Windows Tips: Page 2

One Windows 11 user says the "Turn on virus protection" notification arrives with strange precision: 4 minutes and 13 seconds after every sign-in, never once after waking the PC from sleep, even though, in the poster's own words, Defender "keeps working all the time and never turns off" (Microsoft Community Hub, last week). That kind of specificity is exactly what makes the alert hard to dismiss and hard to trust. Anyone seeing the Windows 11 "Turn on virus protection" notification pop up after...

Can MS Paint run Doom? Yes, technically, though the honest answer takes some unpacking. Doom is fully playable inside Microsoft Paint right now, complete with sound, music, and a frame rate that hits 35 fps at the game's native resolution (The Verge, today). The project is called DoomPaint, built by Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's CTO and a Technical Fellow (Windows Central, today). It loads the genuine shareware DOOM1.WAD file and sustains Doom's classic 35 tics-per-second cadence at...

Uninstall a Microsoft Store app, wait for the progress bar to finish, then check your storage. The number barely moves. If you're wondering why Windows 11 storage does not change after uninstalling apps, the answer depends on where the app came from: MSIX-packaged apps and traditionally installed desktop software can fail to free up space for two entirely different reasons. For a Store app, that result can be normal even when removal from your account went through without a hitch.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2026 shipped fixes for 973 vulnerabilities, including 113 rated Critical, making it the largest Patch Tuesday on record, according to Automox. Cisco Talos counts the same 973 CVEs and 113 Critical bugs. Rapid7 puts Microsoft's own tally slightly higher, at 974, and counted 999 vulnerabilities total once it added 25 non-Microsoft CVEs reviewed in the same release. None of the three publications explain the small gap between their counts.

Ask three different people what "Microsoft Copilot" does, and there's a good chance you'll get three different answers, and all of them will be partially right. That's the problem. Microsoft Copilot isn't one product. It's a family of surfaces, and each one sees a different slice of your data. Mixing up Copilot Chat with Microsoft 365 Copilot, or a Teams meeting assistant with the standalone Researcher agent, is a common reason people asking how to use Microsoft Copilot for research end up with...

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Windows 10 reached end of support on Oct. 14, 2025. Microsoft no longer provides ordinary free Windows 10 security updates, feature updates, or technical support, although enrolled Extended Security Updates devices continue receiving eligible security fixes.

Every time a Surface Dial clicks under a fingertip or a Surface Slim Pen 2 pulses after a completed gesture, three things happen in sequence: something detects the input, software decides how to respond, and a small motor produces the sensation felt. That pipeline sits at the center of Microsoft Surface touch interface design, and Microsoft has now documented, at least partially, how it works at the operating system level.

"Excel multiple values in one cell" can mean two completely different things.

Microsoft plans to let Microsoft 365 Copilot write, update, and delete data inside connected third-party apps, not just read it. Microsoft's September 22 Message Center entry lists the feature as "In development," with general availability targeted for October 2026, per the Microsoft 365 Message Center archive.

Microsoft has turned Copilot in Excel from a chat-based assistant into a tool that can edit workbooks directly. That change matters more in shared files, where multiple people may be changing formulas, formatting, charts, and data at the same time.

An ASUS laptop running slow on Windows 11 rarely comes down to one mystery cause. It's usually a process using too much CPU, memory pressure, low storage space, an older hard drive, heat buildup, or a power setting working against you. Sometimes more than one problem is involved.

Microsoft released the Windows 11 KB5124010 update on September 22 as an optional non-security preview for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2.

Microsoft released Visual Studio Code 1.139.0 to the Stable channel on September 23, 2026, replacing the sparse Insiders page that had appeared earlier in the month.

Vivaldi shipped a fifth minor update for Desktop 8.2 on September 18, 2026, just one day after minor update 4 landed.

Microsoft's next Surface generation, a 13-inch Surface Pro alongside 13.8-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop models built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Plus and X2 Elite chips, is confirmed for sale in three markets so far. Microsoft first documented availability in Switzerland on June 17, with Surface Pro pricing starting at CHF 1,349 (Microsoft EMEA, three months ago). Thailand and Malaysia were both scheduled to begin sales on July 23, 2026, a date now roughly two months in the past; Microsoft's...

If the dedicated Copilot key on your laptop keeps opening an AI assistant you never asked for, here's how to remap the Copilot key in Windows 11 so it does something useful instead. Use Windows Settings if you want the key to open Search or a specific app from its built-in list. Use PowerToys Keyboard Manager if you want the key to fire a keyboard shortcut or open whatever's pinned to your taskbar. Turning the key into a standalone Ctrl is also possible through PowerToys, though it behaves...

Bluetooth speaker problems rarely have one cause. Microsoft's own support documentation splits them into distinct categories: pairing failures, connection failures, and audio-output failures, each requiring a different fix (Microsoft Support, 3 months ago; Microsoft Support, 3 months ago). Treat all three as the same problem and you'll end up applying the wrong fix for hours.

Most people who see the word "Pro" attached to a piece of software assume it means faster, better, or more capable in some general sense. Run that logic on Windows 11 Home vs Pro, and it falls apart fast. The two editions are, in Engadget's words, "extremely similar," and the gap between them has nothing to do with speed, gaming performance, or day-to-day polish.

Hideo Kojima's Physint has moved to Xbox after Sony ended its involvement in the project, according to statements reported today by VGC and Variety. Xbox will now work with Kojima Productions on the game, replacing PlayStation Studios as its publishing partner.

