performance

Dave Plummer’s off‑hand confession that his Windows NT port of the beloved 3D Pinball: Space Cadet rendered “as fast as it could” and eventually spiked into the thousands of frames per second is a compact engineering parable: a tiny timing assumption left unchecked, harmless on 1990s hardware...

Dave Plummer’s confession — that his Windows NT port of the beloved Space Cadet pinball ran “as fast as it could,” eventually spiking to “like, 5,000 frames per second” on modern hardware — is as entertaining as it is instructive, and it revisits a compact engineering lesson about timing...

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...

Borderlands 4 arrives on PC alongside consoles on September 12, 2025, and Gearbox’s published PC system requirements make one thing clear: this is a modern‑PC title that expects eight physical CPU cores, fast NVMe storage, and a GPU with 8–12+ GB of VRAM just to be comfortably playable at...

When a talented concept designer reimagines Windows as a glossy, translucency-first OS, the result is visually striking — but the work of turning a mood board into a production-ready operating system is a far bigger engineering challenge than a nine‑minute video suggests. The AR 4789 “Windows...

File Pilot arrived as one of those rare Windows utilities that makes you rethink a core desktop habit — opening and navigating folders — and after testing a half-dozen modern alternatives and a couple of legacy power-user tools, it’s the one that kept my attention. A hands-on review that...

I moved my Windows user folder to another SSD and the system felt like it shook off months of sluggishness almost overnight. Background The Windows user profile — the folder at C:\Users[YourName] — is the single place where Windows keeps your desktop, Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music...

Microsoft Digital’s Employee Productivity Engineering (EPE) team faced a deceptively simple-sounding question with outsized implications: should we build on Microsoft Dataverse — the low-code data platform native to the Power Platform — or rely on Microsoft SQL Server and its mature relational...

Helldivers 2 can be launched and played on a Steam Deck, but the reality is far messier than a simple “works” or “doesn’t work” label — performance is uneven, requires compromise, and Arrowhead’s leadership says formal handheld support isn’t a near-term priority while the studio focuses on...

Mozilla has quietly added Microsoft Copilot to Firefox Nightly’s built‑in AI sidebar, bringing the same Quick Response, Think Deeper and a new “Smart (GPT‑5)” mode that Microsoft uses in Edge — a move that accelerates browser-level AI competition but raises immediate questions about privacy...

Seelen UI has matured from an experimental curiosity into the closest thing Windows currently has to a true, user‑replaceable desktop environment — a unified, extensible shell built on web technologies that reimagines the taskbar, menus, window management, and theming in a single package...

Microsoft has pushed another incremental but important update for on‑device AI: KB5066125 upgrades the Phi Silica AI component to version 1.2508.906.0 for Qualcomm‑powered Copilot+ PCs, delivered automatically through Windows Update to qualifying Windows 11 (24H2) devices. Background / Overview...

Windows 11 ships with a maze of background services: some are essential, some are convenience features, and a surprising number quietly collect data or spin CPU and disk cycles while you work. A recent practical guide singled out a small set of these services as safe targets for trimming —...

Windows Subsystem for Linux has quietly become one of the most consequential developer features in Windows 11 — not because it’s flashy, but because it removes long-standing friction between two operating systems that many of us need to use every day. What used to require dual‑booting, slow...

Microsoft’s latest “Make windows better” brief in Computeractive — published on 27 August 2025 — lands at a difficult moment for Windows users: the countdown to Windows 10 end-of-support is counting down, Windows 11’s AI-driven features are rolling out at scale, and a fresh set of recovery and...

Not long ago, running a Windows PC without a paid third‑party antivirus felt like leaving your front door open — today, that advice is overdue for a rethink because Windows’ built‑in protections are both better and far more capable than most people realize. Background Windows has a long...

FFmpeg’s new assembly lessons have turned a niche skill into a teachable path: a compact, practical curriculum aimed squarely at developers who want to write the kind of hand-optimized SIMD code that still powers the highest-performance media pipelines. The lessons, published as a public...

Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are no longer just browsers—they’re sprawling platforms where AI, privacy controls, and even gaming features are being used as battlegrounds to win users’ attention and loyalty. Background / Overview The modern browser fight is about more than page-load times and...

Windows 12.2 Concept: Containers, Clarity, and a Glassy Future—What It Gets Right, What It Misses, and How Microsoft Could Make It Real Every few months, the Windows community rallies around a beautifully cut concept reel that reimagines the desktop we live in every day. The latest spark comes...

Microsoft's latest Stable release of Edge, version 139.0.3405.111, quietly brings a small but useful productivity tweak — Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Summarization baked directly into the right-click context menu — alongside a roster of bug fixes and performance refinements that continue Edge’s...