Microsoft's NT team picked Ctrl+Alt+Del in the early 1990s because no shipping app used it, turning a reboot shortcut into a secure attention sequence. Windows 11 still registers it at boot through Winlogon, and one security policy decides whether you have to press it before you can sign in.

Windows leaders wanted a trimmed-down Windows Home on the next Xbox handheld, and an Xbox exec threatened to scrap it. Xbox's CTO disputes that account, and 25 years of Xbox history show why "built on Windows" doesn't mean a Windows desktop.

If you press the Windows key on your keyboard, it opens the Start menu, but what if it could do more? Microsoft has some ideas.

Steve Jobs said vertical touchscreens make your arm want to fall off, Tim Cook compared Windows 8 PCs to a toaster-fridge, and Craig Federighi said touch on a Mac wasn't a good experience. Now Apple is reportedly launching a touchscreen MacBook Pro, and Steven Sinofsky remembers the headlines.

Microsoft promised to cut Windows 11's memory footprint on 8GB PCs, but early 26H2 savings showed up mostly on 16GB to 48GB machines. Here's what changed on an 8GB laptop full of work apps, a clean VM, and what Microsoft's 2GB and 200MB claims mean.

Microsoft says it's retiring "Copilot actions" from the File Explorer context menu, which it recently began rolling out.

Windows Latest enabled a hidden taskbar menu in Insider Build 26340.9750 that has Left, Top, Right and Bottom buttons. It worked well with an app and Start open on our VM, and the menu first appeared in a deleted video a Microsoft engineer shared in April, when it was only a debug tool.

A 32-bit app that asks for System32 on Windows 11 ends up in SysWOW64 without knowing it. I tested the WOW64 redirector on a 26H2 PC, went through Raymond Chen's take on the backward names, and found the hidden Sysnative alias plus six folders Windows doesn't redirect.

Lockergnome founder Chris Pirillo told Microsoft it has the AI tokens to finally unify Windows design. Windows design director Diego Baca agreed on AI, pushed back on the rest, and explained why changing an OS used by over a billion people takes time. Here’s what’s being rebuilt and what’s still stuck.

If you've got AirPods, you should consider installing Windows 11's October 2026 Update, as it ships with the Bluetooth upgrade.

CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1 and LPT1 are still reserved device names in Windows 11 because batch files and scripts depend on them. Microsoft's docs say NUL.txt and even COM¹ are off-limits, but on Windows 11 26H2, File Explorer let us create NUL.txt.

Microsoft said it would reduce ads in Windows 11, but its popular wallpaper app, was recently updated with adware-like behavior.

Windows 11's Photos app is being renamed Photo Viewer and now only opens and edits single images, while the web-based OneDrive Photos becomes the new Photos app with a Gallery for PC, OneDrive and iCloud pictures. I tried both on my Insider PC, and counting File Explorer's Gallery, that makes three.

SimCity read memory after freeing it, so Microsoft made Windows 95 detect the game. Years later, Raymond Chen revealed that Microsoft recompiled Windows 95’s heap manager into a compatibility fix called EmulateHeap, and you can still find it in Compatibility Administrator on Windows 11 26H2.

"Choose Chrome, the browser built by Google" is a new message that pops up when you browse Google.com in Microsoft Edge.