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.

Fernando spent 12+ years building Apple products and is now testing a $5,899.99 Surface Laptop Ultra with 128GB of memory. Former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky and Windows 95 lead Brad Silverberg weighed in on NVIDIA’s RTX Spark plan, comparing it to the DirectX and OpenGL fight of the 90s.

The 8.3 rule dates back to CP/M, a 1974 operating system MS-DOS tried hard to stay compatible with. On Windows 11 26H2, Program Files still answers to PROGRA~1, and Chen warns that one DLL loaded under two names can end up as two separate copies in memory, which is why Microsoft keeps the old names.

Microsoft says it won't allow ReFS on USB drives on Windows 11, and it makes you wonder what happened to the big ReFS bet.

The certificate that signs the Windows boot loader is the last 2011 Secure Boot certificate to expire. We explain what Windows UEFI CA 2023 replaces, what each Windows Security message means, why some older PCs are stuck and how Microsoft is still pushing the update after June.

Spotted in Release Preview build 26200.9807, the change routes Edge launches straight to the running browser. We explain how Windows launches single-instance apps today, what Microsoft's developer docs say about the new path, and tested Edge before and after the update.

Mikhail Parakhin, former Windows boss, has called out Microsoft for still shipping an "unusable" Windows 11 taskbar experience.