windows

The seven free apps How‑To Geek lists as “must‑haves” for a fresh Windows install are a solid, pragmatic starting kit — but each choice deserves context, caveats, and practical alternatives before you click Install. The original shortlist (Microsoft PowerToys, Everything, LocalSend, LibreOffice...

Microsoft appears to be turning Notepad into something closer to a lightweight Markdown notebook: Windows Latest reports that Microsoft is testing image support in the Windows 11 Notepad app, with the feature integrated into the app’s existing Markdown/formatting experience, and — importantly —...

Linux isn’t a drop‑in replacement for Windows — it’s a different operating system with different priorities, strengths, and trade‑offs, and the best outcomes come from accepting those differences rather than forcing Linux to imitate Windows. rview The debate “Linux versus Windows” is older than...

A subtle bug in OpenSSL’s POLY1305 implementation — tracked as CVE-2023-4807 — can silently corrupt non‑volatile XMM register state on 64‑bit Windows systems with newer x86_64 CPUs that support AVX512‑IFMA, producing crashes, incorrect results, and in extreme cases a sustained denial of service...

If you’ve ever shut down your PC and felt confident you were starting each day from a clean slate, that feeling can be misleading — Windows’ Fast Startup often keeps the operating system in a halfway state that looks like a shutdown but behaves a lot like hibernation, and for many users the...

Is this software disguised with malware or not. I installed it and selected all the changes I wanted and then there were issues. So I used its option to turn off everything and change it back to default. But some of the settings did not change back so now my windows is slightly changed. I had...

Windows remains the practical default for most desktop users for reasons that go well beyond sticker price: deep vendor support, decades of familiarity, and institutional lock‑in create an ecosystem where the path of least resistance is often the path that leads back to Microsoft. The argument...

Windows didn’t win because it was the best idea in an ideal marketplace; it won because it arrived first, gathered partners, and built an engine of compatibility that still drives desktop computing today. The three reasons most writers point to—software and hardware compatibility, familiarity...

The Hosts file is a tiny plain‑text system file that punches well above its weight: by mapping human‑readable hostnames to IP addresses, it can short‑circuit DNS lookups and control which servers your PC talks to. When the Hosts file is altered—intentionally for testing, by security software, or...

PowerToys is the closest thing Microsoft will give power users: a visible, supported concession that Windows — for the sake of simplicity, security, and scale — left a lot of useful knobs, shortcuts, and shortcuts-to-shortcuts behind as it chased a mainstream-friendly interface. Background...

Microsoft’s chip partner just gave us a hard timing marker: AMD CEO Lisa Su told investors that development of “Microsoft’s next‑gen Xbox featuring an AMD semi‑custom SoC is progressing well to support a launch in 2027,” a cautious but unmistakable signal that the company’s engineering timeline...

When most of us hear "accessibility," our brains jump straight to tools made specifically for people with disabilities. And those absolutely matter. But somewhere along the way, Microsoft turned Windows accessibility into a rich set of productivity and customization features that benefit almost...

Microsoft hasn’t confirmed a “Windows 12” release, but a steady stream of leaks, Copilot-driven product pivots, and hardware moves make a next‑generation, AI‑first Windows a realistic and consequential possibility — one that could reshape system requirements, app compatibility, update cadence...

AMD’s comment last week that its custom silicon is “progressing well to support a launch in 2027” has reset the public timeline for Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox — but industry reporting since has been unequivocal: supplier readiness is not the same thing as a locked-in release date, and 2027...

Winslop’s latest build doubles down on the project’s promise: a tiny, local, no‑telemetry utility that exposes the exact changes it will make to Windows and gives users simple, reversible controls to remove what the developer calls “system slop.” The 0.50.125 release focuses less on flashy UI...

Microsoft has quietly added a new twist to the Windows 11 out‑of‑box experience (OOBE): while your PC downloads the latest updates during initial setup, you can now open and try Copilot — Microsoft's conversational AI — directly inside the setup flow without first signing in with a Microsoft...

I was locked out of Notepad by a Microsoft service error, and the experience revealed a larger problem: parts of Windows that used to be predictably local now depend on cloud services, accounts, and packaged app behavior in ways that surprise — and sometimes strand — users. Background: why a...

Mozilla pushed a targeted maintenance update this week — Firefox 147.0.3 — to repair a cluster of user-facing UI regressions and minor interoperability issues introduced during the January 2026 147 train. The build, published to Firefox’s release channel on February 4, 2026, bundles focused...

Microsoft has quietly moved another piece of its once‑ambitious 3D strategy onto the chopping block: 3D Viewer — the lightweight model inspector that shipped with Windows 10 and served as Microsoft’s simple bridge for viewing and inspecting glTF, OBJ, FBX and other model formats — was formally...

Mozilla has shipped Firefox 147.0.3 — a small but important dot-release that patches multiple user-facing regressions introduced with the 147 train and, critically for Windows users, addresses a set of UI and popup-placement problems that left some people unable to interact with context menus...