" security app for all Microsoft 365 subscribers ("Personal" and "Family"). Originally Microsoft had "called it a privacy protection feature," writes the blog Windows Central, "designed to let you access sensitive data on the web via a VPN tunnel." But.... Unfortunately, Microsoft has now announced that it's killing the feature later this month, only a couple of years after it first debuted...

To add insult to injury, this announcement comes just days after Microsoft increased subscription prices across the board. Both Personal and Family subscriptions went up by three dollars a month, which the company says is the first price hike Microsoft 365 has seen in over a decade. The increased price does now include Microsoft 365 Copilot, which adds AI features to Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and others.

However, it also comes with the removal of the free VPN in Microsoft Defender, which I've found to be much more useful so far.

EA's Origin PC client will be shut down on April 17, 2025, as Microsoft ends support for 32-bit software. "Anyone still using Origin will need to swap over to the EA app before that date," adds Engadget. From the report: For those PC players who have not migrated over to the EA app, the company has an FAQ explaining the latest system requirements. The EA app runs on 64-bit architecture, and requires a machine using Windows 10 or Windows 11. [...] If you're simply downloading the EA app on a current machine, players won't need to re-download their games. And if you have cloud saves enabled, all of your data should transfer without any additional steps.

However, it's always a good idea to have physical backups with this type of transition, especially since not all games support cloud saves, and those titles will need to have saved game data manually transferred. Mods also may not automatically make the switch, and EA recommends players check with mod creators about transferring to the EA app.

"It's fair to say that by 1995, OS/2 was dead software walking," remembers a new article from the Register (which begins with a 1995 Usenet post from Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's lead architect on the OS/2 project).

But the real question is why this Microsoft-IBM collaboration on a DOS-replacing operating system ultimately lost out to Windows...? If OS/2 1.0 had been an 80386 OS, and had been able to multitask DOS apps, we think it would have been a big hit.... OS/2's initial 1980s versions were 16-bit products, at IBM's insistence. That is when the war was lost. That is when OS/2 flopped. Because its initial versions were even more crippled than the Deskpro 386...

Because OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft launched a product that fixed the key weakness of OS/2 1.x. That product was Windows 3, which worked perfectly acceptably on 286 machines, but if you ran the same installed copy on a 32-bit 386 PC, it worked better. Windows 3.0 could use the more sophisticated hardware of a 386 to give better multitasking of the market-dominating DOS apps...

IBM's poor planning shaped the PC industry of the 1990s more than Microsoft's successes. Windows 3.0 wasn't great, but it was good enough. It reversed people's perception of Windows after the failures of Windows 1 and Windows 2. Windows 3 achieved what OS/2 had intended to do. It transformed IBM PC compatibles from single-tasking text-only computers into graphical computers, with poor but just about usable multitasking...

Soon after Windows 3.0 turned out to be a hit, OS/2 NT was rebranded as Windows NT. Even the most ardent Linux enthusiast must c\oncede that Windows NT did quite well over three decades.
Back in 1995, the Register's author says they'd moved from OS/2 to Windows 95 "while it was still in beta.

"The UI was far superior, more hardware worked, and Doom ran much better."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has published a year in review for its Edge browser and talked up AI-powered chats while lightly skipping over the software's stagnating market share. The company had some big numbers to share. There had been over 10 billion AI-powered chats with Copilot from inside the Edge browser window (although it did not disclose how many chats were customers asking how to install Chrome). Some 38 trillion characters had been auto-translated. Seven trillion megabytes of PC memory had been saved through the use of sleeping tabs.

However, are those numbers actually as big as they seem? What Microsoft did not say is how little Edge has moved the needle on market share in 2024. Strangely, the company did not share raw usage information. Yet, a look at Statcounter's figures for browser desktop market share showed Edge with 11.9 percent of the market in December 2023 and reaching 12.87 percent by November 2024 -- an increase of less than 1 percent. The market leader, Google's Chrome browser, went from 65.23 percent to 66.33 percent in the same period. That's only slightly more than 1 percent, but it still maintains its dominance.

