A Quick Look at Windows Setup in Windows vNext

I’ve written books about every major Windows release since Windows 95, and so I track the changes coming in each product version carefully. Granted, this is a lot more difficult in the Windows 11 era because Microsoft subverts its own testing hierarchy by unpredictably releasing new features at odd times, and it and often skips testing stages in the Windows Insider Preview Program or foregoes pre-release testing altogether.

I complain about that behavior a lot, of course, but one of the lower-level concerns I have with Windows 11 is that today’s Windows team seems incapable of updating the foundational technologies that underlie this platform, focusing instead on superficial and surface-level changes. The most obvious example of this issue is File Explorer, where Microsoft has allowed this core app to suffer from ongoing performance and reliability issues while it continuously updates its user interface in ways that simply don’t matter at all to most users.

But some critical user interfaces haven’t been touched in decades. And so I was thrilled to discover this week that Microsoft is going to finally update an interface I didn’t think it would ever bother with again, the Windows Setup first-boot experience. This is the experience you get when you perform a clean installation of the operating system, and it appears before the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) that’s more familiar because everyone sees that when booting up a new PC or after resetting an existing PC. Microsoft updated the OOBE for the initial version of Windows 11 in 2021, but it the first-boot experience has languished since its introduction over two decades in Longhorn, though its underpinning are rooted in the earliest versions of Windows NT.

Yes, this is the kind of thing that fascinates me.

Here’s what the first screen of the Windows Setup first-boot experience looked like in Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows 11 (all versions), respectively. I took all of these screenshots for the books I wrote about each release.

Aside from some color differences (and, with the Vista and Windows 7, some resolution differences), the biggest change in the past 20 years has been the removal of the graphical backgrounds, which I assume was done to save space on the installation media. But with the next version of Windows—likely to be called Windows 12 or Windows 11 version 24H2—it’s all changing.

In this coming system, the first-run experience is getting a visual update that matches what we see in the Windows 11 Installation Assistant. And that first screen is being replaced by three separate screens. Like so:

This is a good change: It’s not clear that current versions of the Windows 11 installation media can be used to repair a PC, but this version makes that obvious.

And there are other changes, as noted below.

This screen is currently called “Activate Windows,” but you can skip entering a product key as always. Oddly, the language is older here: The screen doesn’t use the term “DVD” but instead references “the box that Windows came in.” (I suspect this is legacy placeholder language and will be updated.)

Here, the term “image” is used instead of “operating system,” also odd.

The EULA is unchanged, but how you accept it has changed: Previously, you checked on option named “I accept the Microsoft License Terms. If an organization is licensing it, I am authorized to bind the organization” before clicking “Next.” Now, you just click “Accept.”

After this, the superfluous “Which type of installation do you want?” screen goes missing. This was where you chose between an upgrade and clean (“custom”) installation. My guess is that this screen will appear if Setup detects an OS on the disk.

This screen looks different from the corresponding screen in previous versions—most obviously, the option buttons are located above the partition list instead of below—but it has also adds an additional option, “Bring Disk Online” and renames some options for clarity. (“Delete” is now “Delete Partition,” for example, and “New” is now “Create Partition.”

There is no corresponding screen in Windows Setup today. Guessing again, I suspect you could switch between upgrade and clean install options here if Setup detected an OS on disk, similar to how Reset This PC works now. (The “Check device specifications” link just pops-up a dialog displayable a non-clickable URL for some reason.)

This screen replaces a screen that is styled like the rest of the first-run experience that does the same thing. (This is similar to how the Windows 11 Upgrade Assistant works.) It must be doing the same thing: Copying Windows files, getting files ready for installation, installing features, and then installing updates.

After a reboot, things return to normal. There are no changes from here to the end.

I like it, but I’m curious to see how or if this changes going forward. It does have a half-finished vibe to it currently.