Personally, I have never seen this many issues with Windows like today. Even way back in the Windows Vista days. Woah, Windows Vista will be 20 years old in November…
If you are forced to still be on Windows 11.
This file can be found in the following directory,
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\CapabilityAccessManager\
Then see if it shows a huge file size.
Windows Latest found that one particular file called “CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal” can use most of your system storage.
If your PC is affected, the safest fix is to install Windows 11 KB5095093 from Windows Update, or wait for the July 2026 Patch Tuesday update, where the fix is expected to roll out automatically.
Vista was not bad. It gets a lot of hate, but Vista SP1 was rock solid. But 7 came shortly after and Vista never had the Aero Snap/Peek stuff and that was game-changing. 7 should have been a Vista service pack. Vista got shafted.
There were also driver issues, but that’s the fault of lazy vendors. Vista itself was fine, but only just fine.
I like Windows 11 at work well enough (and I have about 30 years of experience with that platform) but at home I’m a happy post-PC Mac user. Honestly there are a couple things Windows does better, and I’m familiar with the platform. But Microsoft needs to learn how to get out of their own way, and the way of power users.
Windows 7 ran well on machines that ran Vista barely usable. Vista deserved the hate it got.
One of the problems with Vista was the push for vendors to mark their machines as Vista ready at all costs, where the minimum requirements were way too low, so a lot of people ended up with their first Vista experience being an anemic one, as opposed to one with the right amount of system power.
Vista was also the first time we saw the UAC elevated privilege pop up which seemed to pop for just the simplest of reasons. Mostly because devs were putting too much of user config in the program files directory, or in the windows system directory. This made it so anytime you changed a user preference the UAC would come and ruin your day. Now we just have the devs shoving everything and anything into %AppData% instead.
Yeah, the one and only PC on which I ever used Vista was a comically under powered laptop that my Mum bought. If it was running XP it would have been solid, but alas, it had 512mb RAM and Vista was thiiiirsty.
I was there for Windows Me. Even Windows 95 I don’t think people today would believe me how often it blue screened or had to be rebooted. Multiple times per day.
We used to have LAN parties back in the day with dialup internet.
We’d need a dedicated machine to just dial up to the internet and share the connection, because that way it could run for a day or more at a time without crashing and kicking everyone off.
I remember the moment where I realised I could just… plug the modem into my new XP machine now. You could use a computer and share internet and it’d work! For days!
There’s a reason XP hung on for so long and the previous versions didn’t. XP was the first version of Windows that people felt was good enough and they didn’t need anything more.
XP was the first NT-version with a Home Edition. If you’d been running Windows 2000 at home you would’ve felt the same way (XP is basically just 2000 with a facelift, NT 5.0 to NT 5.1) and even NT4 was pretty good (though 2000 was better).
The 9x series (95, 98, ME) were built on a different kernel and designed specifically for home use and were, in comparison, terrible. ME was especially terrible as they tried to bring plug-and-play to the 9x core without NT’s hardware abstraction layer and shit did not work well.
I bought a machine right before 7 launched to replace my XP machine. Vista SP2 was solid by then. I ran it for over a year because it was extremely stable.
I waited a bit over a year to install 7 on the machine when it’s SP1 came out.