Intel's interim co-CEOs acknowledged that the company may be forced to sell its manufacturing operations if a new chipmaking technology slated for next year does not succeed. Reuters reports: Speaking at a Barclays investment banking conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Michelle Johnston Holthaus and David Zinsner - who were tapped as co-CEOs after the ouster of former CEO Pat Gelsinger last week - were asked if the company's continued combination of manufacturing and design was tied to the success of a new chipmaking technology called 18A due next year. Intel plans to use that technology to bring manufacturing of a flagship PC chip back in-house after being forced to outsource its biggest product to rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. "Pragmatically, do I think it makes sense that they're completely separated and there's no tie?" Holthaus said of the company's product and manufacturing divisions. "I don't think so. But someone will decide that."

Zinsner, also chief financial officer, outlined how Intel is already separating the finances and operations of this manufacturing division into a standalone subsidiary. Zinsner said Intel Foundry, as the division is known, is already run separately from Intel's other businesses and is setting up a separate operational board and business process software system. "That's going to happen," Zinsner said. "Does it ever fully separate? That's an open question for another day."

The Verge thinks Valve "could make a play to dethrone the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft." And it's not just because there's lots of new SteamOS hardware on the way (including a wireless VR headset and a pair of trackable wands, a Steam Controller 2 gamepad, and a living room console.

"Valve has also now seemingly revealed plans for partners to create third-party SteamOS hardware too." It won't be easy to take on Sony, Microsoft, or Meta. Those companies have a lot to lose, and they're deeply entrenched. But the Steam Deck has revealed a massive weakness in each of their businesses that may take them years to correct — the desire to play a huge library of games anytime, anywhere. And while they figure that out, Valve may be building an entire new ecosystem of SteamOS hardware, one that could finally let PC and peripheral makers tap into the huge and growing library of Windows games on all sorts of different hardware without relying on Microsoft or subjecting their customers to the many annoyances of Windows...

Valve has long said it will open up SteamOS to other manufacturers, even recently committing to some direct support for rival handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally — and the other week, Valve quietly updated a document that may reveal its larger overarching strategy. It won't just leave SteamOS sitting around and hope manufacturers build something — it'll hold their hand. Valve now has an explicit label for third parties to create "Powered by SteamOS" devices, which it explicitly defines as "hardware running the SteamOS operating system, implemented in close collaboration with Valve." It additionally lets companies create "Steam Compatible" hardware that ships with "Valve approved controller inputs," as well as SteamVR hardware and Steam Link hardware that lets you stream games from one device to another...

When Valve asked PC manufacturers to sign onto its Steam Machines initiative over a decade ago, with the idea of building living room PC consoles, it asked for a leap of faith with very little to show and a tiny chance of success. It took years for Valve to even build the oddball living room controller for its Steam Machines, and it didn't get far in convincing Windows game developers to port their games to Linux. But by the time it announced the Steam Deck, Valve had hammered out a Proton software compatibility layer so good that many Windows games now run better on Linux, and created the most customizable yet familiar set of controls ever made. If manufacturers could build their own Steam Machines rather than equivalent Windows machines, they could offer better gaming products than they do today. Maybe they'd even want to release a VR headset that isn't tied to Microsoft or Meta if it doubled as a Steam Deck, portably playing decades of flatscreen games.

It's not clear any of this will pan out; Valve is an exceedingly small company that tries not to chase too many things at a time. When I speak to PC industry executives about why they pick Windows over SteamOS, some say they're concerned about whether Valve would truly be able to support them. But it's just as intriguing an idea as it was 12 years ago when Gabe Newell explained the initial vision to us, and this time, there's a far better chance it'll work.
"Today, every major PC company is building one or more Steam Deck rivals," the article points out. "But without Valve's blessing and support, they're saddled with a Windows OS that doesn't start, pause, and resume games quickly and seamlessly enough to feel portable and easy..."

Each day leading up through the 16th (the official day Half-Life 2 was launched), Ars Technica will be publishing a new article looking back at the game and its impact. Here's an excerpt from an article published today by Ars Technica's Kyle Orland: When millions of eager gamers first installed Half-Life 2 20 years ago, many, if not most, of them found they needed to install another piece of software alongside it. Few at the time could imagine that piece of companion software -- with the pithy name Steam -- would eventually become the key distribution point and social networking center for the entire PC gaming ecosystem, making the idea of physical PC games an anachronism in the process.

