power users

Windows 11’s newest surface-level additions — a top‑of‑screen Snap Assist flyout and a persistent Drag Tray for quick file sharing — are small in isolation but consequential when judged by how they change muscle memory, focus, and power‑user workflows. Background Microsoft has steadily evolved...

Microsoft’s claim that Windows 11 now reaches “over 1 billion monthly active devices” landed like a victory lap — and immediately reopened a broader debate about the state of the operating system. The milestone, flagged in Microsoft’s Windows Experience Blog, coincided with intense and public...

As AI reaches the point of being an everyday workplace tool, a stark divide is emerging between two very different classes of users — and the gap is already shaping who wins and who falls behind in productivity, security and competitive advantage. Martin Alderson’s recent essay calling out...

If you rely on the Microsoft Store as your sole source of Windows apps, you’re missing some of the most useful, time-tested tools power users and everyday PC owners still turn to every day. A recent roundup revived an old truth: despite big improvements to the Store in 2024–2025, several...

Microsoft’s relationship with its community is fraying in interesting ways: while official channels stumble through inconsistent UX priorities and half-finished features, creative outsiders—modders, indie developers, and small utility authors—are quietly filling the gaps, innovating faster than...

Microsoft’s recent reshuffle of Windows 10’s admin and system shortcuts into a consolidated Windows Tools panel is a quiet but practical change that brings together pieces of the Control Panel, Administrative Tools, PowerShell, Accessories and System shortcuts into one searchable...

A compact, community-built PowerShell toolkit called RemoveWindowsAI has rapidly become the go-to shortcut for Windows 11 users who want to strip Copilot, Recall, and a broad sweep of built‑in AI surfaces from their PCs — but its convenience comes with real, measurable risks for update...

Windows already ships a decent set of utilities, but a handful of small, focused open‑source apps deliver everyday quality‑of‑life features so clean and well‑engineered that they deserve serious consideration from Microsoft — either as built‑in capabilities, tightly integrated optional...

A blunt verdict from a veteran voice — “Windows sucks” — has landed squarely in the middle of a fraught moment for Microsoft, and the critique is paired with a compact, engineer-first repair plan that deserves more than headline snark. The speaker is Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer...

Microsoft appears to be quietly replacing one of Windows’ oldest, most utilitarian UI elements with something that finally fits the visual language of Windows 11 — a modernized Run dialog that behaves like a lightweight launcher while preserving the simple power-user workflow long associated...

Microsoft’s decades-old Run box is finally getting a makeover — and for the first time in nearly 30 years you may find two Run experiences inside Windows 11: the classic compact dialog that millions of power users rely on, and a new, modernized Run dialog built with WinUI/Fluent visuals and an...

Windows 11’s recent servicing cycle has slipped from irritating bugs into operational risk: critical shell components fail to initialize, recovery environments lose input, developer localhost servers break, and a steady stream of cumulative updates has forced administrators and home users into...

Microsoft's Windows leadership has acknowledged a fierce backlash to its latest public framing of the platform: in a short but consequential post that described "Windows evolving into an agentic OS," the company's Windows chief drew a wave of criticism from developers, power users, and...

Dave Plummer — the retired Microsoft engineer best known for authoring the original Windows Task Manager — has published a blunt, short video and accompanying commentary arguing that modern Windows “sucks” for a sizeable and influential subset of users, and he’s offering a compact, practical...

FlyOOBE’s newest releases make it remarkably easy to flip hidden Windows feature flags — the same switches ViVeTool has exposed for years — by wrapping ViVeTool in a graphical interface so you can paste feature IDs and enable or disable them without touching the command line. Background /...

Shutting down a laptop using only the keyboard is a small skill with outsized value — it can save unsaved work, rescue you from a frozen touchpad, and give you immediate control when the GUI stops responding, and the methods below work reliably across modern Windows versions like Windows 10 and...

Dave Plummer — the engineer behind Windows Task Manager, ZIP Folders, the Space Cadet Pinball port for Windows NT and a string of other Windows-era utilities — has published a blunt, pragmatic video outlining why parts of Windows “suck” for advanced users and how Microsoft could fix it. His...

Last month’s forced farewell to Windows 10 and a blunt, public critique from a former Microsoft engineer have exposed a widening gulf between the operating system Microsoft builds for “everyone” and what experienced users actually want to do with their PCs. The company’s marketing — including a...

Windows has a lot going for it under the hood — a mature kernel, a battle-tested storage stack, a sprawling driver ecosystem — and yet for many long-time users the day-to-day experience feels noisy, opinionated, and friction-filled. That’s the blunt diagnosis former Microsoft engineer Dave...

Creating a desktop shortcut in Windows 11 is one of the simplest, highest-impact customizations you can make to speed up your daily workflow and keep the tools you use most within a single click of the mouse. This feature remains stable across Windows 11 builds and supports everything from...