Microsoft confirmed yesterday that Activision is taking over Halo, with the Call of Duty publisher developing the next flagship game in the franchise through a team built specifically for that job. Halo Studios, the current caretaker of the series, isn't building that next game and instead shifts into a support role for existing titles. The confirmation came from an internal memo by Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, shared by The Verge.

Windows 11 offers several built-in ways to capture a screen, and each one saves the result somewhere different. Pick the wrong shortcut, and you can end up with an image stuck on the clipboard with no file to show for it, or a PNG saved somewhere you weren't expecting.

Xbox's disc-to-digital program is no longer just a leaked roadmap item. Microsoft officially announced the feature on August 26, and Xbox Insiders began testing it on August 31.

Some PCs upgrading from Windows 11 23H2 or 24H2 to 25H2 have run into a confusing failure: "We couldn't update the system reserved partition," sometimes accompanied by error code 0x800F0922 or 0xC1900104.

Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Copilot app now goes by a different name: Microsoft Copilot. That's not just cosmetic. As part of the same round of Microsoft 365 Copilot app updates, Microsoft is merging existing Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot installations into one client on Windows and Mac devices.

If you searched for "Microsoft Teams unable to make or receive calls," the real picture is narrower than that phrase suggests. BleepingComputer reported two separate problems on Sept. 4, not one sweeping outage: some Windows users couldn't get the Teams desktop client to open, and separately, some Mac users were blocked from joining calls and meetings.

Microsoft will begin switching on Memory Integrity, along with Virtualization-based Security where it isn't already running, on eligible Windows 11 machines through next month's Patch Tuesday update. That's according to Peter Waxman, a group program manager at Microsoft, whose comments on the rollout were reported by The Verge yesterday, with the October timing confirmed by OC3D yesterday.

Xbox Insiders testing the platform's new disc-to-digital feature have reported that it also issues digital licences for games long removed from the Xbox Store. Testers cite successful claims for Deadpool, delisted in 2017, and Minecraft: Story Mode, delisted in 2019, within days of the feature going live. The supplied reporting does not identify an official Microsoft compatibility list, so the Xbox disc-to-digital compatible games list circulating among fans right now is built entirely from...

Microsoft announced its new Xbox disc-to-digital program on August 26, with testing opening to Xbox Insiders on August 31. The feature lets owners of "most" Xbox One and Xbox Series X discs unlock a digital copy of a game simply by inserting the disc and launching it.

Microsoft has turned passwordless sign-in from a security-conference talking point into a configurable admin setting. Anyone searching for how to use passkeys with a Microsoft account is usually dealing with one of two different systems: a personal account for Outlook.com, Xbox, or consumer OneDrive, or a work or school account tied to Microsoft Entra ID.

Windows 11's Start menu has shipped with a Recommended section wedged under your pinned apps since launch, mixing recent files with Microsoft's own app suggestions and tips. If you're trying to figure out how to remove the Recommended section in Windows 11, the fix depends on which build you're running, and Microsoft actually made this easier earlier this year. On Windows 11 24H2, 25H2, or 26H1 systems that have received Microsoft's redesigned Start settings, a section-level toggle can hide the...

Is Microsoft 365 down right now? Mostly recovered, not fully closed. As of Wednesday morning, Microsoft's own telemetry shows service availability holding stable above 99%, though the company has kept the incident open while it finishes remediation work (NHSmail Support, today).

Microsoft formally introduced Project Zenith today, building on the developer-optimized Windows 11 experience it previewed at Build 2026. Zenith is a preconfigured "ready-to-code" setup that ships with coding tools and developer-tuned settings built in. It launches first on AMD's Ryzen AI Halo platform, and AMD showed the first Project Zenith device, a mini PC, on stage at IFA earlier today.

Starting in October 2026, Windows 11 quality updates will begin automatically enabling Memory Integrity, a kernel-level security feature, on eligible PCs where it isn't already active.

The downsides of switching from MacBook to Windows are narrower than the horror stories suggest, but they're real enough to plan around before you buy. The hardest part usually isn't the new hardware. It's relearning shortcuts, losing part of the iPhone integration Mac owners take for granted, and discovering that "Windows laptop" describes machines with substantially different battery life, build quality, and app compatibility depending on which one you pick, according to Engadget.

A large photo library stops being something anyone scrolls through to find one shot. OneDrive Photos has a Favorites feature built for exactly that problem: mark the images worth keeping close, then pull every favorited photo into one filtered view inside Gallery. This guide covers how to add or remove favorites in the OneDrive Photos app on Windows 11, using Microsoft's documentation, with one clearly labeled comparison to the separate Windows Photos app.

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday August 2026 release landed yesterday with a Windows kernel-level zero-day already being exploited in the wild. The Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2026 zero-day drawing the most attention is CVE-2026-68820, a use-after-free flaw in the WinSock driver, confirmed under active attack and the clear must-patch item in a release that touches Azure, Exchange, SharePoint, and GitHub Copilot alongside the usual Windows and Office components (Security Affairs).

Microsoft's Copilot Podcasts feature is being discontinued, with previously generated podcasts set to become inaccessible when the feature goes offline. Microsoft says Copilot Podcasts will be retired on August 18, 2026, after which previously generated podcasts will no longer be accessible.

Microsoft has crossed a meaningful threshold in how AI operates inside Excel. The latest update to editing with Copilot in Excel turns Copilot from a suggestion engine into an agent that can act directly inside a live workbook, creating PivotTables, generating forecasts, and executing multi-step tasks from a plain-English prompt, without a user clicking through each step.

Microsoft began testing a less cluttered Windows 11 Search experience on July 13, 2026. The redesigned home panel puts recent searches at the center while removing distractions such as trending searches, quizzes, game recommendations, and Microsoft's image of the day.