While Half-Life 2 wasn't the first Valve game released on Steam, it was the first high-profile title to require the platform, even for players installing the game from physical retail discs. That requirement gave Valve access to millions of gamers with new Steam accounts and helped the company bypass traditional retail publishers of the day by directly marketing and selling its games (and, eventually, games from other developers). But 2004-era Steam also faced a vociferous backlash from players who saw the software as a piece of nuisance DRM (digital rights management) that did little to justify its existence at the time. In honor of the anniversary, Orbifold Studios released a new Half-Life 2 RTX trailer. "[T]his is a remastering project that leverages the technologies of NVIDIA's RTX Remix and has the blessing of the original developer, Valve," reports Wccftech. "Orbifold Studios, a team of experienced modders, was founded specifically to bring this project to fruition." It's unclear when exactly this project will be finished.

Nvidia is also giving away a custom Half-Life 2 themed RTX 480 Super Founders Edition.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After dragging its feet for years, Microsoft has finally released the first official Windows 11 ISOs for PCs with an Arm64 processor. This means users can now clean install Windows 11 using official offline media on an Arm64-based PC, including the latest Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs.

The ISOs contain version 24H2 can be downloaded from the official Microsoft website, and are around 5GB in size depending on the language you select. According to the company, the ISOs are primarily designed for running Windows 11 in a virtual machine on Arm64 PCs. However, it also mentions that you can use them to clean install Windows 11 directly onto Arm64 hardware too.Unfortunately, depending on the Arm64 PC you have, you may need to do some additional work to get the ISO bootable.

Microsoft is once again delaying the roll out of its controversial Recall feature for Copilot Plus PCs. From a report: The software giant had planned to start testing Recall, which creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a Copilot Plus PC, with Windows Insiders in October. Now, Microsoft says it needs more time to get the feature ready.

"We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we're taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders," says Brandon LeBlanc, senior product manager of Windows, in a statement to The Verge. "Originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs by December."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Liliputing: The Fedora Asahi Remix GNU/Linux distribution is now shipping with alpha versions of OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers that allow you to play some games on Macs with M1 or M2 series processors. But there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that most of the PC games you're likely going to want to play are designed to run on Windows PCs with DirectX drivers and x86 processors. So there's some emulation required to get them to run on Macs with ARM-based processors, a Linux-based operating system, and Vulkan drivers.

Some of the work was also made possible by the folks at Valve, who developed the Proton software that allows many PC games to run on Linux. And during a live demo at XDC 2024, developer Alyssa Rosenzweig demonstrated the Steam game client loading and running on an Apple Silicon Mac running Asahi Linux. For that reason, it takes a lot of RAM -- according to the Asahi team, "most games require 16GB of memory due to emulation overhead." So you're probably not going to be able to do much entry-level gaming on an entry-level Mac with just 8GB of RAM.

Some of the titles that have been confirmed to be playable include Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, Control, Portal 2, and Ghostrunner. But there's a difference between playable and smooth. Developers say performance improvements will be required before "newer AAA titles" can run at 60 frames per second or higher. But less demanding games like Hollow Knight should run at full speed.

The latest Windows personal computers with AI features have "the best specs" on "all the benchmarks," Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella recently said. There is one problem: The chips inside current models are incompatible with many leading videogames. From a report: Microsoft and its partners this spring rolled out Copilot+ PCs that include functions such as creating AI-generated pictures and video. Under the hood of the new laptops is a hardware change. Instead of the Intel chips that have powered Microsoft Windows PCs for nearly four decades, the initial Copilot+ PCs to hit the market use Qualcomm chips, which in turn rely on designs from U.K.-based Arm.

