Whether you're coding or simply looking for an important file on your desktop, a single typo can create an outsized amount of frustration. Thankfully, Microsoft is working on a number of improvements for Search within Windows 11, including the ability to see through your typos.

The Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8687 for Windows 11 that dropped last week introduced the 'more forgiving' version of Search. Microsoft explained then, "Search is better at handling typos, dropped letters, extra letters, and partial words for apps. Queries like 'utlook' can still find Outlook" (via Windows Latest).

On top of that, Search will also prioritise local files over web results in the future. Previously, in response to a hastily typed query, Search had the mocking habit of returning a Bing result with the spelling corrected. Thankfully, Microsoft's partner director of design, March Rogers, said on X, "If you want you can turn off web suggestions entirely."

Most normie Windows 11 users would have to wait a bit before enjoying improvements first rolled out in an Insider preview build. However, I'm rocking OS build 26200.8655 (an older, non-Insider build that dropped earlier in June) and when I type something arcane like 'pwerp,' Search already knows I mean 'PowerPoint'.

That said, when I tried another of Windows Latest's typo tests, I found Search really wasn't sure what to make of 'tskm' in my version of Windows 11.

Search's improved typo parsing and more locally focused results are definitely small improvements in the grand scheme of things. But both contribute to making Windows 11 that much more usable, as well as Microsoft's stated recommitment to making the OS better.

User experience counts for a lot, after all. It's just as well Microsoft has decided to pump the brakes on answering every design question with features like Copilot, as I don't feel all that confident in the spelling abilities of AI.

Users of Windows 11 beta have had access to this for a while now, but with its latest OS update, Microsoft has brought its Low Latency Profile (LLP) to general users across the globe. By giving your CPU a brief kick up the pants when you fire things up, certain apps and tools will now launch quicker than before, giving older PCs that 'fresh installed Windows' feeling.

The update in question, KB5094126, is a cumulative one, so your computer may have already received the LLP. But, if it's been a while since you've done any changes, all you need to do is head to Settings > Windows Update and click on the 'Check for updates' button.

Once the update has installed and your PC has rebooted, the new feature should be up and running in the background (unless your location hasn't been selected to receive KB5094126 just yet). There's nothing that you need to do, as Windows will handle everything for you. According to Microsoft, the LPP feature "accelerates app launch and core shell experiences such as Start menu, Search, and Action Center."

It does this by briefly forcing the CPU to run at its highest possible clock speed for a few seconds when any interaction trigger is detected. To avoid any problems with heat or battery usage on laptops, the processor is rapidly returned to a lower-power state. Unless you actually track the CPU's clock speeds all the time, you won't even notice the change.

Well, that's not true, as you should notice that things like the Start Menu, search function, and general apps should fire up a touch snappier. How much so will depend entirely on your PC's specs, though. For example, if you have a high-end gaming PC, you probably won't notice any difference whatsoever, other than a small bump in the CPU clock speed.

So to check out the Low Latency Profile, I used a budget gaming laptop: an Acer Nitro V with an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS and 16 GB of DDR5-4800 CL40. While not old, this kind of hardware setup is pretty much what LLP is intended for. Unfortunately, it turns out it had already installed the system a while back, so all I can show you is the aforementioned clock speed changes.

As you can see, the processor briefly jumps by around 100 to 200 MHz when the Start Menu is activated, and again when the Windows key is pressed to close it (though the clock speed increase isn't as large). There's no noticeable change in the CPU utilization, of course, because the workload involved here is trivial.

On my Core Ultra 270K Plus main PC, the processor's speed jumps by 500 MHz, so you'll see very different results, depending on your computer's setup. The end result will be the same, though: a snappier-feeling Windows.

However, don't think that the LLP will make games load any faster. Something like Solitaire might, but the latest Call of Duty will still take just as long as it did before the update. That's because games on PCs are mostly constrained by the very sequential nature of how Windows handles data, unless DirectStorage is involved to bring in a touch of parallelization.

Still, it's nice to have Windows acting like a genuinely modern operating system and making better use of the hardware you've got. Low Latency Profile won't turn your gaming PC into a hot-snottin' monster, but it will put a bit more spring into its step.

With its latest update for Windows 11, codenamed KB5089573, Microsoft has finally started to fully roll out something that it began late last year, and something that phones have supported for even longer. It's a Bluetooth feature called Shared Audio, and as long as everyone's hardware ticks off the right boxes, you'll be able to cast music and the like to two separate devices.

I always keep Windows on my main PC fully up-to-date, for work reasons, but I wasn't aware that Microsoft had finally rubberstamped the new feature until I read about it at Windows Latest. Unless you had a PC from a very narrow list of options and used a beta version of Windows, there has been no way to have more than one headset playing the same Bluetooth audio stream on a Microsoft-based computer.

That changed last year, when Redmont released a preview of Shared Audio, but now every Windows 11 user gets it. Well, you might have to wait a little while, as Microsoft does have a habit of dragging its heels with rolling updates, but with luck, your PC should be good to go if you have the latest update.

Basically, you just need to have two Bluetooth audio devices (headsets, headphones, earbuds, etc) connected to the same PC, and you should see the option to enable Shared Audio in the Quick Settings dropdown menu (just to the left of the clock in the system tray).

However, this will only be the case if all of the following are true: (1) The PC is using Windows 11 v26200.8524; (2) the PC supports Bluetooth LE audio broadcast; (3) both audio devices support Bluetooth LE Audio; (4) both audio devices have "Use LE Audio when available" enabled in Windows' Bluetooth options.

Ordinarily, at this point, I'd be showing you various images from my own PC as to how to check all of these things, where to look, and so on. However, despite being all updated and with two Bluetooth LE Audio devices connected, my Windows 11 install doesn't have the Shared Audio feature yet. The images I am showing are those produced by Microsoft.

Truth be told, it's not something I'd personally use very much anyway. Phones have been able to do this for a good while now, and in the rare circumstance where I'd want to share music or a video audio track with another person, I'm most likely to be using a phone to do this.

But if you like to sit with a buddy or significant other, and watch a movie together on a laptop, at least there's now a chance that you won't need to share earbuds or suffer the tinny sound from the PC's rubbish speakers. It's a neat feature to have, even if we've had to wait far too long for it.

It's gratifying to know that 84% of PC Gamer readers are sensible folk who would never allow their operating system desktop get into the sort of state you can see in the image above. And it's more gratifying still to know that a third of you are in the zen club where you have have a completely clear, clutter free desktop with nothing on it. This is the right choice. This is the way.

Though I will admit I'm a lazy member of the zen club and don't actually clear my desktop, I just click that button in the Windows context menu which hides all the icons from my desktop. I'm comfortable with the knowledge there's a viper's nest of writhing icons and folders under there, just so long as I don't have to look at it.

Yes, this past week we asked you lovely PC Gamer readers: How do you organise your operating system desktop? Because we're obviously convinced that a clean desktop is a clean mind, but wanted to know about how everyone else organises their systems.

How do you organise your operating system desktop?

Votes (%)

I remove everything from my desktop

26

I have only a few regularly used icons on the desktop

24

I neatly organise them in specific areas and folder

20

I just let the files and shortcuts fall where they may

16

I just hide the desktop icons, sweeping them under the rug

7

I use an animated wallpaper, so keep it clear of icons

4

I use third-party software to organise them

3

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
I remove everything from my desktop	26
I have only a few regularly used icons on the desktop	24
I neatly organise them in specific areas and folder	20
I just let the files and shortcuts fall where they may	16
I just hide the desktop icons, sweeping them under the rug	7
I use an animated wallpaper, so keep it clear of icons	4
I use third-party software to organise them	3

Adding it all up, a hefty 84% of you are pursuing good desktop hygiene and either clearing it entirely, or at least managing the volume or layout of icons littering your screen.

Though I will say, more concerning is that 16%—a worrying number of you dear readers—are leaving the clutter unchecked. Maybe it's my own moderately fastidious nature, but I thought fewer people would leave their desktops open to the whims of app installers and assorted downloaded files. But then I look at the physical desktop of my own workspace in PC Gamer Towers, and I probably shouldn't be that surprised when I've got random courier invoices on my desk from years ago and random parts of coolers and PCs that have long since gone to the great recycle bin in the sky.

So, okay, maybe I'm a monster in my own way, too. What about the rest of you, how do you organise your desktop? Do you keep it clean and clear or are you free and easy about what happens behind the various windows on your screen? Or do you have tips to share with the rest of us?

This week I want to go back to the recycle bin again, and I'm asking when you last cleared it out.

We all know Doom was so popular, so monumental, that it changed videogames forever. As a society, we're still obsessed with installing Doom on increasingly improbable devices, from pregnancy tests to vapes. But sometimes I run into an old factoid about Doom, some detail from its heyday that I'd forgotten, that still puts it in perspective.

Like this one: back in 1995, Doom was installed on more PCs than Windows.

I was reminded of this bit of trivia by re-reading an old PC Gamer magazine interview with John Carmack, published in November 2008, where the id Software programmer was reflecting on the benefits of open source and shareware. "We look back at the early days when the original Doom was shareware, and Microsoft did a study at the time that said there were more copies of Doom installed on computers than there were Windows 3.1. It's hard to characterise what exact value that is, to have people aware of your game but not paying you, but I certainly don't think it's been bad. Maybe we could have monetised it better than we would have thought of as a young company."

More users than Windows sounds like it should be a gargantuan number, but you have to remember this anecdote predated the launch of Windows 95, in August 95, which is when the operating system truly took off. Personal computers weren't rare in the early '90s, but according to articles about the history of Windows, Microsoft sold only about 10 million copies of Windows 3.0 between 1990 and 1992, and an additional three million of Windows 3.1 within its first three months.

In a 1996 interview, id Software president Jay Wilbur said that the shareware version of Doom had been downloaded 20 million times. That seems like an easy slam dunk comparison—Doom, which ran on DOS, was way bigger than Windows!

In the early '90s, being installed on more computers than the most popular operating system of the day was unheard of. As Carmack alluded to, those installs didn't all mean sales, though—Doom's first episode was free, thanks to the very successful shareware model id used. But clearly it was a detail that stuck with people in the tech industry at the time.

People like Valve founder Gabe Newell, who offered more details on the Doom/Windows ratio in a 2013 interview than Carmack did in 2008. Newell said that in the early 1990s, Microsoft (where he worked at the time) had very little insight into how many people were actually using Windows or its other software or what they thought of it, so it commissioned "a really large study" rather than relying on retail reseller data to guess.

"They'd actually go out into the real world and see what people were actually doing. This was the first time Microsoft had done it, to look at 10,000 people's machines and figure out what they were actually using PCs for. Well, it turns out they were actually using them for porn and videogames, and that part of the study was immediately ignored. But the good news was that if you extrapolated those numbers, Windows was actually being used in 30 million people's PCs in the United States.

"But the thing that was really striking to me, at the time, was that Windows was the number two product. Most of you probably know what the number one product was. Yeah, it was Doom."

The rest of Newell's talk is interesting if you're into the sales machinations of the early software industry, and how that ultimately informed the "direct to consumer" model of Steam that we now take for granted. But the bit that sticks out to me is that, at least according to his memory of the study, Doom was installed on more than 30 million PCs. He doesn't cite the year, but he references the "early 1990s," which suggests to me the study was conducted before the release of Windows 95.

30 million is a significantly bigger number than the 20 million number Wilbur cited in 1996. And that's from after the launch of Windows 95! It seems there's no doubt that Doom exceeded Windows' popularity. But by how much?

Could boxed retail sales and people passing around copies of the game on floppy disks or across office and college LANs have made up for another 10 million that id Software couldn't account for? How many times was Doom pirated?

Newell also specifically referenced 30 million Windows users in the United States, while another popularly quoted figure about Doom's success, this one from a September 1995 interview with Wilbur, highlighted the game being on "at least 15 million computers worldwide."

Those numbers from Wilbur are the ones you'll see on Wikipedia, which suggests to me we really don't know how many people installed, much less played, the shareware version of Doom. The anecdote that it was more popular than Windows 3.1 has been passed around in articles for years, but seemingly without anyone focusing on the significance of Newell's reference to 30 million Windows users. Was his memory of the study way off, or were we undercounting Doom's popularity all these years?

I've reached out to Newell and id co-founder John Romero to see if either of them remember the survey's findings in more detail, because it sure seems like we've got an unaccounted-for 10 million players or so.

No wonder Bill Gates was so excited about the Windows 95 port of Doom he cut a promo with a trench coat and shotgun.

While Windows has represented my go-to operating system more often than not, that doesn't mean I especially like using it. Microsoft appears to be all too aware of begrudging use cases such as my own, as it's recently committed to making all things Windows 11 'better'. Most recently, it's Windows' drivers that are enjoying a concerted improvement effort.

At WinHEC 2026 (the first Windows Hardware Engineering Conference since 2018), the company introduced the Driver Quality Initiative (DQI), "a comprehensive, ecosystem-wide effort designed to fundamentally raise the bar on driver quality, reliability and security across Windows."

"Drivers sit at the heart of every Windows experience. They connect the OS to the silicon, components and peripherals that make Windows one of the most versatile platforms in the industry," Microsoft explains. "Today, thousands of partners contribute to tens of thousands of active driver families across the Windows install base."

"When drivers are high quality, customers experience reliable, secure, performant devices. When drivers fail, customers experience it as a device problem, regardless of where the root cause sits."

Fair point. After all, who among us hasn't cursed a driver update for turning our desktop world upside down? The initiative consists of four 'pillars', which include expanding quality measures for drivers with improved partner verification measures, improving driver lifecycle management, and improving Windows driver architecture itself.

To elaborate a bit on that latter point, Microsoft shares that it is "heavily investing in hardening kernel mode drivers and enabling the third-party kernel mode driver transition to either user mode driver or Microsoft authored class drivers."

As a bid to "ensure higher driver security, reliability and resiliency," this 'architecture' pillar seems pretty foundational to the driver initiative as a whole.

The DQI is perhaps no surprise, given Microsoft's recent re-commitment to Windows quality. President of Windows and devices Pavan Davuluri also said that 2026 would be the year Microsoft focuses "on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows."

Microsoft is also rethinking its implementation of AI features, in addition to bringing the wider driver ecosystem back into step. Still, on all counts it's relatively early days, and the DQI blog post stresses that WinHEC 2026 was just "the start of the work, not the end."

