Microsoft has just shared an update to DirectX, labelling it "the biggest wave of new tooling features in DirectX’s history." The company, alongside major "GPU hardware partners", has shared its "dream of bringing console-level GPU developer tools to Windows."

Microsoft reports, "AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm have worked closely with us throughout feature development, each making significant contributions to make this release possible."

The new changes come in a few different sections. The first is the introduction of DirectX dump files. As elaborated on in the Microsoft Game Dev blog, "GPU-related bugs can emerge at any point in a game’s lifecycle, and developers have sought more thorough crash-dump infrastructure to understand their causes."

These dump files can help with both retail users and developer machines, giving a better understanding of what has gone wrong and why. Dump files will reportedly give logs on the hardware and driver state, plus the state of DirectX, and what was happening in the game before the dump file was created. Giving more information in condensed forms like this can help with all kinds of troubleshooting.

Another big update to DirectX is the introduction of "Live Shader Debugging". Effectively, this would allow for real-time shader debugging, which is a celebrated feature on Xbox already. It is currently planned for release in 2027. Microsoft claims it is designed for "needle in the haystack" style problems and also reports it's "the deepest GPU tooling collaboration with hardware vendors in Windows history."

This debugging on PC was only shown off as a preview at this year's GDC, but Microsoft says the public can expect more details in the coming months.

Microsoft has also noted its new shader explorer, which it claims is "a new way to inspect, understand and debug compiled shaders, with deeper live analysis".

This new explorer works with Pix, Windows' debugging tool, and Microsoft has shown off a version working on both AMD and Intel hardware. Interestingly, the shader explorer is not paired to the driver, so developers can analyse shaders for GPUs they don't own. This could potentially help with optimising for the myriad hardware forms that make up PC gaming, especially in smaller dev teams with less access to different hardware.

Microsoft points out specific integrations that AMD and Intel have implemented for these new bits of tech, but it points out that "all four have invested in PIX plugin support to surface their hardware-specific information through PIX’s standardized UI."

Given Microsoft's push towards PC gaming with its hybrid next-generation console, Project Helix, there's a good argument for why Microsoft might want to enable console-like dev tools for Windows devices. Project Helix is losing part of its traditional console appeal with its PC gaming capabilities, so giving developers tools to fine-tune and more easily report problems could help with long-term optimisation.

If you're somehow still on Windows 7 and use Firefox, I have some bad news. You will want to update your OS soon. That's according to the latest Mozilla post, which confirms "Firefox version 115 is the last supported Firefox version for users of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1." (via TechSpot).

Mozilla technically started ending support way back in January 2023, but users have been able to access the Extended Support Release (ESR) for critical security updates until now. The ESR will only receive updates until the end of February.

This new update confirms that users won't even receive those security updates anymore. Naturally, being without security updates makes you more vulnerable to bad actors. Mozilla says, "You are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a supported Microsoft Windows version."

It is worth noting that, as Mozilla states, "Most browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, have already ended support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1." Windows 7 was originally released way back in 2009, so it's not a major surprise to think it wouldn't be supported.

Firefox reportedly only ended support for 2001 OS Windows XP (and Windows Vista) in 2023, which means a pretty impressive 19 years of support (accounting for Firefox 1.0 releasing in 2004).

Despite the operating system hitting EOL, Firefox still currently supports Windows 10. Mozilla has affirmed, "You shouldn’t worry: Firefox will continue to support Windows 10 for the foreseeable future."

However, Mozilla doesn't just advise making the upgrade to Windows 10 or Windows 11. The latter has some hardware requirements which may make it hard for you to run it, though these are more standardised and easier to hit nowadays. Or you simply may not like newer versions of Windows.

The Firefox update says, "If your current hardware can't handle Windows 10 or higher for some reason, you can switch to a Linux-based operating system. The vast majority of Linux distributions come with Firefox as the default browser."

If you are still on an older version of Windows and don't fancy the upgrade, maybe it's time to switch to Linux. I know I've been tempted.

