• irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    47
    ·
    1 day ago

    Don’t delete it, that’ll fuck up your computer. Instead rename it to System64 so you can make full use of all 64 bits your computer has. I tried any and my pc is like 5x times faster.

    • drolex@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      19 hours ago

      Yes, they’ll be thrilled! They love this kind of challenges, they call them ‘absolute fucking dumbass tickets’ - satirically of course. They like me.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 day ago

      Because 16 bit reasons. Also a lot of Windows API is called Win32 regardless of the used bits, as it was the API created for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 originally, with some things added onto it later, and even some kind of deprecated parts

  • Big Baby Thor@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    73
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    2 days ago

    This is also a reminder that Windows and the NT kernel have been so neglected and underdeveloped that it’s a technical house of cards.

    Blame Microsoft for firing their NT kernel team and QA teams in the Windows 9 era to instead automate testing and development.

    In fact, if Europe could just generalise and open source the NT kernel, Windows could actually be usable again.

    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 day ago

      That folder (or rather whatever serves its purpose) has been around since the beginning, so all the 16-bit applications at the time would look for OS libraries in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\.

      Then 32-bit comes along, and you can’t exactly drop 2 files with the same name in the same folder, so the 32-bit ones got put in their own named folder.

      Then 64-bit comes along, and it turns out way too many applications hardcoded the System32 path to change it, so they kept the name the same and inserted a filesystem redirection for legacy 32-bit apps so when they try to read from System32 the kernel redirects that to SysWoW64.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      2 days ago

      I don’t think so anymore. You could probably do some damage if you clicked through the hundred warnings but I don’t think you can remove the whole directory anymore.

      Windows has a secret “System” user which owns most if not all if that, and permissions are now set up such that not even Administrator can touch it. From what I understand those are now hardcoded into the system.

      • olenkoVD@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        21 hours ago

        They’re not hardcoded, you can take ownership of the files with commands (takeown and icacls). As some other user already mentioned, there are ways to start a command prompt as the SYSTEM user. Windows will still not let you delete them however, because most of them are being used by processes.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        2 days ago

        God I hate that System user. Somehow, back when I used Windows, it granted System the ownership of a bunch of folders in my D: that even as an admin I couldn’t delete-- I think because of Microsoft store?

        It wasn’t until I started playing with Linux (Manjaro at the time) that I was able to clean it up. Something like 600gb of game files, lol.

        • terranoid@lemmy.cafe
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          fuck, i wish i knew all this in highschool

          There are some super homophobic dudes i would’ve put gay porn on their desktop and in their documents then made it only system owned with deny delete.

          • Anivia@feddit.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            Why did you have access to their desktops? And surely you could have come up with some other methods to fuck with them if you had access to their desktops

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        You can connect into the system as system and then do all the horrible things. It’s not well publicized because they don’t want you breaking stuff.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        2 days ago

        You certainly can’t delete them all but its possible to rename everything and delete them that way but If I recall windows would likely generate new versions very quickly after some very weird error messages and maybe a restart.

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        2 days ago

        The system user is part of Dos like root is part of Unix. I think what you’re referring to is how the whole OS runs in a virtualization layer because Microsoft doesn’t trust its own kernel. This also disallows a lot of folders from being deleted or modified. I’m not sure if system32 is included.

        • olenkoVD@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          21 hours ago

          The system user is part of Dos like root is part of Unix. I don’t think DOS supported multiple users, nor some kind of ACL. The system user is only part of Windows, after 98 I think.