I've been an Insider for years, going back to Windows 10 and I think the early days of the program, but the last few years it has felt pretty pointless because I am never getting anything rolled out to me until after it goes live.

I used to have two of my PCs on insider builds, but after I had to reinstall on the one PC due to a hardware failure, I left that PC on Live, and it got the updated Start Menu months before my Canary build did.

I know I could force it with the Vive tool, but I don't really want to have to do that just to preview, test, and give feedback on new features, it seems to me that was supposed to be the point of the program.

I get phased rollouts are important and need to be tested as well, but it feels like the rollout period is just way too long.

Hi,

I was hoping for a bit of guidance. I've been on Windows 11 since around 2020. I built a new PC and activated it from a previous Windows 7 or 8 pro key that I'd had for a few years prior before I moved to Mac/Linux.

For the last 5 or so years I've happily used Windows 11 and insider builds. I've re-formatted, re-installed and always activated by logging into my Microsoft account during the install.

I've just downloaded the 26H2 ISO and re-installed from scratch, not only did it not activate when I logged in the first-time during install but now I can't active it at all and I've been through all the troubleshooting steps. I've tried removing old devices from my microsoft account, I found a few troubleshooting tips with slmgr etc.

I'm not against buying a new retail key BUT I still feel like I'm missing something, has something changed, has my old entitlement finally ended (I've not reinstalled in probably 6 months or so) or is this something specific with the most recent insider build.

My windows insider settings look correct (I'm logged in with the same account).

Most of my web research has found articles about hacking windows or using a grey key, that's not what I want, I have had legitimate windows key for years. I'll buy a new one if I'm genuinely now expired it just seems a coincidence against recently installing the latest dev build.

Thanks

I bought this computer about three weeks ago, and not long after that it started randomly blue-screening. At first it would happen every once in a while, but eventually I had three crashes back-to-back. Since I’m pretty new to troubleshooting this kind of thing, I started digging into it with help and a lot of trial and error. My wife was pretty frustrated that a brand-new computer was already giving me problems.
One thing that stood out right away was when the crashes happened. They almost always occurred while the computer was sitting idle, downloading games, or doing something in the background. I can play games for hours without a single issue.

Specs
\-Alienware 16X Aurora AC16251
\-Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (Arrow Lake)
\-32 GB DDR5-5600
\-BIOS 2.4.0
\-Windows 11 Build 26100/26200 family
\-Modern Standby (S0 Low Power Idle only)

The bugchecks I’ve seen include:
0x1E – KMODE\_EXCEPTION\_NOT\_HANDLED
0x3B – SYSTEM\_SERVICE\_EXCEPTION
0x7E – SYSTEM\_THREAD\_EXCEPTION\_NOT\_HANDLED

The common exception across them is 0xC0000005 (Access Violation).
Failure hash:
6f13343d-8edf-14f9-0269-6df067c74f57

BlueScreenView almost always points to ntoskrnl.exe, but it never consistently identifies the same third-party driver.

**Hardware checks**
I couldn’t find any evidence of:
Bad RAM
GPU overheating
CPU overheating
WHEA hardware errors
Machine Check Exceptions

**Driver troubleshooting**
The first thing I did was reinstall every driver from Dell’s support page for my specific system.
After that, I enabled Driver Verifier hoping it would identify a faulty driver. Early minidumps repeatedly referenced the Intel NPU driver (npu\_kmd.sys version 32.0.100.4724), so I disabled the Intel NPU in Device Manager. The crashes continued, so that didn’t appear to be the root cause.

Across nearly every dump I continued seeing Intel platform power management components such as:
intelpep.sys
Intel PMT
ipf\_acpi.sys
ipf\_lf.sys
Intel Dynamic Tuning / IPF
Intel Management Engine components

They appeared frequently, but none of them were clearly identified as the driver causing the corruption.
At that point I performed a completely clean Windows installation. The crashes continued.
I also used DDU to completely remove and reinstall my GPU drivers. No change.
Reliability Monitor showed repeated Dell D3 Svc DTH Sub Agent failures around some of the earlier crashes, so I removed both McAfee and Dell SupportAssist. That also made no difference.
The only thing that noticeably changed the behavior was disabling sleep, disabling display sleep, disabling the Intel NPU, and forcing the system to use only the dedicated GPU. Instead of crashing multiple times a day, the system could sometimes run for a day or two before crashing again. The issue became less frequent, but it never disappeared.