It would be foolish to say that this is the final, incontrovertible proof that AI hype has gone too far. After all, just a week ago Microsoft's head of AI was clearly getting high on his own supply when he said that he just didn't get why folks don't like the idea of turning Windows into an "agentic" operating system. But Microsoft is now exhibiting 420BLAZEIT levels of AI hysteria by imagining that the logo for Copilot, a Windows 11 feature that nobody cares about or indeed likes, belongs on its 2025 ugly Christmas sweater.

This year's sweater, dubbed "Artifact," follows the fuzzy XP hills, iconic Windows 3.0 logo, and successive sweaters featuring MS Paint, Minesweeper and Clippy. This year, Clippy returns as a prominent sweater feature, but he's joined by a hodgepodge of other Windows-related logos that frankly scream "lazy clipart compilation." Which might actually be a perfect aesthetic for a nostalgic ugly Christmas sweater, what with the pixel art icons for MS-DOS, Paint, MSN and Internet Explorer.

But then there's Copilot.

Every other icon on the sweater dates back to the 1990s with the odd exception of the Minecraft Creeper, which already feels out of place. But what degree of AI poisoning do you have to have to demand some poor artist render the 2025 Copilot icon in '90s Windows style, in order to awkwardly include it among things that people think of with some degree of fondness? So far, Copilot's biggest accomplishment, other than driving more people to abandon Windows 11 in favor of Linux, is making Clippy appealing by comparison.

How naive of me to think that a single thing under Microsoft's corporate eye of Sauron would be considered sacred. Not even the most innocent and frivolous of things it sells is immune from being enlisted to shore up AI hype.

On the bright side, when you're putting an AI icon next to Clippy on an ugly Christmas sweater in the hopes of accomplishing that goal, you really must be desperate. There's be a delicious sort of irony in such a goofy piece of merch foretelling the eventual bursting of the AI bubble.

Maybe there's hope for RAM prices coming back down to earth yet.

Microsoft is awfully proud of its latest version of Windows, as it claims it's now less prone to failure. This would make for a pleasant change, as the first few months with the software were not great, to put it lightly.

As noted in the Microsoft blog, “We’re also proud to share that Windows 11 24H2 is our most reliable version of Windows yet. Compared to Windows 10 22H2, failure rates for unexpected restarts have dropped by 24%." The data was sourced from Reliability telemetry collected by Microsoft in July 2025.

It goes on to say, "These improvements reflect deep collaboration across engineering, design, and user research teams and a commitment to making Windows more resilient for everyone."

Ever since the 24H2 update launched in October of last year, it feels like we've been inundated with reports of issues. In October, 24H2 left an undeletable 8.63 GB update cache for some users. In that same month, some Western Digital SSD owners ran into constant blue screens. By December, the OS was reported to crash games due to Auto HDR, cause audio device problems, and lead to stuttering.

Then, in January, some Ubisoft games refused to play nice with 24H2. The temporary solution to this Ubisoft problem was blocking the Windows 11 update for PCs with Ubisoft games installed.

Considering the software got rid of Cortana, WordPad, Steps Recorder, and was the recommended OS as Windows 10 end-of-life support was confirmed, I think it's fair to say 24H2 has left a bad taste in some users' mouths.

If 24H2, up until now, were a beta that users could sign up to, these problems would be more understandable, but this is the version of Windows you will get if you just leave auto update on. This meant that, throughout the last year, there were multiple times when updating could potentially cause you to receive a worse Windows experience.

On a more positive note, we haven't spotted any major problems with 24H2 in the last few months, though whether or not we think it's the 'most reliable version ever' will require a little more time with it.

As part of this, Microsoft officially announced the iconic blue screen would be changing, after reports indicating as much earlier this year. Microsoft claims its changes to the blue (now black) screen, including new quick machine recovery, "reduced the time users spend on the screen from 40 seconds to just 2 seconds for most consumer devices." Joining the latest build of Windows 11 will get you access to this and more.

We can only hope that, in time, 24H2 proves to be as stable as Microsoft claims.