Microsoft has been leaning hard into the idea that what matters with Windows is getting the basics right, as opposed to bolting on more AI gunk. An early example of that drive is a recent announcement involving more configurability for the taskbar and Start menu in Windows 11.

In a blog post titled, "Improving Windows quality: Making Taskbar and Start more personal," Microsoft kicks off with the taskbar, which is "where your PC experience comes to life" according to the post.

The big news here is the ability to now place the taskbar along any edge of the desktop. Yep, top, bottom, left and right, every option is being made available. What's more, you'll be able to align the Start button and icons in all four arrangements, "top-aligned or centered when the taskbar is on the left or right, and left-aligned or centered when the taskbar is on the top or bottom."

Of course, this is functionality that was largely available in previous versions of Windows, but removed for Windows 11. If you go for a vertical taskbar, you'll be able to choose between both a thin bar similar to the standard Windows 11 config along the bottom, or a wider bar that allows for fully labelled buttons for each running application.

There's also an option for an even thinner taskbar than usual, which will come in handy on lower resolution displays where space is at a premium.

As for the Start menu, the changes involve both configurability and quality. The former include section-level toggles to independently show or hide Pinned, Recommended, and All, plus settings to tweak the size of the Start menu and the option to hide your name and profile picture for privacy purposes.

As for "quality," Microsoft says it is improving the content that appears in the Recommended section and changing the name of that part of the menu to Recent to "better reflect what the section primarily shows, including recently installed apps and recently used files."

Microsoft is also improving the accuracy of recent files shown in the Start menu. "We are refining which files appear and how they are ordered to reduce less relevant items and better reflect what you have been working on," Microsoft says.

As for when these changes will be made available, Microsoft says they'll come first to Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel over the coming weeks. The company hasn't given a date for a full public release, but it'll probably be made available within a few months.

Everyone wants your data, so that means everyone would like you to make an account with them. I don't know about you, but more accounts simply means more passwords I'm bound to forget—at least there's multi-factor authentication methods like SMS codes, right? Well, soon that won't be the case for your personal Microsoft account.

Traditionally, codes sent via text to your phone have been deployed as an authentication method when you log in, or as a way to recover your Microsoft account when you inevitably forget your password. Unfortunately for forgetful folks such as myself, Microsoft has chosen to phase out SMS codes in both cases (via Windows Latest).

According to Microsoft, "SMS-based authentication is now a leading source of fraud, and by moving to passwordless accounts, passkeys, and verified email, we're helping you stay ahead of evolving threats while making account access simpler and more seamless."

So, if SMS codes are out and Microsoft truly believes "the future of authentication is passwordless," what does that leave? Primarily, Passkeys. These can take the form of a PIN, but biometric passkeys, like a face or fingerprint scan, avoid the whole 'a sequence of characters you can forget' problem. That said, it requires handing over yet more data that I'm personally reluctant to give up to big tech.

This isn't the first time the company has said it wants to completely ditch traditional passwords. As much as Motorola's 'password pill' captures the imagination, it was far from practical. As such, Microsoft is pitching Passkeys as a faster, "phishing-resistant" way to log in as this method uses your device's local, "built-in authentication (like Face ID, fingerprint, or PIN)."

This makes sense. For a start, SMS codes are displayed in plain text and sent over mobile networks that committed bad actors can fairly easily breach at a distance. On-device authentication cuts out that vulnerable network—though security researchers have already exposed how Windows Recall could be leveraged by bad actors to get around Microsoft's best security intentions, so, as always, it's important to remember that device security should be maintained across the board.

No authentication measure is 100% secure, but limiting a forgetful user's login options is a headache. I would use a password manager like LastPass, but security researchers argue such services are vulnerable to 'a cornucopia of practical attacks', though some of my colleagues swear by them (the two Jacobs swear by BitWarden).

At any rate, you won't be able to get auto-filling from a PWM before you log into the OS. At least if I forget a password, no one has a hope of retrieving it from my grey matter besides me.

There's a sadness in the technosphere right now, ain't there? This overwhelming disappointment that sort of lingers at the back of your mind like unkempt cable management. Enough journalists have called out the enshittification of PC gaming (or platform decay as us sophisticated lot call it), I'm certainly not the first in that regard. But back in January of this year, I finally had enough of it in Windows, and sacked off the legendary operating system entirely in favour of Pop! and that's a big bloody deal for me.

I've been using Windows since around 1998. At the age of seven, it was my first insight into the world of PC gaming. Since then, I've navigated the trials and tribulations of Microsoft's best efforts day-in, day-out. From Win 98 all the way up to modern-era 11 and every service pack in between.

I've gamed for hours beyond count, crafted all manner of UIs, websites, and programs with it, finished my degree thanks to it, and it's been a critical part of my time in tech journalism. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to become editor of Maximum PC magazine, or even gotten a job there to begin with. Yet through all the ups and downs, and the best efforts of my Linux-touting colleagues trying to push me to the big open source OS in the sky, I just refused to try any of the open source distros out. At least that is until recently.

Let's face it, modern-day Windows is just a bit crap. You fork out all this money for an official license, one that's meant to provide you with complete access to a clean, fast, modern-day OS, without issue (and it's not cheap, for the "official" non-OEM one), and yet what you get is an excessively degraded experience compared to what it once was. One that honestly feels like it's just continually getting worse, no matter how many times you reinstall it.

From over-eager back-end telemetry forever pinging Microsoft's servers on your use habits, to the aggressive Copilot AI integration that may or may not be reading your card data, or all of the other intrusive ads begging you to sign up to Microsoft 365, Teams, Candy Crush, or some other madness, there's always something to disrupt your flow. And that's not even mentioning the constant stream of Windows Updates rammed down your throat every three and a half seconds, that could potentially brick your entire rig at a moment's notice. So yes, I felt it was time for a change. Finally. After 28 years.

And the thing is, Linux now has so many distros dedicated to gaming, to privacy, to Nvidia compatibility, to productivity, that there's a flavor for everyone. And better yet, they're built from the ground up to not only be efficient, but to minimize that friction that often comes with being a Windows refugee. You're not going to be sat in terminal for 22 hours a day, pretending you've travelled back in time to 1988.

So then. Pop! OS. Why? How? What are the drawbacks? That's what I'm here to explain, very specifically, my experience with it. I'll be clear, I'm not a huge Linux expert, I haven't tried all the distros. I'm very new to the world of open-source OS's, but I chose Pop! as it feels like a good middle-ground between the lot of them. It's mature, the Cosmic UI is beautiful, and with the Steam Deck really normalizing Proton now, making gaming far smoother, it really is the perfect time to give it a go with an OS that kinda holds your hand a bit.

The setup

The good news is you can just try this out. You don't need to fully commit and fry your entire Windows install to give it a whirl. Instead, we can use Dual Boot to effectively dabble with both, the only compromise being you'll need to shrink an SSD and get a bit of partition space back. Admittedly a bit of a commodity these days, but y'know.

My advice? Back up anything you consider mission-critical, and make sure Windows is fully up-to-date first. Then you'll need to identify what hardware you're running. With Pop! OS, System76, (the devs behind it) has a wide variety of ISOs available, depending on if your GPU is AMD or Nvidia. If you're running Big Red, grab the standard "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS" ISO from its download page system76.com/pop/download/ or if you've got a big ol' green GTX 16 series or above, nab the "Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with NVIDIA" variant instead. Then, and because I'm getting bored of these wee paragraphs, you'll need to do the following:

• Download the Rufus bootable USB stick utility, ready to create your bootable media.
• Grab an 8 GB USB stick (it will get wiped, so do bear that in mind).
• Flash the correct ISO to your USB, and leave Rufus to use its default settings.
• Go into disk management on Windows, and shrink down one of your partitions, ideally by 250 GB or so. Leave it unformatted (Pop! OS actually uses a different file system to Windows ext4 vs NTFS).
• Ensure Fast Startup and BitLocker is disabled so your drives aren't encrypted.
• Head into BIOS, find secure boot, and change it to "Other OS". If Fast Startup is located here, turn that off too.
• Then boot from your Pop! OS Installer USB
• Follow the installer, choose Custom Install, and create a partition from your empty space.
• Let the magic happen, and finish the installation process.
• Then once you've logged in to the full desktop, open Terminal (Windows key + t) and type in:sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -yIt'll ask you for your login password, type that in (you won't see the input), hit enter, and then Pop! OS should perform a full update, including drivers, apps, the lot. Huzzah, that's it.

Life of Pop!

Using Pop! OS is such a breath of fresh air. It feels so clean, responsive, and low latency compared to Windows; it's uncanny. It's actually one of the few things that makes Dual Boot challenging to stick to. Spend half your day in Pop!, then switch back to Windows for work, and everything almost feels laggy in comparison. Even the mouse. And that's with a Ryzen 9 9900X, RTX 5080, 64 GB of DDR5, and a WD SN8100 at my disposal.

Most of this is due to how these operating systems are built. A very simplified explanation is that, effectively, Windows has decades of compatibility layers piled on top of one another to get it to work. Explorer, for instance, is critically interwoven with the shell and the OS, whereas Cosmic just sits on top of the OS, almost like an extrapolation layer. You could remove it or swap it out entirely for an alternative like KDE or Gnome, and the OS just doesn't care. Try to do the same with Windows, and the whole thing comes crumbling down.

File systems, too, are massively different, with Linux opting for ext4 over NTFS, which is excellent at rapid file ops (predominantly what operating systems tend to live and die on). There's zero back-end telemetry involved too, and updates don't affect the entire OS just to get things running properly. It's remarkable the difference that makes in day-to-day use.

Customization is a godsend as well. You can alter the UI directly by changing the style, edges, fonts, colors, border size, all sorts. And all the mod cons and window snapping are built in here, along with window stacking (at least with Cosmic, which Windows still lacks). There's also an impressively built-out app store, with an ungodly number of apps you can directly install. Or alternatively, you can download .deb packages from official sites and install them like you would an .exe, or just direct download through the terminal with the right command. You can sandbox them too, installing them as Flatpaks. If you don't want that program to have access to your entire system, effectively limiting what permissions you decide it has access to. Even VPNs are built in. Once you've got something like NordVPN installed, it lives in the networking tab as its own thing.

It's not all smooth sailing, though. The biggest issue by far is ironically still that app availability. Despite Linux's popularity increasing quite dramatically in recent months, there's a whole host of apps that just don't exist here, and never will. Adobe, Affinity, Battle.net, Office 365, iTunes, Notion, all conspicuous in their absence. And then there's the RGB element too. There's no Corsair iCUE or Logitech, Razer, Armoury Crate, NZXT Cam, Elgato software, none existent. The list is honestly quite large, and mostly because the marketplace here on Linux is still remarkably small.

That said, there are alternatives out there: GIMP, Krita, OpenRGB, LibreOffice, as a huge army of dedicated volunteers keep the software alternatives up and ticking. Plus for software with a web interface, like Tidal or Google Drive, you can install them directly from your browser as PWA apps anyway, so they sit there on your desktop behaving pretty much identically to any modern program anyway, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

And that's not to say it's impossible to get those programs working theoretically, either. You can use software to do that through translation and compatibility layers. Things like Lutris and Wine effectively translate Windows API calls into their Linux equivalents on the fly; you can get Lutris to effectively run Affinity and Battle.net, too, but the implementation is quite clunky to get right and it can break, particularly with authentication.

Valve's spent a lot of time and energy working on Proton as well (its own fork of Wine designed to translate DirectX to Vulkan), which is by far the biggest contributor to modern gaming on Linux, even being possible.

Nvidia sucks, all hail DLSS

The biggest issue for the longest time with Linux has been Nvidia compatibility. Linus Torvalds has "spoken" about this in-depth, but effectively, on the gaming side (not the enterprise side, because you know data centers run Linux practically exclusively), all of the GPU drivers were closed-source. Despite AMD and Intel moving to open source variants near decades ago.

In 2022, finally, Nvidia launched its open-source kernel modules for the GTX 16/RTX 20 series and above, and after a bit of a bumpy start, it's at last matured into something that's beginning to compete with its Windows counterparts.

Gaming results

Windows 1080p / 4K

• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra No DLSS - 92.91 / 31.66
• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra DLSS Quality - 111.35 / 53.03
• Total War: Warhammer 3 Battle Benchmark - 219.4 / 93.4
• Black Myth Wukong RT Off DLSS - 88 / 44

Linux 1080p / 4K

• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra No DLSS - 81.29 / 28.18
• Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra DLSS Quality - 127.25 / 50.12
• Total War: Warhammer 3 Battle Benchmark - 173.1 / 70.5
• Black Myth Wukong RT Off DLSS - 73 / 37

Performance as a result of those open-source drivers is a bit of a mixed bag. So I took three games effectively and ran them through four testing scenarios.

Now it is worth saying straight-up that these benchmarks are completely isolated compared to the way we usually do things here at PC Gamer. Typically, we use Nvidia FrameView on Windows to analyze performance, as it registers the frame rate pushed to the screen, rather than the frame rate the in-game benchmark tools/game engine reports. Unfortunately, (or unsurprisingly), there's no support for it on Linux, so for comparison's sake, we're forced to use the in-game engines instead for consistent results and a fair frame of reference.

I've also only listed average fps here, just to keep things simple, and they're tested in identical conditions across both platforms. Cyberpunk 2077 on the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, with DLSS switched off, and then set to Quality. Total War: Warhammer 3, on the Ultra preset, and Black Myth Wukong, set to Very High, with Ray Tracing off, and the upscaling quality slider set to 100 (using DLSS). All games were tested for three runs, and then averages were taken from there, with results at 1080p and 4K.

What's fascinating from these figures is that, on the whole, despite Proton effectively acting as a bit of a middleman and potential bottleneck, translating those DirectX API calls to Vulkan, the overall fps loss across all titles technically isn't that high, and certainly not noticeable from an actual gameplay perspective, at least in two of the titles.

At 1080p, the performance drop is around 11.1% across all four scenarios, and 16.3% at 4K. There's a couple of outliers here that need pulling, too. The biggest being Cyberpunk with DLSS at 1080p, where Pop! OS actually beat Windows, pulling an average fps score of 127 versus 111. That's not bad by any means. It's hard to know why that's happening; my best theory is that Windows is facing a bit of a CPU bottleneck here, which Linux somehow jumps over, thanks to lower resource usage on the overall system. Or there's some DLSS shenanigans going on with Proton that we can't quite explain.

