backup

Windows can be lean, but it rarely is by default — and the difference between a clean, responsive system and one bogged down by invisible cruft often comes down to a handful of targeted tweaks and a readiness to trade a few gigabytes for stability or convenience. The PCWorld checklist of “12...

Kaspersky’s telemetry snapshot lands like a warning siren: in their sampled dataset just weeks before Microsoft’s cut-off, roughly 53% of monitored devices were still running Windows 10, only 33% had migrated to Windows 11, and a measurable tail — about 8.5% — remained on Windows 7, while...

Most PCs built for Windows 10 can still be moved to Windows 11 without buying new hardware — but only if you understand the right workarounds, the trade‑offs, and the dates that matter. Microsoft’s official upgrade channel enforces a strict hardware policy (TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, UEFI, and a...

Microsoft’s refreshed Windows Backup now offers a built‑in, local PC‑to‑PC migration path that makes moving your personal files and many settings from an old Windows PC to a new Windows 11 machine far less painful than past upgrades — but it is not a silver bullet, and there are important...

More than half of the world’s personal computers remain on Windows 10 even as Microsoft’s official support deadline looms, creating a wide and growing security gap that affects consumers, small businesses, and enterprise networks alike. New telemetry shared publicly via cybersecurity vendor...

Create and Use System Restore Points in Windows 10/11 Difficulty: Beginner | Time Required: 10 minutes Introduction System Restore is a built‑in Windows feature that helps you roll back system files, installed programs, registry settings, and drivers to a previous point in time if something goes...

Microsoft's fix for the Windows 10 October 2018 update fiasco was less a single patch than a two‑part response: an immediate halt and guidance to affected users, and direct recovery assistance via Microsoft support technicians who were equipped with specialized recovery tools to attempt to...

If your PC can’t run Windows 11, you’re not alone — and you still have a set of sensible, ranked options to stay secure, productive, and compliant after Windows 10 reaches end of support on October 14, 2025. Background: why this moment matters Microsoft will stop shipping regular security...

If your laptop is still in your hands right now, treat that as a narrow window of opportunity: apply a handful of defensive settings that will protect your data, help you recover the device if it goes missing, and dramatically reduce the damage a thief can do. These changes take minutes, and...

Microsoft has given Windows 10 users a narrow, conditional lifeline: if you plan to keep a Windows 10 PC beyond the platform’s formal end-of-support date, you must complete a specific enrollment flow — or enable a OneDrive backup path — before the October 14, 2025 cutoff to receive one...

If you still have a working copy of Serif PagePlus 7 and a stack of .ppp files, the short answer is: yes — you can usually move PagePlus 7 to a new PC, but it’s rarely a one-click affair and the right approach depends on three things: the installer and product-key you have, the Windows edition...

Windows 11’s crash screen may look familiar, but the reasons behind the crash and the route to recovery are rarely simple — this feature walks through practical, verified BSOD (and the newer black crash‑screen) troubleshooting, consolidates the basic steps Guiding Tech outlines, and layers in...

Computeractive’s “Problems solved” column from the 10 September 2025 issue distils a familiar mix of household tech triage and hard-bitten workshop experience: practical fixes for everyday Windows upgrades, a clear-eyed primer on Microsoft’s new cloud-assisted recovery tool, and an...

Windows 11 hides surprisingly effective storage-management tools inside Settings that can reclaim gigabytes without buying new hardware — and three of them alone will resolve most everyday low‑disk warnings: Storage Sense, changing Where new content is saved, and the Cleanup recommendations...

If you’re planning the move from a Windows 10 PC to a new Windows 11 machine, this is the moment to get it right: files, photos, game saves, and app data are all portable — but not all at once, and not always in the way you might expect. This practical, step‑by‑step feature explains every viable...

The day-to-day grind of maintaining a sprawling Obsidian vault finally pushed one user to try a different path: they migrated thousands of notes into Joplin, and within weeks declared they weren’t going back — praising Joplin’s genuinely open-source model, straightforward sync options, and...

If your Windows 10 or 11 C: drive is running out of space and there's unallocated room elsewhere on the same disk, you can reclaim it — but not always the way you'd expect. Windows built‑in tools require the unallocated space to be immediately to the right of the partition you want to expand...

Set Up Storage Spaces Mirror in Windows 10/11 for Local Redundancy Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 30-45 minutes Introduction Storage Spaces is a built-in Windows feature that lets you group two or more physical drives into a single virtual pool and create resilient storage volumes...

Phison’s latest public testing and community forensics have reframed the mid‑August Windows 11 SSD scare: what began as frantic reports that the Windows 11 August cumulative updates (commonly tracked as KB5063878 and the related KB5062660) were “bricking” NVMe drives now appears to be a...

A small Taiwanese PC‑building community may have just pulled a loose thread that explains a wave of terrifying reports about Windows 11 “bricking” SSDs: the drives that failed in public tests were running pre‑release, engineering firmware — not the production firmware shipped to regular...