A new report by Ars Technica shows SteamOS matching or outright beating Windows gaming performance in a suite of five recent games on the Lenovo Legion Go S, while testing by YouTuber Dave2D showed an additional four games where SteamOS either handily beats Windows, or trails by just one frame.

PC Gamer hardware writer Jacob Fox's review of the Go S adds yet another three games where SteamOS comes out on top, bringing us to a record of 10 wins, zero losses, and two ties for Valve.

The Legion Go S is the first device with official drivers and support for both operating systems, allowing for an apples to apples comparison we just couldn't swing before. We gave the Windows version a 72%, while the SteamOS variant nabbed an Editor's Pick 91% score from Jacob.

The upshot, aside from "don't buy the Windows version of the Go S," is that increased hardware support for SteamOS, particularly if Valve releases a version for users to install on desktop, could finally supply a genuine desktop OS contender against Windows for gamers.

Ars Technica tested five games: Returnal, Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Homeworld 3, and Doom: The Dark Ages. At both 1200p high and 800p low settings, SteamOS was only beaten by Windows in Borderlands 3, and by about one frame at both graphics settings. Returnal presented the biggest blowout for SteamOS: A nine-frame lead at 1200p, and 17 at 800p.

This echoes Dave2D's excellent video from last month, "Windows Was The Problem All Along." Dave2D's tests showed SteamOS beating Windows by notable margins in Cyberpunk, Helldivers 2, Doom Eternal, and The Witcher 3, with only Spider-Man 2 granting a one-frame lead to Windows. That brings us to a significant performance lead in seven games for SteamOS, with it only losing by a margin of error in two more.

Dave2D harped on a particular hobby horse of mine, how stepped-on and unwieldy Windows feels on handheld PCs, but as Ars Technica concluded and both parties' testing shows, SteamOS might be a contender.

Jacob's review of the SteamOS Legion Go S included performance tests for Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth Wukong, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Hitman 3. SteamOS took the top spot in all four, giving three more points to Valve and confirming its lead in Cyberpunk for a third time. 10-0-2.

Between Microsoft now including AI bloat on top of Windows' already-aggravating endemic bloat⁠—why does the search bar pull up web links?? Search my damn PC!!—and this stunning turnout by SteamOS, becoming a Linux Guy is evolving from an idle threat I'll make whenever Windows annoys me into a genuine plan for my next build, three to five years from now.

SteamOS' biggest hurdles, to my eye, are its current lack of hardware support, and game compatibility. You can use the Steam Deck recovery image to smuggle SteamOS onto a PC, but this isn't really a practical solution, and likely won't carry the performance uplift we've seen here. Then, of course, there are still games that won't run on SteamOS, many due to their anticheat solutions.

But those are both issues that Valve has already improved on over time: It's finally brought SteamOS to a non-Deck device, and is constantly adding games to its compatible list. Microsoft has promised to minimize Windows bloat in its "Xbox Experience for Handhelds," but has a much less impressive track record⁠—I'll believe it when I see it. I still remember Games For Windows Live. I can forgive much, but I will never forget.

To chivvy PC users away from using its previous operating system, Microsoft has published a fresh blog extolling the virtues and benefits of Windows 11, including a statement about how Windows 11 PCs are up to 2.3 times faster than Windows 10 PCs. But when you read the fine print about that claim, you'll see that it's entirely a comparison of new vs old hardware, and practically nothing to do with the software.

Despite its best efforts over the years, Microsoft has struggled to get millions of PC users off Windows 10 and onto Windows 11, despite the fact that the software giant will be officially bringing the older operating system to a close this October. I should imagine that a team of marketing executives sat down and created a list of things they could write about that would make PC gamers update their OS.