I also attempted ETW tracing several times, but the machine would often crash again before I could stop the trace and save the results.
At that point my working theory was that the repeated Intel power management components were related somehow, but I still couldn’t identify a single driver responsible.

While searching for similar reports, I found a Microsoft Q&A thread from someone running an Alienware 18 with very similar symptoms. Their conclusion was that the crash occurred inside Windows kernel pool management rather than pointing to a specific driver. Since then I’ve seen more users posting similar reports.
I switched from collecting minidumps to full kernel memory dumps and analyzed them with WinDbg.

The full dump paints a much clearer picture.
The crash occurs when Windows accesses a corrupted kernel memory structure. Ntoskrnl.exe itself doesn’t appear to be the original cause. Instead, something corrupted kernel memory earlier, and the corruption isn’t detected until later when the kernel accesses that damaged structure.

Running both the minidumps and the full dump through additional analysis consistently pointed to:
FAILURE\_BUCKET\_ID: AV\_nt!ExpPoolTrackerChargeEntry
PROCESS\_NAME: sihost.exe
The interesting part is that sihost.exe (Shell Infrastructure Host) is just the process that happened to touch the corrupted memory. It was opening a registry key when Windows attempted to update kernel pool accounting.

The faulting instruction:
lock xadd qword ptr \[r14+r8\], rbp
was attempting an atomic update using an invalid pointer. The access violation occurred near the guard page for sihost.exe’s expanded kernel stack, which looks much more like previously corrupted data finally being accessed than a bug inside sihost.exe itself.
Based on everything I’ve found, this looks less like a faulty application or driver crashing directly and more like memory corruption that’s only detected later by the Windows kernel.

If anyone doesn’t know, full kernel dumps contain much more useful information than standard minidumps. Most users never enable them, so Microsoft may not be seeing enough of the data needed to connect these reports.

If you’d like to look at my dumps and supporting files, I’ve uploaded them in my Dell forum thread.

One final note: Dell support has told me they’re aware of the issue, but motherboard replacements are still being recommended in many support cases. If this is the same issue I’m seeing, replacing motherboards is unlikely to solve it. It would be far more valuable if these reports, along with the associated dumps, reached the Windows kernel engineers for investigation. If anyone has contacts on the Microsoft kernel team or knows the best way to get this in front of the right people, I’d appreciate the advice. I’ve already submitted multiple feedback reports and they guys on the Microsoft q&a have as well.

I only just enrolled in Windows Insider
I am on stable 25H2 right now

Windows Update says I have no update??? I’m on experimental channel selected and I know there’s a newer build number, tried restarting many times too

I put my PC on the Beta insider update track and haven't been able to download a Preview update for 4 months. The .NET, driver, etc updates work fine. The "Preview Feature" downloads completes but the "Install" phase stalls out anywhere between 20% and 95% and fails.

I’d like to just unenroll next time there’s a new version, but the "Unenroll this device when the next version of windows releases" option is greyed out.

I have a free Microsoft account and my OS is registered there.

Any ideas? My PC came with an OEM build and no install media so reinstalling will be more of a hassle than it usually is.

Since Microsoft is stepping up the changes they are making to Windows, I was wondering if it might be fun to have a bug bash? What do you think?

I had this message myself; I am in the Release Preview Channel of Windows 11 25h2.
But I found a solution that works: Changing the update channel for Windows Defender only.

It is possible that your current update channel is in the beta channel, which is why Microsoft Defender is currently "maybe" finding an error in the hash of a file. You can check this in your Windows event viewer.

You can manually adjust the update channel to the Current Channel (Staged) of Windows Defender.

PowerShell:

Set-MpPreference -EngineUpdatesChannel Staged

Set-MpPreference -PlatformUpdatesChannel Staged

Set-MpPreference -DefinitionUpdatesChannel Staged

Then in cmd:

cd "C:\Program Files\Windows Defender"

MpCmdRun.exe -ResetPlatform

Finally, check for new updates/definition updates in Windows

You are now in Current Channel (Staged) instead of Beta Channel in Microsoft Defender.