And then there's Total War. Or as I like to call it, "oh god oh god why?" Compared to the other benchmarks here, it lost out to its Windows counterpart by a staggering 21% at 1080p and 25% at 4K. If you actually remove that from the results, the average difference drops to just 3.7% at 1080p, and 10.4% at 4K. Again, this seems to be a major API/CPU bottleneck predominantly, so if you're a big strat gamer, Linux might not be the right answer for you. At least if you're using CA's game engines anyway, which are a bit notorious for API calls anyway.

Marry, kiss, format partition?

My time with Linux has been eye-opening, genuinely. Pop! OS is such a beautiful place to be. There was never a day when I got back to the office that I wasn't looking forward to booting up my PC and getting to do some work in the Cosmic environment. It just runs so seamlessly. Yeah, I did have the odd bug here and there, but it wasn't anything a quick Google search or terminal command couldn't fix.

But, and here's the annoying part, specifically for me, so much of my current work is dependent on apps and programs that only exist in Windows and not Pop!. Affinity and benchmarking software, in particular, and other programs like that, kinda forces me back into Microsoft's clutches. The backwards compatibility that makes Windows so bulky, and grotesque, and inefficient at times, gives it such versatility that it's quite hard to ignore that as a positive in a weird roundabout way.

I would say the performance drop concerns me a bit (particularly as I've got about 2,000 hours in the Total War franchise), but there are alternative distros out there that are far more adept at gaming than Pop! Is, particularly in terms of CPU performance. Pop! is effectively designed as this handholding Goldilocks build, almost perfect for a bit of everything and easy to manage, but if you want the absolute best performance, you can get, certainly in-game, something more advanced like CachyOS, or Bazzite, or even Nobara, might be a better fit.

I'm not done with Linux yet. Not by a long shot. Those cutting-edge performance distros have got my interest piqued, and I need to get my fingers dug in there too, but sadly, for the time being, I've just gotta stick with the burgeoning old beast that is Windows 11, if only to keep those bills paid. I suppose we should be thankful that at least we've got Chris Titus Tech's WinUtil to get most of the crud out of the thing, but until major developers get their crap together, it looks like I'm stuck here until then.

A few days ago, Windows Latest reported that a new Low Latency Profile in Windows 11 could make budget rigs perform better. Effectively, it ramps up CPU usage for certain high-priority tasks, which allows it to open and interact with elements of Windows 11 much quicker than before. Since it was spotted, it has been called out for putting a bandage on a wider problem, but a member of Microsoft staff has come to its defence.

Scott Hanselman, VP and member of technical staff for Microsoft AI / GitHub / Windows, has taken to X to defend this Windows update.

"Apple does this and y’all love it," Hanselman says. "See it yourself. Let windows cook."

To let Windows cook is to acknowledge that it is still in process. This means Microsoft is still continuing to work on its Low Latency profiles going forward. Hanselman says, "All modern operating systems do this, including macOS and Linux. It's not 'cheating'; this is how modern systems make apps feel fast: they temporarily boost the CPU speed and prioritise interactive tasks to reduce latency."

Following up on this original tweet, Hanselman says, "Your smartphone already does this. Constantly. Every touch wakes cores, boosts clocks, renders a frame, then drops back to idle milliseconds later. You’ve discovered dynamic frequency scaling."

The Low Latency mode is currently in early testing for Windows Insiders. Early testing shows that the CPU boost opens apps like Edge and outlook 40% faster, and the Start menu all the way up to 70% faster. CPU usage spikes up to almost its max to open up apps, then spins back down again afterwards, and Windows Latest spotted peaks of almost 100% in use.

If you have a beefy rig already, you may not notice a slight increase, but if you have limited cores and performance to work with in the first place, being able to reallocate power at the right moment feels like a smart move.

Windows 11 already sees quite a lot of hate, partially because of the litany of bad Windows 11 bugs over the last year, Microsoft's insistence on using AI, and its own controversies outside of Windows. This could explain why some are very against the new mode. Microsoft taking any shortcuts to better performance leads some to believe it may not actually improve Windows 11 on a structural level. In fairness, just last week, it was revealed that Windows 11 is full of old code.

Whether or not that belief holds any water is still to be seen, but the likes of Linux have benefited greatly from Microsoft's past mistakes. Personally, though, with the memory crisis gutting rigs, I'm happy to take any free performance boosts I can get.

You know those clunky old dialogue boxes that get exposed if you click a few too many layers deep into the Windows 11 UI? The ones that make you think, sheesh this thing is ancient underneath? Well, a senior Microsoft executive has just confirmed that Windows 11's antediluvian innards are indeed far more extensive than that.

In a new video posted on X (via PC World), Russinovich explains how the Win32 API remains central to the functionality of Windows 11, despite dating back to Windows 95.

"Did anyone in the 90s expect Win32 to still be a first-class API surface in the year 2026? And I think I can safely answer, no. Nobody, I think, would’ve expected that because we were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026. Not Win32 that was designed back in Windows 95 days," Russinovich says.

If you're wondering what Win32 is, well, it's basically a set of pre-written functions or calls that software can make to the operating system. When an application needs to draw a window on screen, read a file, process a mouse click, render text, or respond to a keyboard press, it doesn't need to include the literal code to do accomplish those tasks.

Instead, applications call on these pre-written Win32 functions, such as CreateWindow(), ReadFile() , GetCursorPos(). And they all date back to Windows 95.

Microsoft has actually tried to move on from Win32. With Windows 8 in particular, there was a big push to move to a new API layer known as WinRT. The Windows 8 "Metro" UI largely used the new WinRT API layer and the idea was that, eventually, this more modern shell would become the primary way people used Windows.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Windows 8 was not exactly a roaring success and Windows 10 largely retreated back to the traditional Win32 shell. Part of the problem is that applications have to be rewritten to support WinRT (which itself sort got subsumed into Universal Windows Platform for Windows 10 and then was then rebranded as Windows App SDK and WinUI 3). Simply switching Windows to WinRT would have broken all legacy apps.

So, Microsoft ran Win32 and WinRT in parallel and, to cut a long story short, there was relatively little adoption of the latter. And so here we are in 2026, no flying cars, no moon bases and pretty much every mouse click you make in Windows invokes code from the early 1990s.

When's the last time you emptied the recycling bin on your PC? If the answer is right this second because you got self-conscious, then you're not alone. However, if you haven't waited nearly a decade to do so, you aren't quite as bad as one Redditor.

As user Illuminated Autocrat shared on Reddit, they just deleted 557,459 files from their recycling bin because they forgot to clear it out for almost a decade. That makes for 302 GB total, or 0.5 MB per file. They reportedly upgraded from 500 GB to 4 TB of storage over the years, "so the bin grew with it". They add, "free storage upgrade, I guess."

If you're wondering how exactly they took all that rubbish data with them, the user reportedly copied the entire SSD in a disk cloning station, so they never had to reset or wipe the storage since getting it. They also never seemed to realise how much data they couldn't account for on their rig.

I have no room to speak, unfortunately, as I checked and have almost as much data in my recycling bin. I have an 8TB hard drive that has been following me around for years, filled with game capture (so I can make videos), and, well, I now have a spare 300 GB on my PC. Mine only totalled about 7,000 files, though.

Illuminated Autocrat reports the files were mostly text/game/mod files that were kept "just in case". The biggest of the almost deleted files is a 120 GB Skyrim mod folder they made a few years prior.

Decided to empty my recycling bin after almost a decade... from r/pcmasterrace

If you are worried you are losing out on your precious storage and don't want to buy any more (with the memory crisis, who can blame you), there is a smart way of doing so on Windows.

In settings, you will find a neat tool called "Storage Sense". When turned on, it will automatically delete files that are older than 30 days if you are running low on disk space. However, you could opt to have Storage Sense go through your files every month, under the same parameters.

Searching through your deleted files yourself is the best way of avoiding losing data you want to keep, but those files getting into the recycling bin is a good sign you don't want them in the first place. Still, it's a good sign to do a little bit of digital spring cleaning. I know I needed it.

The latest Steam Hardware Survey shows Windows with a commanding 93.47% share of users on the platform, but below that muscular statistic lies a far more embarrassing one: Only 67.74% of Steam users are on Windows 11, almost five years after its initial release.

Perhaps even more surprising, six months after Windows 10's official end of life, more than a quarter of Steam users (25.53%) are still on the moribund OS, which had its own official release almost 11 years ago. I find it difficult to see this as anything but a massive blunder for the default PC operating system, though the hardware market is also contributing to Microsoft's adoption problem.

With the notable exception of a whole lot of Copilot AI nonsense, Windows 11 has stabilized into functionally the same user experience as Windows 10 after a rocky beginning. That's not bad, but it's hardly a compelling reason to upgrade.

Windows 11's early tarnished reputation made for a heady mix with its real poison pill: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0, a hardware-level security measure required by Windows 11 and not present in earlier processor generations.

A hardware upgrade solely to access a stagnant version of Windows is a tough ask under any conditions. It's especially onerous now: Hardware prices are skyrocketing and top of the line rigs struggle to run poorly optimized PC ports. But paradoxically, withered processors and graphics cards are able to be stretched for 10 years or more, depending on the graphical compromises you're willing to make.

I don't think the next phase of the Linux gaming renaissance is in danger of commencing any time soon, either: After cracking 5% of Steam users in March's survey, the April Steam Hardware Survey showed them dropping back to a still-impressive 4.52%—so not a catastrophe, but the numbers just aren't going to the moon (yet).

Windows is still in a tight spot, with even governments like France committing to alternatives. I see parallels to the divisive Windows Vista and 8 being followed by the unifying forces of Windows 7 and 10 respectively. Microsoft could turn things around with a crowd-pleasing Windows 12, but in the era of Copilot and Recall, I'm not convinced it still has that three-seam fastball.

It was only a brief mention, but in Microsoft's recent earnings call, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Amy Hood explained that the ongoing memory crisis is expected to impact revenue from Windows purchases. Specifically, that is, from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

"Windows OEM revenue," Hood says, "should decline in the high teens with roughly six points of impact from a prior-year comparable that benefited from Windows 10 end of support, six points from inventory levels that we expect to come down for the quarter, and six points from a lower PC market as prices increase due to memory cost."

OEMs make pre-built PCs, and when you buy from one of these companies, if they don't come with Windows 11 by default they'll usually give you the choice to pay extra to have it installed. If you say yes to this, you'll have an 'OEM' version of Windows, which is the same as regular Windows but is tied to your device rather than you as a user—you can't transfer it elsewhere.

OEMs pay Microsoft to be able to put Windows on the systems they sell, so that's what Hood is referring to here. Often, these will be large batches of machines for companies to buy in bulk, but they will also be gaming PC system builders, for instance.

The problem is the RAMpocalypse is driving up component prices, which means OEMs have to pay more and then pass on this cost to customers, which means less sales as home users and even companies decide to hold on to their current hardware for longer. Which means, ultimately, that OEMs likely aren't going to be buying as many Windows licences from Microsoft, as the CFO is here predicting.

Microsoft isn't entirely blameless here, of course, as while it's not solely an AI company, it has been implementing AI on a vast scale through Azure cloud and in partnership with OpenAI.

The effects of the memory crisis are far from an abstract possibility, as we've already seen system builders complaining of high memory prices. We've also seen the effects on RAM prices ourselves, of course. And while some chipmakers might be cautiously optimistic about the future on this front, plenty of others—especially system builders further downstream—aren't seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

Gloomy stuff, but at least Microsoft says it's focusing on improving Windows fundamentals. If hardware is taking a hit, perhaps software can soften the blow.

I'm not sure whether it's because of the RAMpocalypse and resultant PC component prices, Windows 10 (partial) EOL, Valve's Linux-based Steam Machine announcement, or something else, but there seems to be increasing focus on operating systems and software compared to hardware this year. Perhaps it's just that people were finally getting to their wits' end with bloated, buggy software. Microsoft is taking note, though, and is looking to "win back fans and strengthen engagement."

That's according to the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, who said in an earnings call: "When it comes to our consumer business, we are doing the foundational work required to win back fans and strengthen engagement across Windows, Xbox, Bing, and Edge."

Nadella continued, "In the near term, we are focused on fundamentals, prioritizing quality, and serving our core users better. You see this in the work underway across our consumer products. With Windows, we recently announced performance improvements for lower-memory devices, streamlined the Windows Update experience, and brought back focus to core features and fundamentals that matter most to our customers."

"Our north star remains the same", the CEO said, "delivering customer value with the highest quality and top-class innovation."

Microsoft began ending support for Windows 10 late last year, which seemed to spur a fresh spate of complaints about Windows 11 from many users. The sentiment seemed to be, 'if we're being forced onto Windows 11, at least make it good.'

Then, last month, Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's Windows president, explained that the company was going to focus on making Windows better in some fundamental ways that users have actually been asking for.

Previously, there'd been what seemed like two years straight of AI-focused updates that people hadn't asked for, without addressing any underlying issues that many users actually care about, such as general desktop performance and bugginess.

Davuluri said Microsoft will be focusing on such areas and also scaling back AI in areas where it's not needed. And it seems that this isn't just talk, either, as certain AI tools have already been cut, and there have been some nice changes to core Windows apps and features, such as Windows Update. Though the extent to which those AI tools are actually cut rather than simply moved or partially cut (as with Notepad and Snipping Tool) is debatable.

Regardless, the "foundational work" already seems to have begun. I suppose Microsoft will just have to hope it's enough to slow the slowly rising tide of Linux emigrees.

Windows Update is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, each fix it installs might end up solving whatever issue you might be having with your Windows 11 machine, but the tool itself has been known to be downright obtrusive at times.

This is why Microsoft has been busy rolling out some changes, starting with the latest Windows Insider builds. MS details all of the upcoming Windows Update, err, updates in a new blog post, and top of the list is a section entitled "more control." That's a pretty good start.

"Updates are an important part of keeping your PC secure and running smoothly", Microsoft says. "But at the wrong time, they can also critically break your flow."

