backups

Windows-stack websites still matter: in 2025 the best cheap Windows hosting providers combine modern Windows Server support, affordable Windows VPS/shared plans, and clear licensing options — but the trade-offs between cost, control, and compliance are more visible than ever. Background Windows...

Microsoft’s free Windows 10 upgrade became a vehicle for a crop of convincing phishing emails that delivered file‑encrypting ransomware disguised as a legitimate installer, according to security researchers — a reminder that major platform announcements instantly become social‑engineering boons...

ExplorerPatcher’s latest pre-release restores the long-missed File Explorer title bar, patches several Start menu and taskbar regressions, and moves under-the-hood hooking to a new library — but it also ships with a short list of known quirks and a reminder that modifying core shell behavior...

I stopped treating my Windows 11 PC like a personal to-do list and let five small automations do the boring, repetitive work — the result felt like a genuine speed boost in my daily flow. Overview Windows 11 is fast when it’s doing the heavy lifting, but it’s the tiny, repeated tasks — opening...

SonicWall has confirmed a cloud‑backup compromise that exposed firewall configuration preference files stored in certain MySonicWall accounts, and customers who used the service are being urged to act immediately to contain and remediate potential follow‑on attacks. SonicWall’s notice —...

Open‑source software today offers Windows users a practical way to reclaim control, improve privacy, and boost productivity — and ZDNET’s compact roundup of “10 open‑source apps I recommend every Windows user try — for free” is a useful starting kit that does exactly that. Background ZDNET’s...

The Windows 11 taskbar looked like a fresh start—sleeker, centered, more modern—but for many users it felt more like a locked box than a customization canvas. A tiny, unofficial tool called Windhawk changes that: it’s a modular tweaking platform that restores missing functionality, unlocks...

Microsoft’s quiet nudge toward a cloud-first file culture is now more than design preference — it’s a default behavior baked into Windows setup and Office that reshapes how most people will create, save, and think about their documents. Background Microsoft’s strategy has been moving toward...

Windows shipping with System Restore (System Protection) turned off by default is one of those small, baffling defaults that quietly raises the stakes when things go wrong — but it’s also an easy fix that can save hours of troubleshooting and a reinstall. The built‑in System Restore feature...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Windows 11 users faced a sudden and alarming data‑integrity scare when an August cumulative update was linked to a reproducible failure mode that can make certain SSDs “vanish” from the operating system during sustained, large writes — a problem that can truncate files, corrupt partitions, and...

Microsoft and Phison are publicly at odds over whether last month’s Windows 11 cumulative update (commonly tracked as KB5063878) caused data-loss and device‑disappearance issues on some NVMe SSDs — and the debate reveals a messy intersection of community test benches, vendor lab validation...

Microsoft says the recent reports that a Windows 11 cumulative update “bricked” consumer SSDs are not supported by its telemetry and lab findings, and vendor testing so far has failed to reproduce a fleet‑level failure tied to the August servicing wave tracked as KB5063878. Background The story...

Phison’s pre-release controller firmware has emerged as the most plausible explanation for the wave of NVMe SSD “vanishing” and bricking reports that followed Microsoft’s mid‑August Windows 11 cumulative updates — a finding that reframes the incident from a suspected OS regression into a...