Featured content

Windows Central is asking readers to help shape its editorial future with a short audience survey that promises a quick feedback loop and a prize draw — an Amazon gift card worth $250 (or £200 for U.K. winners) — and the move highlights how major technology publishers are trying to realign coverage, product guidance, and community features around real reader needs. Background Windows Central has positioned itself as a leading destination for coverage of Microsoft, Windows, Xbox, and PC...

Microsoft’s quiet march to modernize Notepad has accelerated: a lightweight formatting layer that supports bold, italics, hyperlinks, lists, headings and rendered Markdown is now available in Insider builds, and follow‑on updates add native table editing and streaming AI responses — changes that reshape Notepad from a minimal plain‑text scratchpad into a Markdown‑aware, Copilot‑tethered writing surface. The formatting features arrive with a visible toolbar and a toggle to view raw Markdown...

WhatsApp’s desktop experience has been recast as a resource‑heavy web wrapper that forces Windows users onto a less capable client while the company continues to treat its mobile apps as the feature priority. Background WhatsApp’s desktop story has swung between web views, repackaged containers and a genuinely native Windows client; the most recent pivot replaces the native Windows app with a WebView2‑hosted build of WhatsApp Web distributed through the Microsoft Store. That change delivers...

Microsoft has quietly rolled back the annoying “white flash” in File Explorer’s dark mode: the Patch Tuesday cumulative update KB5072033 corrects a rendering regression introduced by the December preview KB5070311, and also bundles fixes and configuration changes that IT teams need to know about now. Background Microsoft shipped a preview package, KB5070311, on December 1, 2025 that aimed to make Windows 11’s dark theme more consistent across File Explorer and related UI surfaces. The...

Steve Ballmer’s public shrug at a browser-based future captured a defining tension in 2009: a veteran platform company defending a proven stack while a new generation of devices and distribution models rewired how software is created, delivered, and monetized. The question then — whether a web-centric operating model was “an idea whose time had come” — is no longer academic. It shaped how mobile platforms, browsers, cloud services, and even Windows evolved in the decade that followed. This...

Microsoft's third Technical Preview of Azure Stack (TP3) arrives as the last major pre‑GA milestone, bringing a wider slice of Azure's IaaS and PaaS surface to on‑premises environments, a clearer pay‑as‑you‑use model for local consumption, and practical refinements for disconnected and edge scenarios that enterprise teams have been asking for. Background Azure Stack is Microsoft's attempt to offer a cloud‑consistent platform inside customer datacenters: the same APIs, resource model, and...

Businesses moving to Microsoft Azure are increasingly doing it with a partner at their side: a new NetEnrich survey shows most organizations are “very likely” to hire a managed services provider to migrate to or manage Azure, and they point to security, backups and disaster recovery as the single biggest reason to outsource cloud operations. Background Azure adoption has moved well past experiments and into mainstream IT portfolios for many organizations. The NetEnrich survey highlighted...

Microsoft’s final trickle of protection for Windows XP has run dry: the company stopped shipping antimalware updates and the monthly Malicious Software Removal Tool for XP on July 14, 2015, leaving legacy XP systems without any official Microsoft-supplied security updates and pushing long‑term holdouts into a far riskier position. Background Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014, but left a narrow safety valve in place for a limited time: signature and engine...

Microsoft’s weekly roundup of fresh Windows 8 apps leans heavily on casual gaming this week, but it also highlights a small cluster of productivity and educational tools that show how the Windows Store still served a varied audience—even as Microsoft prepared to shift the platform’s direction with the Windows 10 announcement. The BetaNews roundup that inspired this feature names Gameloft’s Puzzle Pets as the week’s App of the Week and collects eight more notable releases and updates, from...

The NHS remains tangled with legacy Windows deployments—an uncomfortable but avoidable risk that surfaced again when a 2014 Freedom of Information exercise found widespread Windows XP use across sampled trusts, even as Whitehall negotiated a short-term, paid extension of Microsoft support to buy migration time. Overview In autumn 2014 Citrix publicly disclosed the results of a Freedom of Information request showing that, among 35 NHS trusts it queried, every trust reported at least some...