I mean, why else would one make a statement of "Windows 11 PCs are up to 2.3x faster than Windows 10 PCs" if not to appeal to gamers? The thing is, the claim itself comes with a footnote of "Based on Geekbench 6 Multi-Core benchmark. See aka.ms/w11claims" and when you follow that link, you get this snippet of information:

"Based on testing performed by Microsoft in December 2024 using Geekbench 6 Multi-core score comparing a selection of Windows 10 PCs with Intel Core 6th, 8th and 10th generation processors and Windows 11 PCs with Intel Core 12th and 13th generation processors. Performance will vary significantly by device and with settings, usage and other factors."

So Microsoft has used one synthetic benchmark test to make this judgment, and one that specifically focuses on the multicore performance of a CPU. To make matters worse, it's directly comparing Intel processors from 2022 to 2024 to chips from as far back as 2015—a gap of seven to nine years.

That might not sound very much, but the most powerful desktop Core 6th Gen chip Intel produced was the Core i7 6700K: a four-core, eight-thread processor. Exactly the same as the weakest Core i3 12th Gen. Head in the other direction and pick a Core i9 13900K, and you get 24 cores and 32 threads.

Any 'Windows 11 PC' with such a processor is going to absolutely trounce a 'Windows 10 PC' with a 6th Gen chip, because they have far more threads, something that the Geekbench multicore test thrives on. Even if one picks the most powerful 10th Gen Intel CPU, the Core i9 10900K, that still only has 20 threads.

The caveat of "Performance will vary significantly by device and with settings, usage and other factors" just doesn't cut the mustard, because Microsoft has deliberately used a set of figures to make your performance claim that aren't impacted by those 'other factors'.

Of course, what it's not going to do is take two Intel Core Ultra 9 285K PCs, install Windows 10 on one and Windows 11 on the other, and then compare them in Geekbench. They'll get almost identical results. Which most PC gamers would expect because millions of them are still using the older operating system on the latest hardware.

Sure, the blog does go on to provide a much larger list of reasons why one should be using Windows 11—arguably, some of them are valid points—but using flawed data to try and push PC users across just isn't going to work. Because PC gamers aren't stupid. Back to the drawing board Microsoft, and next time, try not to fob us off with utter nonsense, yes?

Microsoft's controversial AI screenshotting tool, Recall, is back again after being, well, recalled numerous times.

Nearly a year after its divisive announcement, Microsoft is finally rolling out Recall on Windows 11, but it's still not available for most users (and you probably shouldn't use it even if you do have access).

Recall uses AI to "remember" things you've done on your Windows 11 PC by taking screenshots every few seconds in case you ever need help remembering something. A preview version of the feature is now set for a "gradual rollout" to members of the Windows Insider program, meaning Recall is still not available to the general public.

That's probably for the best. This isn't the first time Microsoft has attempted to launch Recall, but it keeps having to reel back the feature due to a slew of privacy issues and backlash from users.

For instance, researchers spotted an earlier version of Recall storing sensitive data as unsecured plain text files. Recall was also caught screenshotting credit card numbers and social security numbers.

Microsoft made some major changes back in September to address many of the initial issues with Recall, and changed it to an opt-in feature, meaning it would no longer be turned on by default. Microsoft requires users to set up Windows Hello to authenticate any attempt to access Recall data, and the sensitive data also thankfully isn't saved as plain text files anymore.

So, for what it's worth, Recall is currently safer overall than it was when Microsoft originally announced it. You should still be careful about using it, though, assuming you're a "lucky" Windows Insider member who has access to it. While Microsoft has made it harder for hackers to access and steal your Recall data, you're still trusting Microsoft itself to protect huge amounts of data about yourself and the way you use your computer.

Depending on how comfortable you are with that, turning Recall on may seem fairly low-risk. Microsoft has said that it can't access or view your Recall data, which its Copilot AI processes locally on your device (meaning that data isn't sent to the cloud). You can also freely pause or deactivate Recall, delete your screenshots, or filter out certain content and apps.

I'm still not in any hurry to activate it on my Windows laptop. Considering Recall's turbulent history, I'd rather wait and see how the preview version turns out since more security issues could still pop up.

While you risk your privacy any time you go on the internet, Recall takes privacy risks to a whole new level by literally watching everything on your screen. Some have even gone so far as to call Recall "spyware" and compare it to a virus.