Preach. To rectify Windows 11's update-misbehaving ways, Microsoft has already begun rolling out a "skip updates" feature to the Out of Box Experience (OOBE), which means you can now bypass updates during installation to get to the desktop quicker.

Our Jess has tested the feature and found it to work exactly as intended. We set up a lot of machines here at PC Gamer (no way), so when we say it's "neat", what we really mean is "thank goodness for that."

There's also a new upcoming option to pause updates, with a built-in calendar interface that lets you choose a specific day of the month to update your machine. This calendar goes up to 35 days in the future, but can be endlessly extended for 35-day periods.

The biggest feature on the list, though, is a Power menu change. You'll soon get options to shut down or restart your machine without being forced to install a pending update, no matter the circumstances.

It's kind of mind-blowing to me that this is presented as a revolutionary feature. I can't count the number of times I've needed to pack up my laptop in a hurry and mistakenly hit the "update and shutdown" option, rather than just closing the lid, locking me into an update process that could take two minutes, or the best part of half an hour.

MS also says it'll classify its update titles with more detail, so you can see whether they'll apply to specific features on your machine. And lastly, updates will now be grouped together to prevent frequent reboots.

"We know this has been a major pain point for Windows users, so as of today, we’re unifying the update experience to reduce the number of reboots you see every month," says MS.

"We are starting by coordinating driver, .NET, and firmware updates to align with the monthly quality update, reducing update experience to a single monthly restart."

Yep, that sounds good. The new updates are part of Microsoft's solemn vow to improve the Windows 11 experience, after user complaints regarding Microsoft's focus on AI updates over usability reached a fever pitch.

I'd say it was a pretty good start, but my machine still automatically reboots after being told to update and shut down, despite MS saying the issue was fixed some months ago. Is there somewhere I can raise a ticket, Microsoft, or will the end of this article do?

Whenever I think of old-school programming, I think of people like Dave Plummer, the creator of the original Task Manager. Working for Microsoft in the 1990s, he built that app, which we now very much take for granted, brick by metaphorical brick. That isn't to say there was zero hackiness involved—far from it, as with much pre-2000s code.

Case in point is something I just learned about the original app: Plummer accidentally left his phone number inside it. "It's one of those tiny bits of old code that tells a story," he says.

It all started by him noticing, when developing the original app, that CPU utilisation was sometimes adding up to over 100%, which is "just not possible if the math is being done right."

After checking the math was right on his end and finding nothing wrong, the other possibility was that there was a bug in the kernel, as that's where the data was being pulled from. But it was difficult to get any of the kernel developers to take this idea seriously in part because of the "pecking order" at Microsoft in the '90s: "the kernel is where the silverbacks live."

"I was just a UI guy drawing little pictures of CPU usage. So, as you can imagine, when I proposed to the kernel guys that, 'hey, maybe it's your bug', they were what I would charitably call unsympathetic to my plight."

Plummer used 'asserts' in the code to help diagnose the problem, meaning if the correct and proper conditions weren't met—if the 'assertions' didn't hold—while the application was running, "it throws a fault and it stops in the debugger so that you can inspect the machine to determine exactly why your assertion proved false."

He added an assert that specified CPU usage shouldn't be above 100%, which was intended to help diagnose when and where the problem was occurring in the code. However, "it was a weird case that hardly ever happened and it never fired on my machine, of course, or on any of the machines of the other people on my team."

"So I did the one thing that I felt gave me the best odds of finding out if anybody hit this case. I put my name and home phone number in the assertion. That way, no matter who in the company hit it or when or where in what building, they would be given my contact info and let me know about it."

He never got a lead though, and before long he forgot all about it.

"And then we shipped the beta. Now, I don't know exactly how many people get the Windows beta, but if it's not millions of people it's certainly thousands of folks. And now they would all be armed with code that would display my home phone number in a dialogue if things went sideways."

Apparently, though, despite still having the same home phone number to this day, no one has ever called—not until he mentioned it on YouTube a couple of years ago, anyway. I don't like to imagine how the 'oh crap' realisation that he'd potentially doxxed himself must have felt.

These are, I suppose, just some of the lengths that were gone to in order to deliver those first versions of the operating systems and software that we're so familiar with today.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the bug, apparently that got caught on a lab machine and the kernel devs confirmed it was a problem on their side and fixed it. Sometimes it's the silverbacks after all.

People have had a problem with how Windows 11's Task Manager shows CPU usage stats for a long time. While recent discussions have revolved around the idea that the app only bases its reporting on base clocks, Dave Plummer, the creator of the original Task Manager, explains in a recent video how it might actually be more to do with average calculations and complicated "little lies" and "compromises" in underlying calculations.

Last month, Microsoft announced a fix for this in recent a Preview build for the operating system. The company said: "We are changing the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools."

After being sent his original source code by Microsoft, Plummer has cast some more light on what's really going on. And to be honest, the wording from Microsoft would make more sense alongside Plummer's assessment than a base/boost clock mix-up.

The essential picture that Plummer paints is that Task Manager creates a useful fiction out of more data than we might think to give us our CPU utilisation figure.

One difference between how we might think it operates and how it actually does is regarding the refresh or interval time. CPU utilisation isn't calculated for each GUI refresh, because this isn't always reliable.

Instead, the amount of time used for each tick's calculation is "how much total CPU time was actually accounted for and consumed by all processes between the last sample and this one."

So that's the first thing to note: even the time-frame for each measurement isn't as straightforward as time between GUI refreshes.

The second and main thing to note, however, is that when it comes to the usage calculation, there's a lot of averaging going on:

"The CPU number in Task Manager is a moving little obituary for the immediate past. It tells you what just happened over the last refresh window, not what happened at the moment that your eyeballs landed on the row.

If the process wakes up, goes berserk for 100 milliseconds, and then goes back to sleep, Task Manager may show a small average or even a rounded zero depending on the refresh window and how much total capacity existed during that interval. That's not because it missed or didn't see the work. It's because it diluted the work over that whole window."

In other words, "modern CPU usage is more like how full was the freeway rather than how many miles were actually traveled."

Which to my eyes and ears sounds a bit like the difference between bandwidth and speed. Which made a lot more sense in the past, when there were fewer cores to wrangle and much less frequency variance.

"The old Task Manager," Plummer says, "was built in an era where the time used was a pretty decent proxy for what work got one. But on today's processors with dynamic frequency scaling, turbo boost, thermal throttling, and deep idle states, that connection has gotten a lot looser."

So, when the numbers feel a little slippery, it's not because the tool is broken so much as the hardware stops being simple enough for a single percentage to tell you the whole story."

As far as Plummer is concerned—and I suppose he would think as much given it's concerning his application's lineage—Task Manager serves its purpose at the cost of pinpoint accuracy. After all, there are plenty of things someone could mean by 'utilisation'.

"Task Manager's approach was cheap, fairly robust, and understandable enough for normal humans, which actually matters because a performance tool that requires a graduate seminar before breakfast has already lost the room."

Plummer has previously said that Windows "really does suck for some people" and has explained how he would fix it. Essentially, he would have a separate Windows mode that you can use if you're a power user, which removes some guardrails and so on. That might go some way towards retaining Windows users during the current significant minority user migration to Linux which we're personally witnessing.

Or, there's always the chance that Microsoft will actually improve Windows 11 like it says it will. I won't be holding my breath, but you never know.

As reported by Gaming on Linux, a new bill brought before the US House would require operating systems like Windows, Linux, and MacOS to verify users' age for installation and, seemingly, regular use. The "Parents Decide Act" has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and is cosponsored by New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer and New York Republican Elise Stefanik.

The bill would "require any user of the operating system" to enter their date of birth to both "set up an account on the operating system and use the operating system."

OS providers would also have to "develop a system to allow an app developer to access any information as is necessary, collected by the operating system to carry out this section and any regulation promulgated under this section, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer." In other words, any program on your PC would have access to the date you entered, which I don't like at all.

The method of age verification is probably the most critical information here in terms of privacy and data security, but that's being left to the Energy and Commerce Committee to decide after the bill has been passed⁠

It's not exactly clear if the law would simply require us to enter a date—just like how we all say we were born on 1/1/1900 when we want to look at an M-rated game—or if an actual verification step will be required. Some of the language in the bill heavily implies the latter, and, worryingly, that detail is seemingly one of a few that would only be figured out after the bill is passed—if it is passed.

"Not later than 180 days" after enacting the Parents Decide Act, the committee would determine the following:

• "How an operating system provider can verify the date of birth of a parent or legal guardian"—or, unmentioned in this entry but implied later, an adult user acting on their own behalf.
• "Data protection standards related to how an operating system provider shall ensure a date of birth collected by the operating system provider from a user, or the parent or legal guardian of the user … is collected in a secure manner to maintain the privacy of the user or the parent or legal guardian of the user; and is not stolen or breached."
• "Ensure an app developer can access information collected by the operating system provider to carry out this section …, to verify the date of birth of a user of an app of the app developer."

Now I'm just a simple country games journalist, but this certainly sounds like a vaguely-worded privacy nightmare that would require OSes to not only store sensitive personal information, but share it with whoever⁠—and you'll forgive me for not trusting some hastily drawn-up data protection scheme when these things always seem to fail, whether it's Discord immediately compromising IDs used in its own age verification, or some bush league people finder in Florida losing everyone's Social Security number.

That's not to mention that this bill seems to just assume that all operating systems are of corporate origin⁠—how is an open-source fork of Linux supposed to securely process personal information at installation, startup, and, seemingly, every time it interacts with a third-party application?

The simple answer would seem to be that it's not, and this bill would blithely wipe out an entire mode of personal computing in order to project the appearance that Congress cares about children's wellbeing. A further wrinkle pointed out by PCG US editor-in-chief Tyler Wilde: Would this also require internet access just to use a computer?

OS-level age verification is the latest development in the generalized first world drive to wipe out what little remains of digital privacy in a panicked response to parents letting their children fry their brains on the internet. The government of California has already passed a similar law, and it's driving open source software developers to the brink.

Though Microsoft claims it's actively working towards rebuilding user goodwill, many PC gamers are calling time on Windows. It helps that Linux is the best it's ever been for gaming, thanks to dedicated distros such as Bazzite. However, historic Steam survey results suggest the Big Switch is a ways off yet.

Redditor xVarrick compared Steam Hardware & Software Survey results from March 2024, March 2025, and March 2026. Their resulting bar graph simplifies the data by combining all OS versions and distros under unified banners, but still makes it pretty clear that the vast majority of Steam users have continued to stick with Windows; 92.33% of Steam's user base are using some version of Windows as of March 2026.

That said the Windows user base did shrink overall by 3.77% between March 2025 and March 2026. While that's not exactly eye-watering stuff, a correlational increase of 0.77% can be seen in macOS users. As you may already suspect, Linux enjoyed the greatest uptick, with an increase of 3% bringing it to a total 5.33% slice of the pie.

Steam's most recent all-time peak of concurrent users was 42,686,616 according to Steam.db. So even though 5.33% doesn't feel massive, just 5% of all concurrent Steam users still represents about 2,134,330 gamers who are playing on a Linux distro of some kind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Steam's latest survey puts SteamOS Holo 64 bit top of that particular pile.

But back to Microsoft—as Nick observed last July, Windows 11 has been with us for almost five years and for three of those, it was never the OS of choice amongst Steam users. Comparing survey data from October 2021 to July 2025, Windows 11 only overtakes Windows 10's Steam user count in October 2024.

OS distribution in Steam from March 2024 to March 2026 from r/linux_gaming

Support for Windows 10 officially ended in October of last year (unless you either pay $30 for Extended Security Updates, or live in the European Economic Area, in which case you'll get those updates for free). So it's definitely an interesting wrinkle that 27.03% of gamers sticking with Microsoft are still using Windows 10 as of March 2026. Good luck to 'em, I say—though this particular group has also shrunk by a massive 14.57% from the month before.

Safe to say, many of those users likely upgraded to Windows 11, as that OS saw an uptick of 13.09%. However, strict system requirements mean that many with elderly Windows 10 machines are faced with either figuring out how to bypass these requirements via tools like Flyby 11 and Rufus or—dun dun dun—making the leap to Linux. While I'm not among this crowd, I must admit that Linux's customisability is making serious headway in eroding my loyalty to Windows.

Task Manager is a piece of software you almost only have to open up when something is going wrong, and its creator, Dave Plummer, knows this well. As detailed in their latest YouTube Video, "If the system feels sick, if an app is hung, if the machine is gasping, Task Manager does not get to arrive fashionably late, staggering in under the weight of its dependencies."

He elaborates, "It has to be there now, and it has to feel crisp. It has to look calm even when the rest of the system is not." Plummer says that the software came in at under 80 kB when he originally wrote it and that it was "insanely fast".

Plummer details working on 1 MHz Commodore 64 games and how that experience trained them to think about programs in specific ways. He says, "Once you spend your formative years on a machine where every instruction has to justify its existence like it's applying for a loan, you never fully recover from that. Every line has a cost. Every allocation leaves footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent."

The Microsoft vet notes that Task Manager is now around 4 megabytes, which is around 50 times bigger. Naturally, Task Manager no longer needs to be as small as it originally was, given how much computers have progressed since Task Manager's launch three decades ago.

Plummer states, "I'm not here to say that modern engineers are just dumb because they're not. Their world is vastly more complicated now." Task Manager was only reportedly so small purely because "in that time and place, small was fast and fast mattered."

The Windows stalwart describes that the first thing Task Manager does is communicate with other instances of Task Manager, and investigates them. Instead of simply seeing if it's running, it communicates to the program and shuts it down if it doesn't get a reply.

It also only enabled and worked with part of its program if that was needed to run. Now, Plummer argues users "pay every cost upfront all the time for every user, whether or not they benefit. Old code, like Task Manager, has the opposite bias. Nothing got to tive in the hot path without a fight"

Notably, Plummer reflects on how he has changed as a programmer and designer since making Task Manager. He says that one of Task Manager's unique features is that it replaces runtime startup code with something bespoke, to avoid the baggage that comes with operating like a standard bit of software. Plummer says, "It's the sort of thing you do when you're young enough to think that manually replacing the runtime startup code is a reasonable afternoon activity."