Most PC games, including popular multiplayer games such as "League of Legends" and "Fortnite," are made to work with Intel's x86, a chip architecture that has been the standard for many personal computers for decades. To make some of these programs function on the Qualcomm-Arm system, they must be run through a layer of software that translates Intel-speak into Arm-speak. Chip experts say the approach isn't perfect and can result in bugs, glitches or games simply not working. The problem is widespread. About 1,300 PC games have been independently tested to see if they work on Microsoft's new Arm-powered PCs and only about half ran smoothly, said James McWhirter, an analyst with research firm Omdia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Before WordPerfect, the most popular work processor was WordStar. Now, the last ever DOS version has been bundled and set free by one of its biggest fans. WordStar 7.0d was the last-ever DOS release of the classic word processor, and it still has admirers today. A notable enthusiast is Canadian SF writer Robert J Sawyer, who wrote the book that became the TV series Flashforward.

Thanks to his efforts you can now try out this pinnacle of pre-Windows PC programs for professional prose-smiths. Sawyer has taken the final release, packaged it up along with some useful tools -- including DOS emulators for modern Windows -- and shared the result. Now you, too, can revel in the sheer unbridled power of this powerful app. The download is 680MB, but as well as the app itself, full documentation, and some tools to help translate WordStar documents to more modern formats, it also includes copies of two FOSS tools that will let you run this MS-DOS application on modern Windows: DOSbox-X and vDosPlus. "The program has been a big part of my career -- not only did I write all 25 of my novels and almost all of my short stories with it (a few date back to the typewriter era), I also in my earlier freelance days wrote hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles with WordStar," says Sawyer.

After months of back and forth, Intel has finally agreed to extend the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs by an additional two years. This extension increases the warranty period for new boxed Intel CPUs from three to five years. For CPUs pre-installed in systems, Intel directs users to contact their PC's manufacturer for support, maintaining its established channels for warranty claims. The Verge adds: Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an "elevated operating voltage" and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won't fix any damage that's already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, it initially seemed like the beginning of the end for Intel's desktop CPU instability woes -- the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the "root cause" of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won't fix it.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom's Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked. Intel is "confident" the patch will keep it from happening in the first place. But if your defective CPU has been damaged, your best option is to replace it instead of tweaking BIOS settings to try and alleviate the problems.

And, Intel confirms, too-high voltages aren't the only reason some of these chips are failing. Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford confirms it's a primary cause, but the company is still investigating. Intel community manager Lex Hoyos also revealed some instability reports can be traced back to an oxidization manufacturing issue that was fixed at an unspecified date last year.

Yesterday, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens asked AI company Anthropic why it was clogging up their server bandwidth without permission. "Do you really need to hit our servers a million times in 24 hours?" Wiens wrote on X. "You're not only taking our content without paying, you're tying up our DevOps resources. Not cool." PC Gamer's Jacob Fox reports: Assuming Wiens isn't massively exaggerating, it's no surprise that this is "typing up our devops resources." A million "hits" per day would do it, and would certainly be enough to justify more than a little annoyance. The thing is, putting this bandwidth chugging in context only makes it more ridiculous, which is what Wiens is getting at. It's not just that an AI company is seemingly clogging up server resources, but that it's been expressly forbidden from using the content on its servers anyway.

There should be no reason for an AI company to hit the iFixit site because its terms of service state that "copying or distributing any Content, materials or design elements on the Site for any other purpose, including training a machine learning or AI model, is strictly prohibited without the express prior written permission of iFixit." Unless it wants us to believe it's not going to use any data it scrapes for these purposes, and it's just doing it for... fun?

Well, whatever the case, iFixit's Wiens decided to have some fun with it and ask Anthropic's own AI, Claude, about the matter, saying to Anthropic, "Don't ask me, ask Claude!" It seems that Claude agrees with iFixit, because when it's asked what it should do if it was training a machine learning model and found the above writing in its terms of service, it responded, in no uncertain terms, "Do not use the content." This is, as Wiens points out, something that could be seen if one simply accessed the terms of service.

The Verge reports that for machines that aren't automatically receiving Crowdstrike's newly-released software fix, Microsoft has released a recovery tool that creates a bootable USB drive. Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file. Microsoft's recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly. This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows. If a disk is protected by BitLocker encryption, the tool will prompt for the BitLocker recovery key and then continue to fix the CrowdStrike update.