Change often happens very slowly and in the case of Windows Explorer being all sluggish and laggy when dealing with OneDrive files, that problem seems to have been around since the dawn of the dinosaurs. But at long last, in a small Windows beta update, Microsoft has apparently finally solved the issue.

The update in question is KB5052094, though it's only for those on the Review Release Channel of Windows 11 right now (via Windows Report). I use the standard public release, so I've not been able to check Microsoft's claims that it has fixed the "context menu opens slowly when you right-click cloud files" issue.

But I surely hope it has because for as long as I've been using OneDrive and Windows 11, the interaction lag has been slowly driving me up the wall. I get that renaming a cloud-based file can't be as instantaneous as doing the same for anything on a local SSD, but sometimes the delay between clicking 'rename' and actually being able to do it can run into seconds.

Now, I'm sure some of you may feel that the real problem is that I'm using OneDrive and I'll readily agree with anyone who feels that it's not the best cloud service out there. However, I use it all the time for doing game benchmarking across multiple PCs, because I have the testing software configured so that the results file is saved in my OneDrive. I can then access those on my main PC, while the others are still working away.

Opening such files is fine but doing anything context menu stuff (e.g. copying, renaming, cloning) is pretty tiresome because of the lag. If this fix really does solve that problem, I will be one happy person. What puzzles me, though, is why on Earth it has taken Microsoft so long to create and release a solution. I can only assume that it didn't consider the bug to be a high enough priority and let's face it, Windows 11 surely has far more pressing issues than require fixing.

Either that or the solution involved changes on its Azure servers, and given how expensive they are, any alterations to what they're doing or what hardware is being used are potentially very costly. What might seem like a minor fix at the user end of things could well involve a whole host of major tweaks on the server side.

Anyway, I just want the fix to be publicly rolled out as soon as possible. Even if it only slightly improves the situation, it'll make my working life a whole lot nicer. Until the next Windows 11 bug grinds my gears.

A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger dives into an aspect of personal computing you probably haven't put much thought into⁠—or at least I sure didn't until now. After being impressed by an aquatic screensaver on a TV at a local bar, LGR did some research into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, a veritable dynasty in the aquatic screensaver space that's still going strong to this day.

The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sachs' pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums⁠—Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website⁠—Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

Screensavers don't have anywhere near the ubiquity they used to thanks to the ascendancy of LCD screens and convenient monitor sleep modes, but the idea of them having a second life thanks to smart TVs and streaming services warms my heart a bit⁠—I don't even have a Roku TV, but I still find something charming and whimsical about the built-in Roku City screensaver.

The evocative art used in '90s PC screensavers has secured them a strangely prominent place in many millennials' psyches. The Windows '95 maze seems to have a hold over many in my cohort, but I'm personally a big fan of the Windows XP 3D pipes. PC Gamer contributor Sarah Richter wrote about how one of her favorite childhood "games" turned out to have been a screensaver/early desktop pet, Johnny Castaway.

Every day, it feels like we're hitting new levels of cultural division—with government officials taking to platforms to dunk, for some reason, and a rising tide of verbal slapfighting to which even your humble search engines are not immune. Google has fired a verbal shot over the information highway, as per a recent post to X by the company's vice president and general manager of Chrome, Parisa Tabriz.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Microsoft spoofing the Google homepage is another tactic in its long history of tricks to confuse users & limit choice," Tabriz writes. "New year; new low, Microsoft." This dunk is in response to a recent, and certainly underhanded, trick by Microsoft to redirect you to a faux-Google webpage if you search for "Google" on Bing, a sort of eerie facsimile of Google's layout, complete with Google-esque clipart.

I just tested it now, and it's still happening, although the "Microsoft Bing" cookies request at the bottom does somewhat ruin the kayfabe. As our own Joshua Wolens described it, "I'd bet a billion it'd hoodwink your less tech-literate family members and friends. You know, the kind of people who might find themselves doing a Bing search for 'Google'."