Plummer does, however, argue that Task Manager differs from many modern utilities in scope and intent. It's not just that modern programs are bigger, in Plummer's eyes, but that they often "lack the instinct for refusal. They don't ask 'does the user benefit from this work right now?', they ask, 'can the hardware do it?' and those are not the same question."

Admittedly, he does balance this, arguing not to romanticise the code, and he also acknowledges "there are definitely parts of the old Task Manager where I can see the younger Dave strutting around the office thinking he's a lot more clever than he really is".

The Task Manager creator left Microsoft in 2003, but he has spoken extensively about his work on Task Manager, coding Pinball on Windows NT, and has levied some complaints at the current state of Windows.

He also, back in February, showed off his AI dashboard with synthwave music, saying "this is probably what Task Manager would look like (and sound like) if I were still around", whilst admitting "it's a good thing I knew to stay in my lane, design-wise."

With the latest Beta Channel version of Windows 11, build 26220.8165, Insider Preview members will be able to set much bigger drive partitions when using FAT32. Instead of the current default limit of 32 GB, you'll now be able to go all the way up to 2 TB. Just like you could do two years ago.

It's only a short note in the release blog for the new Beta Channel build, but it says everything you need to know: "We’re increasing the size limit for formatting FAT32 volumes via the command line from 32GB to 2TB."

The thing is, when I read this statement, the first thing that popped into my head was 'hasn't Microsoft already done this?' And the answer to that question is yes, it has, almost two years ago. Admittedly, that was in a Canary Channel build, which is basically like a beta Beta Channel, but at least the new release means the change is likely to roll out into public versions of Windows fairly soon.

Not that you need to rely on Microsoft, if you want to set a FAT32 partition greater than 32 GB in size, because there are countless tools on the interwebs that let you do this, such as GUIFormat. And you should also note that this doesn't change FAT32's 4 GB limit for file sizes, as that's inherent to the number of bytes used to store the length of files in the directory.

But for those PC users who still need to have FAT32-formatted drives for old PCs or some funky homebrew setups, or even just for prepping a USB thumb stick that's bigger than 32 GB for doing a BIOS update, at least you'll soon be able to do it on Windows, without recourse to using another piece of software.

It's all a very minor update, of course, and arguably one that Microsoft should have rolled out years ago, but I'll take it. Now, if Redmond can just see to it that Windows will let me have the taskbar at the top of my screen, without using third-party software, then I'll be a slightly happier chappier.

Oh wait, it is doing that! Finally...

In a seminar on April 8, a handful of groups from the French government got together to discuss digital sovereignty and "accelerating the reduction of its extra-European dependencies." One such act is to move away from Windows, the US-made operating system, entirely.

The solution? Linux.

As noted by Tom's Hardware, and detailed in a report, the French government has announced "its exit from Windows in favor of workstations running on the Linux operating system".

This is declared by the Directorate General for Enterprises (DINUM), alongside the Directorate General for Enterprises (DGE), the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI) and the State Procurement Directorate (DAE).

Importantly, there are plenty of reasons to want to switch to Linux. Unlike Windows, this operating system is free and open-source, and it's popular for its customisability and efficiency. Traditionally, it's used by developers because of the granularity of control available to them.

As well as this, there are plenty who simply do not like Microsoft or Windows. Its constant introduction of AI tools (though it does appear to be rolling back Copilot branding and has even removed AI from the Snipping Tool), without or without encouragement, plus its role in geopolitics, certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

However, the French government isn't switching from Windows because of quabbles or efficiency. It is simply trying to move its tools over to ones not owned by other states. The nature of Linux means that one can easily set up their own distro with little outside interference and without being reliant on American companies.

The French government also plans on moving its 80,000 agents in the National Health Insurance Fund over to 'sovereign solutions', and it reportedly plans to do so by the end of 2026.

David Amiel, the Minister of Public Action and Accounts, says, "The State can no longer simply acknowledge its dependence; it must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny."

He continues, "We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control."

If you've ever gone to open up some built-in Windows app and wondered why Microsoft has bothered to add a Copilot button in it, you aren't alone. After hearing community feedback, MS is reducing Copilot branding, starting with the likes of Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad.

As reported by Windows Latest, the latest preview of Notepad (version 11.2512.28.0) is removing the Copilot button up in the top right. Now, it will instead have a pen icon called "writing tools", which then opens up the same AI writing functionality.

Effectively, though it will be removing some of its Copilot branding, it won't be entirely removing the tools that come with it. You will still be able to use AI in most of your apps, it just won't be quite as obnoxiously branded.

The Snipping Tool, however, does appear to have entirely lost AI functionality, so that's a win for the AI sceptics.

This change was choreographed in a Windows Blog post last month. In it, writer Pavan Davuluri says, "You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows" and "As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points."

We have seen Notepad remove its Copilot button, but we haven't yet seen the same for Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. One can assume, based on the blog, that they, too, will follow suit.

This may be a 'forest through the trees' moment for Microsoft, though, as some users' problems with Copilot aren't just with the name and logo. I, for one, don't particularly want AI tools thrown at me upon bootup, without asking for them.

The Windows president said at the end of last year that "Windows is evolving into an agentic OS", which effectively means the plan is to pump it full of so many AI tools that it can just run itself. And yes, an agentic OS would in fact need access to many of your files and would need the ability to rummage through them.

Still, there's a level of self-awareness here that Microsoft is demonstrating. Let's just hope it gets the full memo on AI next time. Given its investment in the tech, that seems unlikely, but one can dream nonetheless. Or swap to Linux, I guess.

It can be easy to dunk on Microsoft. It is the creator of the most popular operating system, Windows, yet it's constantly trying to push more AI onto its users, and this is before mentioning the less savoury parts of the company. So when it was revealed that WireGuard and VeraCrypt both had their developer accounts terminated, it was easy to place the blame on the company.

But a representative from Microsoft instead claims that it was merely a mistake on the developers' part by not checking emails. A classic blunder.

VeraCrypt is a free open-source disk encryption software, and it could be seen as an alternative to Microsoft's own BitLocker. That's why, when its developer announced the account had been terminated and claimed "Microsoft did not send me any emails or prior warnings", some on X believed the termination to be a conscious effort from Microsoft to shut down competing developers.

In response, Scott Hanselman, VP and member of technical staff at Microsoft, took to X to say, "Hey I love dumping on my company as much as the next guy, because Microsoft does some dumb stuff, but sometimes it's just check emails and verify your accounts."

Hanselman goes on to say, "Not every 'WTF micro$oft' moment is a slam dunk."

He claims to have emailed VeraCrypt personally and plans on getting them unlocked, and also states that he has talked to Jason at WireGuard. WireGuard is effectively an open-source VPN protocol that lets you set up a private connection for your data across the web. You can create a private tunnel between two spots, and it's commonly used to connect mobile phones and other devices to a NAS.

Hanselman finishes this response saying, "Not everything is a conspiracy, sometimes it's literally paperwork."

It seems like the catalyst for this problem came in the form of an account verification system for the Windows Hardware Program that began in October last year. With this, the partner would have to review and update legal information and verify their account. As such, one must have a work email address and must verify their identity via a government-issued ID.

Microsoft says, "Partners who fail to complete Account Verification by the deadline, or who do not meet the requirements, will have their status set to Rejected and will be suspended from the program."

Though VeraCrypt says it didn't receive any emails from Microsoft, Hanselman does suggest they were sent, so perhaps they were missed in some inbox somewhere. It's certainly happened to me. Unless you're my boss reading this, in which case I diligently comb through my inbox regularly.

Until this verification is sorted, it halts progress for apps affected, as developers cannot publish Windows updates. This means VeraCrypt on Windows lags behind the likes of Linux and macOS, and the company claims "Windows is the platform used by the majority of users and so the inability to deliver Windows releases is a major blow to the project."

Linux is something that has been on our minds, and honestly on our gaming PCs quite extensively over the past few months. Since Valve dropped it into the Steam Deck, and Proton became the way forward for gaming on Linux distros the world over, there has been increased interest in the open source operating system. Is it a viable alternative to Windows, can it actually cope with gaming on high-end hardware, will you be stuck copy and pasting random code into a terminal from here until the end of time?

Yes, yes, and probably.

But there are other questions, the most pertinent is one that we put to the you, our dear readers over the past week: Would you, will you, are you making the switch to PC gaming on Linux?

For the hard of peeping among you, the results from that frustratingly ill-compressed image are as follows: 29% of the responders to the week's poll said they had already made the switch over to gaming on Linux; 26% said they actually don't mind Windows after all, and 14% said they planned to make the switch this year.

Then 10% of respondents each said they were either waiting for better multiplayer game support—Linux still suffers from being locked out of any game that has kernel-level anti-cheat support—or they were waiting for the Steam Machine to come out. Bon chance waiting on that.

Bringing up the rear, so to speak, we've got 6% saying that no, they don't like change, with 5% of respdonents saying they've been there already and got burned. Hey, me too, and I still went back.

It is obviously worth noting that the respondents add up to a grand total of 2,333 people, so the sample size is limited. Which means it behooves you to jump into the comments and make a noise about where you stand on this great debate.

We did have another quiz running last week, too, asking the question: Could Nvidia convince you to use DLSS 5? I'll give you the results to that soon enough, but I think you can probably guess how that one went already...

This week we want to know what resolution you game at. Are you a 4:3 Counter-Strike sicko, have you stuck resolutely to 1080p, or are you all in on ultrawides? Let us know.

Yesterday, April 1, Artemis II launched to start its mission to orbit the moon and lay the groundwork for future lunar missions. Important stuff. I'm sure NASA has got all its systems in order, no kinks to iron out, no oversi- oh no, wait, never mind, I see the Artemis II is hooked up with Outlook. And it looks like the Microsoft email and calendar suite is already causing problems for the astronauts:

"I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working. If you want to remote in and check the Optimus and those two Outlooks, that would be awesome."

Those are the words that recently sounded from Artemis II as one of the astronauts conveyed the issue back to NASA. Though it's worth noting we can't be certain the problem lies with Outlook rather than one of what I'm sure are many other systems at play in a spacecraft. NASA says they'll remotely connect to the computer to see what the problem is.

I can't imagine that much crucial will rest on whether Outlook is working or not, but it does at least go to show even the best and brightest among us can be victim of the simplest IT troubles. Largely because we're at the mercy of our tools.

Those tools will hopefully be improving soon, though. Microsoft has said that the company will be making '100% native' Windows programs, which is a change from the usually more laggy WebView apps, which are essentially browser apps wrapped up to run on Windows. Given the latest Outlook app is a WebView one, hopefully that will get a native re-build, too.

The improvements shouldn't be limited to apps, though, as Microsoft has recently said it's going to work on improving general Windows 11 performance and rolling back AI features. Part of that includes moving non-app elements such as the start menu to the WinUI3 native UI framework rather than WebView and React.

Hopefully no more software issues surface on the Artemis II mission, and hopefully Microsoft has all its improvements ready to ship before the Artemis III launch next year.

Steam Hardware Surveys come with copious caveats, including some courtesy of Valve itself. But the latest results for March are still intriguing, including a big jump in the proportions of gamers running Linux and a regression to the mean for the survey's GPU stats.

First up, that Linux result. According to March survey figures, the proportion of gamers on Steam running Linux increased from 2.13% in February to 5.33% in March.

That's enough to be well ahead of MacOS on 2.35%, though obviously still miles behind all versions of Windows on 92.33%. For the record, Arch Linux tops the Linux charts with 0.34%, with Linux Mint 22.3 next on 0.27%.

The SteamOS 3 as used for the Steam Deck is, of course, based on Arch Linux, likely explaining its top ranking position on the Linux list. Other notable trends include a pretty hefty shift away from Windows 10 in favour of Windows 11, with the latter up by over 10% and the former plummeting by 15%.

Exactly how accurate these figures are is an open question. But the idea that Linux is chipping away at Windows is not novel. There's a growing sense that the Windows quality of experience, for want of a better characterisation, is increasingly on the slide. And the obvious alternative is Linux.

Even Microsoft itself seems to have realised this, what with its recent messaging being all about improving Windows' fundamentals as opposed to loading it up with ever more AI slop. As it happens, several of the PC Gamer massif have also switched to Linux.

As for the GPU results in the survey, after February's suspicious looking win for the Nvidia RTX 5070, the numbers seem to have returned to normality.

The RTX 5070 jumped from 2.87% of Steam gamers in January to 9.42% in February, making it the most popular GPU on Steam. In March, the 5070 has reverted to, yup, exactly 2.87% again, placing it 5th overall.

That means the RTX 3060 returns to its likely rightful place at the top of the table, despite falling off slightly between February and March, from 4.6% of gamers to 4.1%.

AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs remain barely visible in the results, meanwhile, with the RX 9070 just making the top 100 in 99th place and the RX 9060 not appearing at all.

Arguably, that could be down to AMD Radeon cards being lumped together under the generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics." But even that amounts to just 2.4% of gamers and number nine in the rankings.

Everything will be a web app. That was once the assumption for the PC, even if the emergence of smartphone apps shifted the emphasis somewhat. But now Microsoft wants to put the focus back on running apps actually built for the Windows operating system.

Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft, recently made an appeal on X (via Windows Latest) for software devs to form a new team that will build Windows apps. When queried over the specific nature of those apps, Huyn was very clear. "100% native", he said.

That "100% native" claim will take some proving. It implies apps that are built with WinUI with no WebView content. The latter, essentially, is a mini browser that apps can use to display web content.

Many Windows apps and indeed elements of Windows itself, including even some parts of the Settings app that seem like they were natively coded for Windows, are actually running on WebView underneath it all. Generally, that's because it's faster and easier to serve up content and application services via a browser than to code an app. Indeed, Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot are WebView apps.

Likewise, even third-party devs that once coded native apps have been moving to browser-based alternatives, an obvious example being WhatsApp. That particular move is arguably a good example of why web apps can be problematic. Just for starters, running a WebView 2 app means spooling up a Chromium browser instance in the background, which can be much more memory-intensive.

Some users report that just loading up the WhatsApp login screen with the WebView version soaks up 300 MB, whereas the old native app used under 20 MB. With the new version of WhatsApp up and running, it can consume multiple gigabytes of memory, while the native app typically remains under 300 MB.