This worked for me. It might be worth a try; you can find information about this on the internet.

https://preview.redd.it/0ztddqmt0rah1.png?width=456&format=png&auto=webp&s=9744b18799d00cf7340776cbc70304f46ac677b5

After installing update computer locks up after running for 5 mins forcing a power button shut down only for it to repeat itself after restarting!

I switched from Windows 10 to Windows 11 Home Insider preview version in 2021. My laptop is a 2019 Dell Inspiron 7591 with i5 9th gen, 16gb ddr4 and 512gb ssd and a GTX 1050 with 3gb vram. Should I switch to windows 11 stable release? If yes how can I do it? Or should I go back to windows 10? Or should I stay with the windows 11 preview version?

I don't do any development work. I'm not a techie. My friend had forced me to download it and now I think that was a bad choice.

Any help will be very helpful. Thank you.

Hey guys, I'm new to the sub! Hope all of you are well. I am running an LG gram and I ran into a really weird problem with my laptop recently. This isn't a support request. I wanted to document an unusual issue I investigated on Windows 11 25H2 in case anyone else has seen similar behavior or can explain the underlying mechanism. A few days ago I noticed something strange, my SSD had lost almost 58 GB of free space over the course of a few months, despite not installing anything large.

I expected to find a forgotten game or VM.

Instead, I ended up spending several days debugging one of the strangest Windows issues I've run into.

The culprit turned out to be:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\CapabilityAccessManager\

More specifically,

CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal

a SQLite write-ahead log (WAL) used by the Windows Capability Access Manager Service (camsvc).

At one point the WAL had grown to almost 58 GB.

What I tried

The obvious hardware checks all came back clean:

• SMART
• CHKDSK
• DISM
• SFC

No corruption.

Using WizTree, Sysinternals Handle, PowerShell, SQLite, and Event Viewer, I eventually traced the file back to camsvc.

After rebuilding the SQLite WAL in Safe Mode, I recovered roughly 58 GB of disk space.

At that point I thought the problem was solved.

It wasn't.

The interesting part

I started monitoring the WAL every 30 seconds with PowerShell.

Instead of remaining almost idle, it was continuously growing.

Example:

622 MB
623 MB
624 MB
625 MB
...
640 MB
641 MB
642 MB

roughly every 30 seconds.

So I started disabling Windows features one by one.

Some observations:

• Disabling Bluetooth caused WAL growth to stop temporarily.
• Disabling Camera and Microphone access reduced activity.
• The strongest correlation so far has been Location Services.

With Location Services enabled, the WAL grows continuously.

When I stop the Location Service, growth immediately stops and the timestamp freezes.

Restarting the service causes writes to resume.

Current hypothesis

I don't think this is an SSD issue.

I also don't think it's malware.

At this point my best hypothesis is that something is repeatedly triggering capability/privacy logging inside Windows, causing the SQLite WAL to accumulate writes much faster than expected.

I still don't know whether this is:

• a Windows bug,
• an OEM image issue,
• a driver interaction,
• or a specific combination of hardware and Windows services.

That's why i'm saying that I did not find the definitive root cause yet.

I'm curious to see if anyone else seen CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal grow into the hundreds of MBs or even GBs?

If you've seen similar behavior, I'd love to compare hardware, Windows version, and drivers to see if there's a common pattern.

DISCLAIMER: This post was written by me and edited with Grammarly. Thanks a lot for reading!

Hey guys.

I want to love my Surface Laptop 8 but... I'm getting recurring BSODs. build 28000.2333, Windows 11 26H1. I wanted to see if anyone else is hitting this?

Stop code: SECURE_KERNEL_ERROR (0x18B)

It crashes on builds 28000.1830 (OEM) and .2333 (release preview).

I tried disabling Windows Hello entirely but I still get crashes. I've had 7 crashes over 4 days. Not usable!

I published my dumps in Feedback Hub.

I can't be the only one??

Build (26300.8697)

I installed the build yesterday from the GA build. I had no issues until I upgraded to the Dev. build. As soon as I did, about 30 seconds after I turn my computer on or restart a box slides out in the action center telling me to turn virus protection on. It goes on to say that virus protection is off. When I check Windows Security, it says that it is on. I'm posting this here because it started after I installed the Dev. build and I thought it was curious that it was doing that.