winget

Windows 11’s taskbar just gained a one‑click “Perform speed test” control — but instead of spinning up a native diagnostic engine, the button opens your default browser and lands on Bing’s internet speed test (the same Speedtest technology Ookla powers in Bing). Background Microsoft has been...

Microsoft’s attempt to build a safe, centralized app ecosystem for Windows began as an inspired idea and then spent more than a decade bouncing between half-measures, bad product bets, and shifting incentives — but over the last two years Microsoft has quietly rebuilt the plumbing and the...

Microsoft’s app-store experiment started with a clear promise — a single, safe place to find and automatically update Windows software — but for more than a decade the reality was a sequence of missteps, confusing platform shifts, and fragmented developer incentives that left most PC users...

Windows 11 hides a surprising number of high-impact productivity tools beneath its clean new interface — features that can shave minutes off repetitive tasks, reduce interruptions, and make multi-app workflows feel effortless once you know where to look. This piece walks through the most useful...

Microsoft’s refreshed Windows Backup now offers a built‑in, local PC‑to‑PC migration path that makes moving your personal files and many settings from an old Windows PC to a new Windows 11 machine far less painful than past upgrades — but it is not a silver bullet, and there are important...

Microsoft’s refreshed Windows Backup now includes a built‑in, local PC‑to‑PC migration path that can move your files and many personalization settings across the local network during Windows 11 setup — making the leap to a new machine faster and less dependent on external services or paid...

Windows 11 now offers a built-in, local PC-to-PC transfer path inside the Windows Backup app that promises to simplify moving your files and settings to a new machine — but it comes with important caveats, sharp trade-offs, and a handful of setup steps most users will need to know before they...

A prominent tech writer has publicly abandoned the Windows 11 Start menu in favor of Flow Launcher, an open‑source, keyboard‑first app launcher — and in doing so rekindled a long‑running debate about how Windows should expose search, system commands, and shortcuts to power users. The transition...

Windows 11 ships with a clear design philosophy: modern, polished, and opinionated. For many users that means a pleasant daily experience out of the box — but it also means defaults that favor discoverability and platform features over minimalism and control. Pocket-lint recently distilled five...

WinGet has quietly become one of the most practical productivity tools in a Windows 11 power user's toolbox — not just for installing apps, but for managing whole system states, enforcing upgrade policies, and automating maintenance. A recent MakeUseOf piece showed four simple WinGet workflows —...

Windows power users have long known the best tools often live outside the commercial software ecosystem, but a recent MakeUseOf roundup highlighting “unbelievably” polished open‑source Windows apps crystallizes just how far free software has come: the list assembles utilities that replace or...

Checking which Python is installed on a Windows PC shouldn’t be a chore — a couple of quick Command Prompt commands and you’ll know whether you’re running Python 3.11, 3.10, 2.7, or nothing at all. This practical guide expands on the quick tips from Windows Report and turns them into a...

Microsoft’s glossy marketing often highlights the big, headline features of Windows 11, but a recent explainer that rounds up “13 features you probably didn’t know about” is a useful reminder: the OS is full of practical, time‑saving tools that rarely make the launch‑pad demo. The original list...

Microsoft PowerToys quietly transforms Windows 11 from a rigid, predictable environment into a highly malleable productivity powerhouse — and once you start using tools like Workspaces, PowerToys Run, FancyZones, Peek, and Keyboard Manager, the OS feels fundamentally different. Toys has evolved...

Microsoft has confirmed that OneNote for Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025, and Microsoft is urging users and organizations to migrate to the newer OneNote on Windows app now to avoid losing editing and sync functionality when the legacy app becomes read-only...

Updating Chrome from the command line with Winget on Windows 11 turns a repetitive, GUI-driven maintenance task into a single, scriptable operation—saving time for power users and administrators while giving clear, auditable control over browser updates. The how-to that follows summarizes the...

Microsoft has quietly removed the long-standing, user-facing option to permanently switch off automatic app updates in the Microsoft Store for many consumer devices, replacing it with a pause-only model that forces automatic updates to resume after a short, fixed interval (commonly one through...

Microsoft has quietly changed how the Microsoft Store handles app updates on Windows 11 and Windows 10: the long-standing option to permanently turn off automatic app updates in the Store UI is being removed for many users, and instead the Store now only offers time-limited pause options...

Microsoft’s recent import of the familiar Linux sudo into Windows is more than a convenience — it’s a signal that the terminal experience on Windows is changing, and that choice and parity with Unix-like workflows are now first-class concerns for Microsoft. The xda-developers piece that sparked...

Ten years after its debut, Windows 10’s story reads less like a single product lifecycle and more like a decade-long experiment in balancing familiarity, compatibility, and incremental innovation — an experiment that, for most users and enterprises, largely succeeded. Background: the rescue that...