This move follows a broader public push from Microsoft to improve what you might call the "fundamentals" of Windows 11. Instead of leaning even further into AI frills and features, Microsoft is working on aspects such as reducing the disruption from Windows Update, making the taskbar more configurable, and even removing the need to log in online via a Microsoft account when setting up a new Windows 11 install. Yes, really.

Funnily enough, this all ties in neatly with an observation made by a former Microsoft operative. Former Windows development lead Mikhail Parakhin said he'd previously worked on a so-called 20/20 project, which aimed to reduce both the Windows install size and idle memory consumption by 20%.

Microsoft hasn't committed to those targets publicly, but it has made "lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows" a core Aim. Shifting as much app code as possible from WebView to native would certainly help with that.

All in all, this seems like yet another indication that Microsoft has now got its priorities right with Windows. Instead of ramping up the AI slop, Microsoft appears to be focusing on the nuts and bolts of the OS itself. If that's true, it's very, very good news indeed, especially when you consider how much system memory costs these days.

Today feels like a good day for Windows 11 fans. After the revelation that Microsoft might remove the requirement for an online MS account to set up Windows, along with reducing AI pervasiveness and even making Windows Update less of a pain, now we learn that Microsoft once aspired to reduce both the idle memory usage and installed disk size of Windows 11 by 20%. So, could this be back on the cards?

Responding to the blog post we covered earlier today outlining Microsoft's plans to improve the quality of Windows, former Windows development lead Mikhail Parakhin welcomed the new direction and recalled a project of his own that never came to fruition.

"Back in the day, Jeff Johnson and I had this 20/20 project," Parakhin says, "reducing Windows' idle memory consumption and the fresh install size on disk by 20%. We never got to finish—great to see this focus on fundamentals again."

Notably, current Windows and Devices VP at Microsoft, Pavan Davuluri, did not specifically mention an effort to hit 20% targets for memory and storage footprints of Windows 11 in the recent Windows Insider post. However, such a goal would fit pretty comfortably with many of the other measures aimed at improving Windows' "fundamentals."

More to the point, Davuluri does call out resource usage with "improved memory efficiency, lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows, freeing up more capacity for the apps you run" among the listed ambitions.

In the current context where memory and storage pricing are thoroughly out of control, this feels like an absolutely on-point effort from Microsoft, even if you'd probably be well advised to retain a healthy scepticism regarding delivery. Believe all this when you see it, in other words.

Personally, I really like the sound of the section in Davuluri's Windows Insider post headed, "More fluid and responsive app interactions." Davuluri says the aim here is "improving the shared UI infrastructure that Windows experiences rely on, reducing interaction latency and overhead at the platform level."

My sense, or at least my hope, is that this will mean UI responsiveness and fluidity will finally be fully prioritised within the Windows kernel. At risk of being unceremoniously marched off PCG, anyone who uses both MacOS and Windows can't help but notice that the former feels much smoother in terms of how the interface moves and responds.

I've always assumed that Apple pays more attention to how UI calls are prioritised, ensuring that limited CPU cycles are given to UI processes that dictate the responsiveness and frame rate of the UI. I also think that Apple is better, though not perfect, at setting priorities in a way that minimises UI freezes while waiting for various background events to complete, like network or disk traffic.

MacOS's advantage is such that, in UI terms, it often looks smoother at 60 Hz than Windows does at 120 Hz-plus. Anywho, all this talk of a leaner, lighter, more responsive Windows 11 will be music to the ears of many PC enthusiasts. Here's hoping Microsoft delivers.

This sounds almost too good to be true. But Microsoft has indicated that it is "working on" removing the requirement to log in to an online MS account during initial setup of a new Windows 11 installation. As if that isn't enough, Microsoft also says it is going to reduce disruption from Windows Update and even scale back on its Copilot AI assistant. Yes, really.

Most of the developments are covered in a new Windows Insider blog post by Pavan Davuluri, Windows and Devices VP at Microsoft. The blog post candidly, if indirectly, recognises what many of us have been feeling of, late, namely that the quality of Windows 11 has been on the slide.

"Over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better," Davuluri says, before detailing a list of improvements that maps pretty well with what most PC enthusiasts would most like to see fixed.

The item that doesn't appear in the blog post, however, involves the aforementioned MS account requirement for Windows 11 installs. Another Microsoft VP, Scott Hanselman, was queried about that on X (spotted by Videocardz) and his response was unequivocal. "Ya I hate that. Working on it," Hanselman said.

The first thing to note is that the X post in question has been up for four days and remains up at time of writing, so hopefully that indicates it wasn't a rash, ill-considered quip that clashes with official policy. Indeed, it does square with the broader sentiments of what the official blog post indicates for the future of Windows 11.

The reduction of Copilot integration will see it removed from apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad, for instance. Meanwhile, reducing the disruption from Windows Update will include, "the ability to skip updates during device setup to get to the desktop faster, restart or shut down without installing updates and pause updates for longer when needed, all while reducing update noise with fewer automatic restarts and notifications." Hallelujah.

Then there's the taskbar. "Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you," Davuluri's blog post says. "We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace." Hooray.

Other fixes include a "faster and more dependable" File Explorer, "more control over widgets and feed experiences," a simpler, more transparent Windows Insider Program and an improved Feedback Hub.

It's a very welcome sounding list that implies the current Windows 11 team at Microsoft is better aligned with the needs and preferences of users. The removal of the online account at login, reduction in Windows Update hassle and scaling back of Copilot certainly tick my personal three most wanted boxes for Windows.

Of course, at this point the account login element hasn't appeared in an actual Microsoft outlet or publication, so it's probably best viewed as semi-official for now. But here's really, really hoping that it's for real.

Occasionally, there's some Windows news that gives a little glimmer of hope for the operating system. A recent statement from Microsoft, however, does not mark such an occasion—not because it's bad, but rather because, for a change, it offers far better than a mere glimmer. This is Microsoft actually promising to deliver on all the main bases that we've been asking for over the last few years.

The blog post, written by Microsoft's Windows president Pavan Davuluri, kicks it off with exactly the right tone: "I want to speak to you directly, as an engineer who has spent his career building technology that people depend on every day." And then an admission that people "want [Windows 11] to be better."

That's a great start, admitting there's a problem, but what's to be done about it? The sceptic in me, that's been conditioned by the last few years of Microsoft messaging, braced for 'more AI.' But Microsoft is promising no such thing. Instead, it's promising exactly the kinds of changes that we've been arguing for here at PC Gamer, along with half of the web. These will be previewed in Windows Insider builds over the next month or so.

Here's how Microsoft breaks it down:

• More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
• Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
• Reducing disruption from Windows updates
• Faster and more dependable File Explorer
• More control over widgets and feed experiences
• A simpler, more transparent Windows Insider Program
• Improved Feedback Hub, available starting today

In addition to these and some other specific changes, Microsoft explains that it will be making general improvements to performance, something I'm particularly happy to hear. For instance, it's "moving more experiences", such as the start menu, to WinUI3, a native UI framework that should be much snappier than WebView and React apps. It's also promising to improve file explorer latency and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) performance.

Getting back to the list, Microsoft's AI note might sound a little vague, but the company explains that it actually involves rolling back some AI features where they're not needed: "As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad."

The Windows update promissory is also pretty concrete. The new idea for Windows update, Davuluri says, "includes the ability to skip updates during device setup to get to the desktop faster, restart or shut down without installing updates and pause updates for longer when needed, all while reducing update noise with fewer automatic restarts and notifications."

This, and more, constitutes Microsoft's "commitment to Windows quality", and is certainly a better direction than banning the word 'Microslop.' It's also better than feeding us said slop, such as by making "every Windows 11 PC an AI PC", of course.

The change in focus isn't completely out of the blue, given that Davuluri had previously said that this year, "you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows."

The problem was that this was a little hard to believe, given all the previous—yes, slop-heavy—updates and general decline in performance. I concluded my previous reporting on Davuluri's statement by hedging my bets, saying the changes are promising "assuming it's not all talk."

Well, it seems it is, indeed, not all talk, as Microsoft has gotten specific about what's being changed, and it's exactly what is needed: less AI, better performance, more customisability. And we won't even have to wait too long for it. Could this signal a return to form for Microsoft's OS? I sure hope so.

Nvidia GPUs don't always play nicely with Linux. Well, with recent driver issues, they don't always play nicely with Windows either, but it's been a bit of a pain for those swapping over for some time. If you are among those with an Nvidia GPU who use Gnome, things should be about to get much smoother.

For the unaware, Gnome is an open-source desktop environment for Linux, and the default interface seen in the likes of Ubuntu. Named 'Tokyo', after the Gnome Asia summit in 2025, Gnome 50 has just been unveiled, and it comes with a whole host of new features—but the most important for gamers will be better Nvidia GPU support (via Phoronix).

Under the 'Display Handling Improvements' section of the patch notes, it notes "Nvidia Performance Boosts", mentioning "Workarounds for Nvidia driver quirks." This means Gnome gamers should notice "smoother window animations and general desktop fluidity for users with Nvidia GPUs."

One of the biggest changes for those looking to swap from Windows to Linux is all those quality of life benefits Microsoft gets as the biggest platform holder. Nvidia will likely have Windows in mind first and foremost for its consumer tech, and the same is true for many developers.

However, there's been a shifting tide recently regarding Linux adoption. A chunk of the PC Gamer team have swapped over to Linux (mostly) successfully, and it's easy to see why. Microsoft has been through some rough times as of late, to put it lightly, and if you're thinking of ditching its ubiquitous OS, this should make things easier.

Google recently added official Chrome support for Linux on Arm, and Opera GX has recently announced a version for Linux. Today, actually.

It wasn't all smooth sailing in some of our team's swap to Linux, with our Jacob Fox running into a major problem at Gamescom that was eventually saved with a Windows USB. But Linux has plenty of upsides that aren't just "well, I don't want to use Windows". It's free, fast, and highly customizable, which might explain why a lot of developers like it so much.

Gnome 50 adds better VRR support, strong color management, HDR screen sharing, improved remote desktop, and a whole host of other features. And the best part of it all is that there are no unneeded AI features or new subscriptions.

If you've recently made the switch to Linux with your Arm64-based processor, but miss Chrome, I've got some good news for you. At some point in the next few months (Q2 according to Google), you will finally be getting official Google Chrome support.

As pointed out by Google, this follows Chrome support for Arm-based macOS devices in 2020 and Arm-based Windows devices in 2024. Many Apple devices are Arm-based (though they will naturally use macOS), and Snapdragon chips are Arm-based, too. Most Snapdragon laptops do come with Windows 11 built-in though, so it requires a little work to swap over.

Google says, "This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features."

The mention of the Google ecosystem is a good one here, as it could possibly ease the gap of swapping from Windows to Linux. Given that your Google account keeps your bookmarks and password data, you just have to remember how to get into your account to get access to all of your Google data.

For the likes of Google, it will want to make the swap from one OS to another as seamless as possible, as it will just lose out on any users swapping to unsupported devices. Google argues, "Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser."

Many of us here at PC Gamer have made the swap to Linux, too, and Snapdragon chips are getting mighty impressive. Just under two weeks ago, Snapdragon's X2 CPU popped up in Geekbench, and it's a bit of a beast. Notably, Nvidia is working on a chip comparable to Intel and AMD's offerings, which is also Arm-based, so we could see even more Arm machines in the future.

Making it easier to switch over to Linux feels like a smart move for anyone other than Windows right now. Given dissatisfaction with Microsoft as a company, and the potential of even more AI in Windows, neither the company nor the product have the best reputation right now.

Google finishes its announcement, stating, "This launch marks a major milestone in our commitment to the Linux community and the Arm ecosystem." It continues, "We look forward to seeing how developers and power-users leverage Chrome on this next generation of high-performance devices."

Naturally, you don't even need to wait for Google to launch its Linux ARM-compatible browser. Maybe swapping to Linux is a good time to swap to Brave, Zen, or Firefox too.

Perhaps setting the groundwork for the future launch of Microsoft's Project Helix, Windows users will be getting access to a dedicated Xbox mode this April. This will work on laptops, desktops, and tablets, according to Microsoft.

As announced via the Windows Blog, "Xbox mode delivers a controller-optimized experience to your Windows 11 device, letting players browse their library, launch games, use Game Bar and switch between apps."

The Xbox mode will be a full-screen "dedicated gaming experience", but it's not clear exactly how that will happen in the full launch, be it via a downloaded extra app or through Xbox's Game Bar function. It's also not clear yet if the April launch will be a worldwide rollout or just to Microsoft insiders.

Previously titled 'Xbox full screen experience', we did get to try an early version of the new Xbox mode in the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. At the time, we said it "does make a big difference to the overall experience", praising its stripped back interface, easy-to-navigate tabs and the fact it boots quicker and with little fuss. Though early days, it's a promising wrap on a handheld, which is a bit of a shame as handhelds aren't namedropped in the Windows blog.

One can assume that any Windows 11 gaming handheld will be able to run the Xbox mode, but whether it will have specific optimisations for handhelds other than the ROG Xbox Ally remains to be seen.

I don't know if I see the value of an Xbox mode on my desktop, but that might be because I'm 80% mouse and keyboard at this point. The Windows UI is, admittedly, still pretty hard to navigate on a controller without a touchpad. Steam does have Big Picture mode, but then accessing the Epic Games Store or Xbox app is a bit troublesome, traditionally.

However, arguably the biggest application for an Xbox mode is in whatever console Microsoft decides to put out next. Early reports suggest it's a tad more PC-like than previous Xbox devices, and it may even come with built-in Windows support.

In this realm, where the Xbox 720 / Series Y / Two is more of a competitor to the Steam Machine than the Sony PlayStation 6, a wrapper that makes it feel more bespoke than a traditional rig feels like an attractive offer.

Long-time Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been surprisingly candid in a recent chat with Morgan Stanley, highlighting, in as many words, how much the company has to thank both Intel and Apple for.

This came in response to a question—well, more of a statement than a question—commenting on Nadella "embracing openness". For instance, regarding Microsoft's stance towards Linux on Azure and its relationship with OpenAI.

Nadella responded: "There are very few zero-sum battles, and I think we overstate that a lot… somebody else’s success doesn’t need to be your failure if you can ride it. It’s sort of a thing that needs to be talked about more… Like, without Intel, I don’t know if Windows would have happened, right? Without Mac, I wonder whether Office would have happened."