This week’s Windows Store roundup brings a mix of polished mobile ports, useful utilities, and a couple of pleasant surprises — from an instructional yoga app that promises a complete practice library to a high‑octane hydrojet racer that finally feels at home on PCs. Highlights include the instructional app All in Yoga, King’s colorful Bubble Witch Saga 3, the handy third‑party Flickr client Fliky, HP’s business‑oriented HP Cirrus, the splashy racing title Riptide GP: Renegade, and...

Two-hundred-and-nineteen in the series: this week’s Windows Store roundup highlights a small but diverse batch of new arrivals — from ambient sound mixers and audiobook players to a GTA-style open-world mobile port and an official HP financial calculator app — plus a newly available ad‑blocking extension for Microsoft Edge and several incremental updates to niche productivity and entertainment clients. Background The weekly “Best Windows 10 apps this week” roundups are designed to surface...

Windows XP’s formal retirement is more than a date on a calendar — it marks the close of a chapter in which Microsoft reinvented the consumer PC by marrying NT-grade stability to mass-market usability, and it offers a useful lens for understanding why some platform experiments fail fast while others age into cultural bedrock. The parallels between XP’s rocky debut and the reception to Windows 8 are striking: both were loudly promoted, initially resisted by parts of the installed base, and...

Wox arrived on Windows as a compact, Spotlight‑style launcher that promised to speed app and file access, slot useful utilities (calculator, color picker, clipboard history) into a single keyboard-driven surface, and let users extend the experience with a rich plugin ecosystem—an approach that remains its defining strength today. The original BetaNews review praised Wox’s quick activation (Alt+Space), expression evaluator, and more than 100 community plugins while noting a practical quirk...

Samsung’s Flow (and related “phone‑to‑PC” partnerships) promised to make a Galaxy phone a true identity key for Windows machines, but the reality behind the BetaNews headline — that you could “unlock any device running Windows 10 Creators Update with a Samsung phone” — is more complicated, conditional, and security‑conscious than the original coverage suggested. What started as a convenient continuity feature grew into a broader set of cross‑device capabilities (file transfer, clipboard...

Windows fans are tired of choosing between flash and frustration: sleek visuals, generous AI features, and an expanding pile of background services that make even fairly modern machines stutter. A recent concept push under the name Windows 12 Lite—popularized in coverage of a concept video by designer AR 4789—frames a direct answer: strip Windows back to essentials, keep the best modern ideas, and give users the ability to opt into heavier AI and service features only when they want them...

Two decades of ritual reinstalling—format, wipe, reinstall—worked once because hardware and vendor practices made it the fastest path to a sane, usable PC, but today that reflex often wastes time and can even leave you worse off. Background / Overview The core argument against habitual clean installs is simple: modern Windows, vendor practices, and available recovery tools have changed the calculus that once made reinstallation the default fix. The original PCMag piece that sparked this...

CES 2026 arrived as a turning point for the Windows PC ecosystem: manufacturers and silicon partners moved beyond heady promises and unveiled concrete Copilot+ PC hardware, new AI-capable silicon, and bold form-factor experiments that together signal a rapid, industry-wide push to make on‑device AI a mainstream expectation rather than an optional headline feature. Background / Overview CES has long been a stage for future-facing hardware, but the 2026 show stood out for one unambiguous...

Microsoft’s abrupt retirement of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) has left a sizable portion of the Windows systems administration community scrambling — existing deployments will continue to run for now, but Microsoft will issue no further updates, security patches, or compatibility fixes, and administrators are being told to remove MDT integrations from Configuration Manager task sequences to prevent corruption. Background MDT began life in the early 2000s as a pragmatic, free...

OMV’s security team says moving its core SOC to Microsoft Sentinel cut incident resolution time in half while unifying disparate telemetry under Microsoft Defender XDR—and the deployment reads like a textbook example of modern SOC consolidation: cloud-native SIEM, customer-managed encryption keys, automation with Logic Apps, and hot/warm/cold data tiering via Azure Data Explorer. The result, according to OMV’s cyber defense leadership, is faster investigations, fewer manual handoffs with...