performance

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...

Visual Studio 2026’s first Insiders build lands as a clear statement: Microsoft intends to make AI the connective tissue of the IDE while simultaneously modernizing Visual Studio’s foundation for the .NET 10 era. At VSLive! San Diego Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio 2026 (internal version 18.0)...

Microsoft has quietly opened the gates: Windows 11 version 25H2 is now available to testers in the Windows Insider Release Preview channel as a small, fast enablement package that flips features already staged in the 24H2 servicing branch — which means you can install the 2025 annual update on...

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...

JetBrains has pushed a major architectural change into ReSharper 2025.2 that moves most heavy analysis out of Visual Studio’s UI process into a separate 64‑bit worker process — a shift the company says reduces cumulative UI freezes during solution startup by roughly 61 percent in its lab tests...

Rogue Factor’s Hell is Us ships with surprisingly specific PC demands: the studio has published clear minimum, recommended and ultra tiers that lean on modern upscaling tech to make the game playable on mid-range rigs while reserving native 4K/ray-traced fidelity for very high-end GPUs. The...

Windows 11 hides scroll bars by default to keep the interface clean, but a simple accessibility toggle lets you restore permanently visible scroll bars for faster, less jittery navigation—especially useful when scanning long lists, working with spreadsheets, or using touchpads and touchscreens...

Windows hides a high-drain, low-latency power profile called Ultimate Performance that can nudge certain workstation workloads a little faster—but it’s a tool with real trade-offs that should be used deliberately, not by habit. (howtogeek.com, winaero.com) Background Microsoft introduced the...

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...