"I’m always looking for, first, what’s the non-zero sum, where we can add value to our customers? Then, of course, there are zero-sum battles, and we’ll compete."

It's clear that the Microsoft CEO is referring to the origins of Windows and Office rather than any kind of ongoing dependence. In the case of Windows, there's a reason "Wintel" was, for a long time, common techy parlance. MS-DOS was made for the first IBM PCs that were running Intel CPUs, and thereafter for quite some time Microsoft's operating systems were the de-facto for home computing, in Intel machines.

The Mac-and-Office link is a little weaker but still pretty strong, because Excel was originally released for Mac computers, and the first version of Word with a GUI was also released for Mac before Windows. This was most likely because the original graphical Mac OS, System 1, was more user-friendly and popular than Microsoft's first graphical follow-up to MS-DOS, Windows 1.0.

Oh how far we've come... I suppose? Take a Windows 11 room temperature reading, and you'll most likely find it lukewarm at best, thanks in part to the all-out AI PC rebranding and redesigns and seemingly perpetual privacy creep. On the former front, that topic and related ones took up the bulk of the Morgan Stanley discussion—surprise, surprise—with a brief respite for this candid admission.

There have recently been some rumours that an AI-laden and "modular" Windows 12 might land this year, too, but this is heavily disputed. Either way, 2026 is seeming increasingly like the year of Linux, and I'm not sure Nadella will be as thankful for that as he is about yesteryear's Intel and Mac. But that's enough snark from me, let's leave a good comment be.

New versions of Microsoft's Windows OS don't come along very often. But could 2026 be the year of Windows 12? A new story from PCWorld summarises what it calls the latest "leaks, internal project references, and statements from hardware partners", which point to Windows 12 being a much more configurable and modular OS with a fancy new interface and a 2026 launch date. And, yes, it will inevitably be shot through with much deeper AI integration.

First up, the "modular" thing. It's said Windows 12 will have a new architecture known as "CorePC". The idea here is the ability to build or scale different versions of Windows for specific applications. Think desktop, mobile, tablet and, yes, gaming, including Xbox. This modular approach will also, apparently, enable Microsoft to better support a so-called hybrid mix of local and cloud computing.

The look and feel of Windows 12 is also expected to be substantially different and new. One of the most dramatic interface changes is reportedly a new "floating" taskbar with rounded corners and transparent glass visual effects. Superficially, it sounds a lot like the Dock in Apple's MacOS, at least in terms of looks if not so much in functionality.

It's also said that the system tray and clock move to the top-right corner of the display, with a Copilot-powered search bar located centrally at the top of the screen. Better support for touch control is also said to be a significant feature in the new interface.

Of course, the other major focus for Windows 12 from the get-go will be AI. Instead of an optional add-on, as in Windows 11, AI is said to be foundational with "OS-wide integration" of Copilot+ for Windows 12.

While it's tempting to view this as a worrying or negative development, especially given how hit-and-miss Microsoft's Copilot+ implementation in Windows 11 has been, there could be some very useful features if AI is implemented well. The conventional search experience in Windows has always been patchy. But Windows 12 is expected to support "semantic" searches, which could allow you to find folders and files without knowing the exact file name.

Previous leaks have indicated that Windows 12 could become a "voice-controlled chatbot," but there's less of an emphasis on that eventuality in the latest leak round-up. Whatever, full support for the AI functionality is said to require an NPU with at least 40 TOPS of performance. So, for those who are AI resistant or sceptical, perhaps avoiding system configurations with built-in NPUs could become de rigueur.

It is theoretically possible that Microsoft could limit Windows 12 to PCs with compliant NPUs. However, given that Intel's current Arrow Lake CPUs have an NPU limited to 13 TOPS and AMD's desktop CPUs don't have an NPU at all, a launch of Windows 12 restricted to systems with 40 TOPS-plus NPUs would mean no Windows 12 on the desktop, which seems an unlikely strategy.

Microsoft is said to be planning various other tweaks for Windows 12. As you would expect, that includes tighter Xbox integration. Better power management is also on the list. But exactly how radical Windows 12 proves to be, we'll have to wait and see. Hopefully it will indeed be released later this year, and there isn't long to wait.

Personally, I'd quite like to see really good support for high-DPI displays, something that was supposed to be a major part of Windows 7 way back when it was still in its "Longhorn" development stage, but has never really materialised. I'd take that over more unreliable AI slop, that's for sure. Let us know below your most-wanted upgrades for Windows 12.

The US Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida has announced the sentencing of a 52-year-old woman after she was found guilty of "conspiring to traffic in illicit Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels."

Heidi Richards, a resident of Brandon, Florida, was sentenced to 22 months in US federal prison for her part in the scheme, alongside a $50,000 fine.

Richards operated an e-commerce business called Trinity Software Distribution, which the Attorney's Office claims was used to purchase millions of dollars worth of genuine, standalone Microsoft COA labels at prices significantly lower than the the retail price of the associated software (via Bleeping Computer).

COA labels are small stickers carrying Microsoft product key codes, which can then be used to activate products sold as physical media including Windows 10 and MS Office, as was the case here.

Richards, along with her employees, were said to have harvested the product key codes from tens of thousands of stickers—typing them by hand into Excel documents—before selling them on in bulk to the company's customers. COA labels are not to be sold separately from the license and hardware that they are intended to accompany, according to federal law.

The trafficking of the illicit labels was said to occur between July 2018 and January 2023, and Richard's company is said to have wired $5,148,181.50 to the original Texas-based supplier during this period—although it's unclear exactly how much profit was made on the keys during this time.

The indictment lists a number of bulk purchases of the labels over a roughly five-and-a-half-year period, with the largest said to have been "approximately $100,000". Still, with Richards now sentenced and the scheme unravelled, it looks like the license resale game is now up. Who knew there were so many illicit gains to be made in a sticker? Or thousands of them, at the very least.

The government of California is implementing a law that requires operating system providers to implement some form of age verification into their account setup procedures.

Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal). The bill states, among other factors, that "An operating system provider shall do all of the following:"

"(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.

"(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."

The categories are broken into four sections: users under 13 years of age, over 13 years of age under 16, at least 16 years of age and under 18, and "at least 18 years of age."

In essence, while the bill doesn't seem to require the most egregious forms of age verification (face scans or similar), it does require OS providers to collect age verification of some form at the account/user creation stage—and to be able to pass a segmented version of that information to outside developers upon request.

That's likely no big deal for Windows, which already requires you to enter your date of birth during the Microsoft Account setup procedure. However, the idea that all operating system providers need to comply (in California) has drawn a fair degree of ire from certain Linux communities.

"This is basically impossible for California to enforce" says CatoDomine on the Linuxmint subreddit. "Even if Linux Mint decides to add some kind of age verification, to comply with CA law, there's no reason anyone would choose that version."

Comment from r/linuxmint

"It's more likely they will put a disclaimer on their website: "not for use in California."

Looking at the wider picture, however, mandatory age verification appears to be a growing trend. The UK government's current implementation under the Online Safety Act has come under heavy fire for privacy concerns, while platforms like Discord have received similar critique for their face-scanning age verification efforts, not least because of associations with companies that may not be using the collected data for mere age-confirmation purposes.

And while this implementation is California-specific, it does speak to a wider desire from governments to enforce age verification on a legal level—even if in this case, it seems virtually impossible to effectively enact.

If you're serious about your competitive shooters, you'll know that every single frame per second counts, so anything that gets in the way of that is something to be avoided. But what if the software you're using to chat with teammates is actually making things worse? According to some folks, that's precisely what Discord is doing, and it's because of process priorities.

First, let me just say that this doesn't seem to be a particularly widely reported issue, but we have noticed various claims cropping up on social media that Discord's default process priorities are too high. This, in turn, takes up too much of your CPU's time, resulting in lower frame rates, spikes in frame times, and whatnot.

AQ 'process priority' is a value given to programs that lets the operating system know how much of the CPU's time and resources should be dedicated to the task, compared to all the other processes it's juggling. A default value of 'Normal' means that it doesn't get priority over anything else, and the OS can just do what it needs to do to manage everything.

In Windows, process priority can be set higher than this: Above Normal, High and Realtime force the system to push a program ahead of everything else. In the case of the Windows Discord app, it actually has eight processes running when it's active, and although five of them have Normal priorities, one defaults to Above Normal, and two labelled as 'DiscordSystemHelper' run with High priorities.

Given that this is what some folks are complaining about, I decided to check it all out for myself, running Counter-Strike 2 at 1080p, with Low graphics, FSR Performance upscaling, and Nvidia Reflex enabled on a Ryzen 9 9900X rig with an RTX 5090.

Other than the fact that I truly suck at CS2 (I mean, seriously bad), there's pretty much nothing untoward that I saw in my testing. The above video clip compares three bot matches: Without Discord running, with Discord open in the background but with default priorities, and then one more where I forced every Discord process priority to Normal.

If you look closely at the frame time graph underneath the D3D11 performance figures (average fps and 1% low fps), you'll see that they run pretty much identically. The frame times are fractionally higher when Discord is running, but we're talking a millisecond here, a millisecond there.

That might matter in a professional esports competition, but the rigs every combatant will be using will be the same (or should be the same), so nobody would be at a loss. If it's just yourself playing with friends, albeit competitively so, then it's still not really enough of a performance impact to warrant concern.

However, this is just one test, on one PC, in one game. In other words, it's nowhere near enough evidence to comprehensively state that Discord's default priorities are a problem. But if you are worried about it all, then it's easy enough to resolve.

Just get Discord going, then fire up Task Manager (right-click on the Taskbar or Start Menu button). Then head to the Details page, scroll to the relevant process, and right-click on that. Scoot down to Set Priority, choose Normal, and then confirm the selection.

You might find that on your PC, it gives your games a little more CPU breathing space, but if I'm to be honest, Discord is pretty light in terms of processor demand, and if that app's giving your PC grief, then games are never going to be running super smoothly anyway.

Oh, and don't be tempted to try and force more performance by setting a game's priority to High or, heaven help you, Realtime. It's unlikely to make a blind bit of difference, and in the case of Realtime mode, it'll just make things very unstable. So don't do it, alright?

Late last year, Microsoft said that it was making 'every Windows 11 PC an AI PC', so congratulations, you've probably already got one in some form or fashion.

However, a blog post tucked within the Windows Learning Center entitled 'Best AI PC features to look for in 2026: A beginner's guide' seems to disagree. Under a section titled "What is an AI computer and why 2026 is the moment", Microsoft attempts to explain to the uninitiated what an AI PC is (via Windows Latest).

"An AI PC is a computer built from the ground up to run artificial intelligence features directly on the device—not just in the cloud," says MS. "Instead of relying heavily on the cloud, AI PCs blend hardware, software, and operating system intelligence to deliver incredible speed, all-day battery life, and built-in AI experiences."

"Think of it this way," the blog continues. "A traditional PC follows your commands... an AI PC anticipates your needs." And for those worried about some of the potential side effects of the technology, Microsoft has some reassuring words: "And no—AI is not here to replace you. AI is here to assist you by helping to remove friction, so everyday tasks feel smoother, faster, and more intuitive."

I'm glad we've cleared that up. After all, the definition of an AI PC has been something of a nebulous concept over the years. Beyond the idea that AI itself is somewhat difficult to pin down, an AI PC has at various points needed a physical hardware NPU, or a Copilot sticker, or be capable of running Copilot AI in some form or fashion.

Then we were told that every Windows 11 PC was becoming one thanks to new Copilot updates, despite many modern chips still lacking dedicated AI hardware. Still, a PC that's "Built from the ground up to run artificial intelligence features directly on the device" is surely an NPU-equipped machine, and Microsoft looks to be doubling down on that fact.

"AI PCs are powered by a turbocharged neural processing unit (NPU)—a specialized computer chip powering Windows AI features to enrich your everyday life", the blog confirms. That's that, it seems.

But wait, there's more! There are also Copilot+ PCs, which the blog says need an NPU with at least 40 TOPS of AI-crunching power, 16 GB of RAM, at least a 256 GB SSD, and Windows 11 version 24H2 or newer. The blog also says that "Many Copilot+ PCs are powered by Snapdragon X Elite Plus processors, though support is expanding to Intel Core Ultra 200V series and AMD Ryzen AI 300 series processors".

By which it means, many of those chips are already supported, right?

See? It's simple stuff for a beginner to understand, and definitely not a convoluted web of branding terminology that almost certainly leaves the non-hardware-inclined scratching their heads and wondering what PC they're supposed to buy to become part of the AI revolution.

"To find the right AI PC, look for integrated AI architecture and select a device with a dedicated NPU to ensure peak local performance," the blog concludes. "Choosing a Copilot+ PC provides the most future-proof experience, offering native AI tools that are more efficient than third-party software. Ultimately, choose a Windows PC that streamlines your specific workflow through seamless, built-in AI capabilities."

Uh-huh, uh-huh. Sure thing. I'm glad AI isn't coming to replace me, at the very least. And I can always retrain as a plumber or an electrician if things get desperate. It's nice to have options, isn't it?

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.

Rejoice all ye doubters of network performance. Microsoft has announced a new speed test feature being integrated right into the Windows 11 taskbar, making it easier than ever to take your internet connection's performance for a spin.

In a blog post on the Windows Insider portal, Microsoft explains that the new feature is included in Windows 11 Builds 26100.7918 and 26200.7918 (KB5077241).

"New! A built‑in network speed test is now available from the taskbar. Open it from the Wi‑Fi or Cellular Quick Settings, or by right-clicking the network icon in the system tray. The speed test opens in the default browser and measures Ethernet, Wi‑Fi, and Cellular connections. This feature helps check network performance and troubleshoot issues," the post says.

Long story short, the new feature adds an option for "Perform speed test" or "test internet speed" when you either mouse-over or right-click, respectively, the network icon in System Tray on the far righthand side of the taskbar, as shown in the X post above. This allows you to immediately open an internet speed test page in your default browser. Our understanding is that it will take you to the Bing speed test found here.

Whether this is necessarily more convenient than, say, a simple browser bookmark is an open question. But it could at least come in slightly hand for new PCs or builds.

Of course, this feature isn't the only novelty in the new builds of Win 11. Other highlights include the ability to control pan and tilt for supported cameras in the Settings app, a revised set of emojis, enhanced restore and recovery capabilities for cloud PCs and enterprise installations, support for .webp image files as desktop backgrounds and, well, a whole litany of other detailed tweaks.