As for that "long history of tricks", Tabriz isn't entirely wrong. Just last year, PC Gamer's own Rich Stanton was blindsided when the sheer audacity of a pop-up advertising Bing during his browsing that made him think he had some sketchy malware installed. Then there's the Bing wallpaper app, which was allegedly doing the same, along with the recommended settings automatically swapping your default engine for its unused self. I'm sort of desensitised to it now, and I only use the search bar for files anyway, but in 2022 Microsoft made it your desktop's default engine, too. The Verge, whose article on the subject Tabriz is quoting, actually has an updated list of all the times Microsoft's tried to sneak it past you.

The funny thing is, Tabriz isn't even the only Google employee taking pot-shots at this thing. Product manager Jeffrey Jose writes "shameful" in a similar post, while product strategy manager Apran Das adds: "Nice jugaad", presumably sarcastically, given he's reposted Tabriz's statement (a jugaad is a word that describes a sort of patchwork or roundabout solution to a problem).

I mean, listen. I'm about as nervous about Google's techno-monopoly as any person with a passing knowledge of science fiction. The company has even been ordered to sell the very web browser in question after a judge ruled that it had acted illegally in order to maintain its iron grip on the market. But from a consumer perspective, you can't just 'here comes the aeroplane!' a search engine, Bing. We're grown adults. I only eat my broccoli if it's a spaceship, like any self-respecting member of society.

I've reached out to Microsoft to see if it'd like to explain this particular rugpull. I'll update this article if I receive a response. In the meantime, I'll just have to live with the fact that we live in a society just a few steps away from Google and Microsoft meeting in a parking lot to dance battle with each other.

At this point in my internet life, I've been conditioned to just assume that everything I see is fundamentally "fake" in some way, either made up by some guy or computer generated in any number of ethically or practically dubious ways. But Windows 10's desktop background, with the blue light bursting out of a Windows logo suspended in a void? That was real, baby, that actually happened.

The design was a collaboration between Microsoft and the artist GMUNK, and it's not like it was a secret or anything: There's been a post on GMUNK's website and a YouTube video of the thing in motion up online for nearly a decade. But I think we're all so conditioned to disregard or otherwise devalue so much of what we see, why on earth would anyone spare a thought for a corporate branding exercise destined to be replaced with videogame concept art or something anyway? I never consciously said "surely this image is CGI," I simply blanked out the default Windows 10 desktop background the way I might do to an advertisement or garbage post on Reddit.

But the fact that it came from a physical installation is mind-boggling⁠—with that knowledge, I look at the thing and wonder how it was even possible. GMUNK's webpage dedicated to the project explains it best, but basically: The artist shot different colored lasers and other light sources through a glass Windows logo suspended with wires, while the effect was further enhanced with billowing volumetric smoke pumped through the set. GMUNK captured the results with a high-speed camera, and the final image used in the Windows 10 desktop was a composite of several frames from the shoot.

The exercise definitely feels like it came from another era of tech marketing⁠—a slightly melancholic nostalgia piece from the freewheeling days of the go-go 2010s. I find myself pleasantly surprised that, just this once, something I had assumed to be more pointless visual noise from the computer was actually a genuinely interesting physical creation in the real world. You can check out some more shots from the photo shoot below⁠—my favorite is probably the red and pink variation on pitch black.

Unless you're a PC enthusiast or hardware tester, you probably don't install Windows very often. However, all of us experience the routine grind of updating the operating system, to fix bugs, improve security, and perhaps even totally bork your PC. It turns out that Microsoft has been working to make the update process a whole lot faster, with its 24H2 update.

Like most hardware reviewers, I install Windows a lot and I mean a lot. New CPU, motherboard, SSD, etc? That's a fresh installation of Microsoft's operating system every single time and even though I've streamlined the process as much as possible, it's still pretty tedious—especially when it comes to updating the operating system.

However, during my testing of Intel's new Arrow Lake chips, the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core 5 245K, I noticed that installing Windows and the subsequent updates all seemed quite a bit quicker than normal.

