Fable isn't the first.
In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold.
Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.
@KineticElle I got a simpler answer for you "newer models are simpler to crack because they are shells of the original engine so it carries flaws that can be exploited over time or with the assistance of another original competitive engine" because they are less hardened.
Spent the morning diagnostic-auditing a Windows 11 Insider build on Snapdragon X Elite (ARM64). The goal: hunt down system instability & major disk bloat. Here is a quick thread on what we found, and some quirks of running WSL/Docker on Copilot+ PCs. ๐งต
Finally, logs showed Camera Frame Server crashes (common preview ARM64 driver issue) & empty DNS NRPT table corruption. A simple winsock reset & dns flush resolves the latter. Overall, Snapdragon X Elite dev setups stay surprisingly clean!
Operational lesson: VHDX files never auto-shrink. After pruning Docker inside Linux, running a host-side diskpart -> compact vdisk is mandatory to actually reclaim that space on the Windows drive. Total realistic recovery: ~35-42 GB.
Under /var/lib/docker, we identified a 1.95GB active volume: buildx_buildkit_multiarch0_state. It's not application database data, but BuildKit's transient multi-arch build cache. Pruning this + unused images + builder cache clears 7.2GB.
WSL was not actually bloated (11GB live). Direct inspection of ext4 showed zero duplicate toolchains (Cargo, Rustup, or PNPM). WSL was configured as a root-only, lightweight Docker host wrapperโall dev caches live natively on the Windows host.
The biggest win: Windows.old. Since today's Insider upgrade succeeded, this was 26.6 GB of pure rollback insurance. Easiest recovery via Disk Cleanup. The other major offender was Docker running in WSL, but not in the way we expected.
The fix: Disable centralized Frame Server mode so Windows Hello talks directly to the camera driver:
Set DWORD EnableFrameServerMode to 0 under: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform (and WoW6432Node)
Restart FrameServer service.
Instant logins!
I have been dealing with the same Windows Hello Face unlock bug for 4 Surface Pro generations: the camera takes forever to load, fails to recognize my face, and the white camera light stays stuck 'On' after a failed login.
@Microsoft@surface
I finally diagnosed and fixed it:
Looking at Event Viewer System logs, the Windows Camera Frame Server service (svchost.exe_FrameServer) was repeatedly crashing in ntdll.dll.
Because it crashes mid-stream, it fails to send the 'stop' command to the camera, leaving the hardware light stuck on.