Indeed, this appears to be one of the more comprehensive updates for Windows 11 of late. There's nothing that immediately looks revolutionary. But it's a long list of fixes and upgrades. Take this fix, for example: "For laptops used with a docking station while the lid is closed, improved reliability of resuming from sleep when connecting to AC power, without needing to open the laptop lid."

That's the sort of annoying glitch that makes Windows feel pretty flakey. If you use a docked laptop and find that you have to lift the lid to wake it every time it drops off, that fix will be very welcome indeed.

Of course, with the general narrative of late arguably being that Windows has becoming increasingly klunky, it's an open question exactly how far this set of updates will go to redressing the balance. But we should all be able to find out pretty soon.

The updates are rolling out now for Windows Insiders subscribers and are expected to be made available to everyone running Windows 11 in the few weeks. That should start with the non-preview security update for February, due before the end of the month.

Windows 11. There's a lot I could say about Microsoft's latest operating system, but if I got into it, we'd be here all day. So, let's focus on the most recent development—namely, how many Windows Insiders have been blocked from downloading the latest preview build ISOs.

To be clear, non-Insider builds of Windows 11 are unaffected by the issue; if you're not part of the Windows Insider preview program, you should be able to update your OS just fine. But according to Neowin, folks wanting to get their hands on either the Windows 11 Canary channel build, 28020.1611, or the Server preview build, 29531, are seeing their downloads consistently fail.

A number of users have taken to the community support forum to say that it appears their IP addresses are being blocked. The developers behind Rufus, a free utility that can significantly pare down Windows 11's installation nonsense, have encountered the same ISO download issue. Whether this is a bug or an intentional block placed by Microsoft has not yet been confirmed.

However, Rufus dev Pete Batard recently commented via Github that he believes there is "active intentional involvement from Microsoft to break the script downloads." He went on to write, "In short, I'm pretty sure Microsoft paid one of their employees to figure out a way to break the Fido downloads explicitly, and then implemented that on their servers."

Batard acknowledges that this wouldn't be too hard to do seeing as Rufus is an open source project, and the Fido scripts it uses to automate downloads of Windows ISOs were written using Microsoft's Powershell. According to Neowin, this wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has done something that has broken the Fido script either.

An intentional block by Microsoft would make sense for a few other reasons too. For one thing, it would be hardly surprising if Microsoft wanted to steer users towards using its own media creation utilities and away from third-party tools (such as Rufus). Granted, that doesn't completely explain why Windows Insiders, who are presumably downloading ISOs directly, are also running headlong into the block.

That said, the block could be in place for security reasons. For instance, if there's a major issue with the build itself, it would make sense for Microsoft to block downloads until it's had time to put out the fire.

Alternatively, the IP blocks and failed downloads could potentially be an unforeseen consequence of tightening security; only last month Microsoft documented Windows Hello Tampering Vulnerability that could result in incorrect privilege assignment—locking down who has access to what may be part of a fairly reasonable mitigation response. Regardless, it'll be difficult to know for sure until Microsoft decides to comment.

Dave Plummer, the man known for his work with Task Manager and Windows Pinball, has recently taken to Twitter to share what a modern version of his Task Manager would look like, and it's… interesting.

Well, more accurately, he shared the dashboard for his Tempest AI, saying, "This is probably what Task Manager would look like (and sound like) if I were still around. Which is why it's a good thing I knew to stay in my lane, design-wise."

The dashboard in question has a smattering of graphs, two speedometer-style gauges, and an almost Cyberpunk-style theming. It's a bit messy, and perhaps the best/worst part is the music—a pounding synthwave/rave/glitch track.

It's all over the top, in a way that would be far too much for any task manager I'd want to use. At least Plummer is self-aware about it. There's a web version of the dashboard live right now (and yes, you can turn the audio off). Just four days ago, the dashboard looked far less gauche.

If you're wondering what Tempest AI is, it's more or less what it says on the tin. Dave Plummer has been working on an AI that is trained on the old arcade game Tempest to, well, play Tempest.

Tempest is published by Atari, and it launched in 1981. It used the then-budding QuadraScan vector technology and emulated 3D movement, which made it rather difficult.

Plummer said last year, "You might wonder why I chose Tempest for this AI project. It's not because Tempest is an easy game. Far from it. Tempest is a beast to master with fast-paced action and complex patterns. Its spinning 3D playfield and relentless enemies make every second a test of skill and reflexes. But here's the thing. I've been hooked on it for more than 40 years."

He's not lying. Plummer holds a world record for his score in the game. "Most humans are notoriously bad at the game, and it's a tough challenge for an AI to crack, which is precisely why it's perfect for this project", he says.

In fairness, given that the AI is built to play a retro game, the Tempest AI dashboard is fittingly retro—even if I'd never want to use it on my PC.

Longtime Microsoft insider Raymond Chen has returned with another cracking anecdote from the days of Windows 95. His latest blog post concerns the fun freebies packaged alongside the OS to showcase Windows 95's multimedia capabilities—turns out, Weezer's Buddy Holly music video presented a tricky rights situation before it was cleared for inclusion.

For those not old and wizened like me, Weezer's Buddy Holly music video is a loving homage to Happy Days, an American sitcom steeped in 50's nostalgia which ran from 1974 to 1984. Clips from the show are interspersed and cleverly blended with more contemporaneous footage of the band performing in their sweet little cardigans.

It's a neat effect for sure, but it meant that Microsoft didn't just have to get the rights to just the song audio. The company also had to seek the permission of every on-screen Happy Days actor before they could legally redistribute the music video—including, most prominently, Henry Winkler of Arthur 'The Fonz' Fonzarelli fame.

Raymond Chen writes, "The lawyer responsible for securing the rights to the video [...] thoroughly enjoyed the assignment. I don’t know whether he got to talk to the actors directly, or only to their agents, but I can imagine it being an interesting experience trying to find Henry Winkler’s telephone number (or his agent’s telephone number) with a chance of talking to The Fonz himself."

Conversely, it was easy enough to clear the song itself for redistribution—though it was Weezer's label, Geffen Records, that provided permission rather than the musicians themselves, causing at least a little consternation at the time.

Longtime Weezer collaborator Karl Koch told Magnet magazine back in 2014, "Nobody in the band even had a computer at that [time] so we had no idea how big a deal that was" (via Genius and Phawker).

Drummer Pat Wilson also reflected, "I was furious because at the time I was like, ‘How are they allowed to do this without our permission?’ Turns out it was one of the greatest things that could have happened to us. Can you imagine that happening today? It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video.”

It was hardly the only time Microsoft leveraged popular music; The Rolling Stones' Start Me Up memorably scores some of Windows 95's earliest ads (and you can read about how Microsoft scored those song rights in this blog post by former senior vice president Brad Chase).

Given the highs and low-lows of Windows 11, perhaps Microsoft will be inclined to find another killer theme song for the next version of their OS before long. Considering that last year Microsoft's Windows and devices boss Pavan Davuluri pitched an all-seeing, voice-controlled chatbot that gives you productivity 'superpowers', I'm personally not in a rush to see Windows 12.

For over four decades, Windows Notepad has been the basic text editor of choice for many a discerning PC user. In recent years, though, Microsoft has been steadily adding all kinds of features to it, turning it from a barebones word processor into something decidedly more complex. Unfortunately, the addition of formatting and tables now includes one more feature: a remote code execution vulnerability that could let hackers run all kinds of nasty stuff on your PC.

Microsoft acknowledges the issue in its security update guide, snappily labelled as CVE-2026-20841. With a common vulnerability base score of 8.8 and temporal score of 7.7, it's rated as a 'high' security problem.

Basically, it all works like this: A user opens up a Markdown file that contains an innocent-looking link in it, but upon opening said link, Notepad then starts to load and execute remote files that scrape data or do other nasty stuff with the computer. If the user has admin rights, then the attacker would have the same privileges too.

Like so many vulnerabilities of this kind, the computer would need to be connected to a network for the attacker to gain remote access, and it would only trigger if the user opened the Markdown file and then clicked on the link inside it. You'd think that this would mean that almost nobody would be affected by the problem, but the fact that cybercrime is such a problem these days just shows how many folks would be at risk.

If you're wondering what Markdown is, it's a simple markup language that can be used to translate basic text into HTML, and it's what Microsoft uses to give Notepad the ability to add tables and formatting (e.g. bold or italic) to a text document. If you've ever used an app where you've added two asterisks before a word to make it go bold, then you're probably using Markdown to do this. Well, the app is, but you get what I mean.

This security vulnerability isn't an issue with Markdown itself, just how Notepad renders it, but exactly how Microsoft will fix this isn't clear at this stage. For now, though, you can avoid the problem entirely by sticking to some important procedures: Do not download any file that you can't verify the integrity of its source and never click on a random link.

The good news is that there is currently no known exploitation of this vulnerability doing the rounds out in the wild, and even if there was, it's pretty straightforward to avoid putting your PC into harm's way. But given the simplicity of the hack, you'd think that Microsoft would have already thought about the possibility of it before going all willy-nilly with expanding Notepad's feature set.

Microsoft seems to have listened to the year-long barrage of collective groaning, as it is apparently now focusing on improving the things in Windows 11 that matter. The Verge has heard from Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, who says the company needs "to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people."

"This year," Davuluri continues, "you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows."

According to The Verge's sources, which are "familiar with the company's plans", these changes will occur "in a process known as 'swarming'." Which presumably means getting as many engineers on-board as possible to "swarm" the most crucial issues and resolve them.

If you use Windows 11 more than just every now and then and if you spend even a little time online, you'll no doubt already know what kinds of issues these are. We've seen it all, over the past year, from Task Manager refusing to close, to peripherals not working in the recovery environment, a surprise dark mode File Explorer flashbang bug, and even previous update bugs causing new ones. And those are just the stand-outs; Windows 11 has had a rough time of it.

That's not including the so-called features, either, including a metric ton of AI ones. I'm pretty used to AI slop by now, and even I was recently taken aback when I reinstalled Windows and was greeted by Microsoft Edge giving me a window-width message proclaiming it to be an AI browser. Or something similar—I can't remember, to be honest, I've blocked out the sordid memory a little already.

Then there are the nagging OneDrive pop-ups, web search being mixed in with local search, and just general poor performance in various areas. The list goes on, and on, and… you get the picture.

I think part of what's annoyed many people about the state of Windows 11 is the fact that it's forced many of them onto the OS from Windows 10. Late last year, the previous OS became kind-of-but-not-quite EOL, forcing many to upgrade if they wanted updates. Even with those updates extended for a year for opted-in users, that was just delaying the near-imminently inevitable.

People needed (or need) to upgrade if they want to stay on Windows, and the least such Windows 10-ers could ask for is to be greeted by an operating system that works. But alas.

That's why many seem to be trying out Linux instead. Even I, who swore off Linux after somewhat of a catastrophe on a work trip last year, am trying out the open-source operating system again—dual-booted this time, though. It's not even a poor choice for gaming anymore, and with a new cross-distro collective forming and the Steam Machine soon to launch, things can only get better for the Windows alternative.

All that, plus Microsoft's declining gaming revenue, must certainly be lighting a small fire under the company's feet. I say 'small' because let's not kid ourselves, Windows isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and home power users are only a small fraction of the Windows market. But the discontent isn't nothing, either. So it's good to see that Microsoft might be taking it all seriously, now, and focusing on what matters for a while. Assuming it's not all talk, that is.

Well, don't I have egg on my face. After writing an article yesterday wherein I pointed out that Windows 11 is "currently in a reasonable state", it appears the OS now has something of a stacked bug problem.

We previously reported on a bug that Microsoft said was creating a "limited number of reports" over a boot failure issue, in which users were greeted with an "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" stop code after installing the January 2026 Windows security update (KB5074109).

However, according to Bleeping Computer, Microsoft now says that the update-based failure seems to be linked to a previous security update bug. Per a Microsoft business account-locked advisory spotted by an AskWoody forum member:

"Recent investigations have determined this issue can occur on devices that failed to install the December 2025 security update and were left in an improper state after rolling back the update.

"Attempting to install Windows updates while in this improper state could result in the device being unable to boot. We are working on a partial resolution that will prevent additional devices from resulting in a no-boot scenario if they try to install an update while in this improper state.

"However, this partial resolution will not prevent devices from getting into the improper state in the first place, nor will it repair devices that are already unable to boot", says MS.

So, it looks like it's a failed update that causes the next update to, err, fail. This sounds like a particularly frustrating problem, although if you keep your machine updated on the regular there's a good chance you're already on the new update without this issue.

Or you can't read this piece on your desktop PC because it won't boot. Ugh. While Windows 11 is arguably pretty stable these days (Microsoft certainly thinks so), it's bugs like these that make users wary, and rightly so. Hopefully Microsoft's "partial resolution" eventually becomes a full one, although by the looks of its efforts so far, it seems like a full re-install may eventually be in order. It's not a great look, I grant you.

France announced Monday, January 26, that it plans to replace American software such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own domestic software, Visio. Visio will be rolled out by 2027 and will only be available for government departments, not private companies or individual members of the public.

As reported by Euronews, David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, said, "The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool." It seems France doesn't want another nation's AI LLM like Gemini taking notes during meetings that could include sensitive information.

Visio has been in testing for around a year and already has 40,000 users. By switching to this homegrown software and not paying for licences from American technology companies, France could save €1 million per year per 100,000 users, the French government claims.

The new platform, which includes its own AI transcription abilities, is part of the Suite Numérique plan, Euronews reports. The end goal is to replace other US software such as Gmail and Slack, too, ending France's reliance on foreign information technology.

Visio will be hosted on the cloud infrastructure of Outscale, a French company. Last year's Amazon Web Services outage affected countries all over the world, so France looks to be isolating itself from foreign effects on its own digital services.

Amiel also says this move toward domestic systems "highlights France's commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or service disruptions."

Two Danish municipalities moved away from Microsoft software for civil servants last year, and the German state of Schleswig-Holstein followed suit and banned Teams and other Microsoft programmes within the government.

These changes show that Microsoft isn't destined to dominate global software forever. While it's still popular among private businesses and members of the public, more governments are shifting to open-source or local solutions.