I then did a bit of additional testing on a Ryzen 9 9950X system, using the same Windows ISO as for the Intel processors, and experienced the same speed bump. What they all had in common was the fact that I was installing Windows 11 24H2, the very latest version.

Well, it just so happens that Microsoft has indeed been working at making the update process a lot faster, and has explained what it's done in a recent IT Pro blog (via Windows Latest). From its own internal tests, Microsoft claims that installing an update in Windows 11 24H2 is 44 to 46% faster than 22H2 and the restarts during the whole sequence are 34 to 40% quicker, too, depending on the PC being used.

While I can't confirm those specific figures, I can say with certainty that the 24H2 version is a lot snappier to update. Sure, it's not a major advancement, and I dare say there are more important things for Microsoft to improve upon, but I'll take these little gains gladly.

Microsoft uses some...err...interesting language to explain how it's managed to achieve the speed bump for the Windows update process: "Parallel processing of component manifests: This complements the parallel hydration of newly serviced components using reverse and forward differentials first introduced in Windows 11, version 22H2."

In plain English, it's making better use of your CPU's multiple cores/threads. The update process also caches information about an update package to improve matters if the same package is involved in other updates.

Lastly, Windows update now uses more system RAM, if it's available. Oh, and Microsoft has shaved up to 200 MB off certain update packages, too.

Taken altogether, it means that while Windows update is technically using more of your PC's hardware to patch the operating system, the overall benefit is simply one of speed. And when it comes to computers, we could all do with a bit more perceived performance.

With each major revision, Windows 11 is slowly becoming the operating system it should have been at launch. Not that this is really doing much to entice Windows 10 fans to change, though that may well alter once support for the older OS finally stops next year.

Remember when we reported on how the developers of Tiny11, NTDEV, had managed to pack the installation package for Windows 11 down to just 2GB? Well, the same folks have gone one, no, many steps further by making a version of Microsoft's bulky OS that's just 100MB in size. Yes, you read that right, it's twenty times smaller. They had to get pretty drastic with the code scalpel, though, removing the main thing that gives Windows its name: Goodbye GUI and hello to a text-only Win11.

News of NTDEV's achievement was posted on X a few days ago (via Tom's Hardware), though it's not something you'll be able to play around with yourself, unfortunately. If you check out the video of it in action above, you'd be forgiven in thinking that this is just the command prompt in normal Windows, albeit running very slowly.

The clue that it's not is when it shows all of the folders and files in the actual installation taking up 1.78GB of the C: drive's space. A normal Windows 11 install is typically around the 25 to 30GB mark, and while a good chunk of that are the default programs and tools, the only way you can get it that small is by chopping out some key parts.

Specifically, what's gone is the graphical user interface (GUI), the software that generates all of the windows, icons, and associated actions. But is it truly Windows if it doesn't have any windows? After all, none of your normal programs and games will ever be able to run, because they require a GUI and related bits to function.

But yes, it genuinely is Windows or rather, the main body of code that lies underneath all the visual stuff when you're using your PC. Mind you, from the speed of it all in the video, it's certainly nothing you'd ever want to use on a daily basis.

That was never the intention of the project, though, and you have to admire the determination of NTDEV to keep pushing the boundaries as to how small you can make Windows and still have a functional operating system left behind.

I know some folks bemoan the fact that modern Windows is very bloated compared to much older versions and while that's certainly true, it's not like we're struggling for storage these days.

You can get fast 512GB SSDs for $50 and if you're willing to sacrifice speed for cents, far cheaper options are available too.

However, we're also in the era of every app jumping on the AI bandwagon and the next version of Windows, expected later this year, is going to heavily feature this. 

Microsoft recommends that you have at least 64GB of drive space to install Windows 11, but what's the betting it's a far bit larger than this in Windows 12?

I'm not in the least bit worried, though, because I'm pretty sure NTDEV will just make Tiny12 and once again give us the option to streamline our computers as we see fit, even if Microsoft doesn't want us to.