diagnostics

If you value privacy on Windows, start by switching off the “Send optional diagnostic data” toggle — it’s the single easiest setting to reduce the amount of behavioral and usage data Windows 11 ships back to Microsoft, and it’s buried in Settings > Privacy & security > Diagnostics & feedback...

Windows’ built‑in telemetry — labeled “Diagnostics & feedback” in Settings — collects far more than crash reports by default, and every Windows user should understand what’s being sent, what they can realistically block, and the trade‑offs involved before they decide whether to turn it down or...

If you just unboxed a new Windows 11 laptop, there are five settings you should consider turning off right away to tighten privacy, reduce distractions, and reclaim background resources for the tasks that matter most. Background / Overview Windows 11 ships with a range of convenience features...

Diagnose App Crashes & Startup Issues with Event Viewer and Custom Views (Win10/11) Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 20-30 minutes Introduction When an app crashes or Windows takes forever to start, the first place to look is the Event Viewer. Event Viewer records system, application...

Windows 11 now puts a quick internet speed check one click away in the Taskbar — but it’s a launcher to Bing’s web tool, not a native measurement engine, and that choice has real implications for accuracy, privacy, and enterprise control. Background Microsoft quietly began testing a new...

Windows 11 now surfaces a one‑click path to a network speed test directly from the taskbar — but for now it’s a shortcut to Bing’s web tool (which itself delegates to Speedtest by Ookla), and it’s only available to Windows Insiders in preview channels. Background Microsoft has quietly started...

When Windows refuses to finish an upgrade, the experience quickly moves from annoying to terrifying: cryptic error codes, long rollbacks, and the gnawing fear of lost files. Millions of Windows users have lived through that loop; the good news is that most upgrade failures are diagnosable and...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 Insider preview builds quietly add a one‑click internet speed‑test shortcut to the taskbar network flyout — but the shortcut simply opens Bing’s web‑based speed test rather than running a native, offline measurement — and the same builds also include a subtle but...

Microsoft is quietly testing a small but notable convenience feature in Windows 11: a one‑click internet speed test shortcut embedded directly in the network flyout and taskbar context menu — a shortcut that, for now, simply launches Bing’s online speed‑test widget rather than running a native...

When you unbox a new Windows 11 laptop the out‑of‑the‑box experience is deliberately full‑featured — but many of the conveniences Microsoft enables by default trade away privacy, clarity, and system headroom. A short, safe checklist of five settings you should disable right after setup can...

Glow’s latest incremental update, Glow 25.11, continues the project’s steady focus on polish, portability and practical diagnostics: the release adds pre‑release support for Windows 11 version 25H2, broad UI and DPI refinements to match modern Windows visuals, targeted speed optimizations...

Glow’s steady, unapologetic march toward a one-stop Windows system-information utility continued this month with reports circling of a new incremental release in the 25.x series — the expected Glow 25.11 update — bringing UI polish, performance optimizations, and deeper platform compatibility...

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 has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by...

Phison’s latest public testing and fresh community forensics have changed the tone of an urgent story that began as “Windows 11 is killing SSDs” and quickly morphed into a complex investigation at the intersection of OS updates, controller firmware, and supply‑chain quirks — with no single party...

Microsoft says its August Windows 11 security update (KB5063878) is not behind the recent wave of reports alleging SSDs and HDDs have been rendered inaccessible or corrupted, but the episode has exposed gaps in forensic clarity and left many users mistrustful of a conclusion drawn without a...

PowerToys quietly hides a few genuinely time-saving features behind its polished dashboard — tools for backing up your entire configuration, automatic diagnostic logs you can read yourself, and an easy plugin system that turns the launcher into a Swiss Army knife. These three capabilities alone...

I built a single, portable USB rescue toolkit that boots a full Windows-based recovery environment (PhoenixPE) and a collection of specialized ISOs via Ventoy—giving me password resets, malware removal, disk imaging, memory testing, and a working desktop for troubleshooting without touching the...

Microsoft has concluded its investigation into the mid‑August reports that a recent Windows 11 security rollup (commonly tracked as KB5063878) “bricked” or corrupted some SSDs, saying it found no reproducible link between the update and the wave of drive disappearances — a position echoed by SSD...

Microsoft and Phison have pushed back hard against a wave of social-media claims that the latest Windows 11 cumulative update is “bricking” NVMe SSDs — but the episode exposes a brittle edge case in modern storage stacks, a gap between telemetry and forensic proof, and practical steps every...