Windows Archive

Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage. This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices. In September 2020, we announced DirectStorage would be coming to Windows, and after collecting feedback throughout our developer preview, we are making this API available to all of our partners to ship with their games. Check out the announcement blog for an in-depth exploration of the inspiration for DirectStorage and how it will benefit Windows games. This technology brings the fast storage features of the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S to Windows gaming. I’m curious to see if this feature can make its way to Linux, but I wonder how e.g. games running through Proton would possibly make use of it.

This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. But today, let’s focus on Defender for the home user. It does not have additional functions that are offered by other commercial solutions, but what it does is enough. However, it is worth enabling some additional functions that are not available from the graphical interface. Excellent article, and worth a read if you’re still using Windows.

Now, a black screen could have multiple causes. The video driver may have crashed. Or the video driver could be working fine, but the compositor has crashed, so that nothing is being given to the video driver. Or the compositor could be working fine, but the shell has crashed, so the compositor has nothing to render. Or the shell could be running, but it simply forgot to put something on the screen. For that last case, the Windows 8 shell created a backstop window that sat at a layer below all of the other layers. If none of the other layers were present, then at least you got a backstop window. And in early debug builds, that backstop window contained an ASCII drawing of cats. That way, if you saw cats, you knew that you were in that last failure case: The shell is running but forgot to put something on the screen. Why cats? I approve of cats.

They hid it very well, two-thirds down a long list of changes and screenshots, but what was already inevitable is now reality. Similar to Windows 11 Home edition, Windows 11 Pro edition now requires internet connectivity during the initial device setup (OOBE) only. If you choose to setup device for personal use, MSA will be required for setup as well. You can expect Microsoft Account to be required in subsequent WIP flights. In other words, installing Windows 11 Pro will now, just like 11 Home, also require a Microsoft Account and thus an internet connection. You didn’t think pro users would be safe from big tech’s data hunger, now, did you?

Ever wondered what Microsoft’s canceled version of Windows for the Surface Duo was going to be like? Well wonder no more, as we’ve got a first hands-on look at a pre-release build from mid-2018 running on a Lumia 950. We’ve already shown you what Andromeda OS looked like in recreated mockups, so now it’s time to see the real thing running on video. The idea of using a blank canvas for writing as the homescreen is fascinating, but it’s definitely not the first time this has been tried. In fact, one sure way to ensure your mobile platform will fail, is to build it around the notepad interface. It didn’t work for PenPoint OS, it didn’t work for Apple’s Newton, and it didn’t work for any other attempts either. People simply do not want to do handwriting on a computer. It’s been tried over and over, and people just don’t like it. The only platform which has been able to sort of make handwriting work is Palm OS, but that’s a misnomer since Palm’s Graffiti was a standardised character set you had to learn – it didn’t recognise handwriting at all.

Microsoft took a while to figure out that the A: assignment is pointless as the era of Floppy drives is now over. This has been fixed in Windows 11 Build 22000 (stable). Starting with Windows 11, Device Manager no longer defaults to A: i.e it doesn’t ask you for a floppy disk for drivers (icon has also been replaced). Device Manager can now automatically detect the OS drive, so you can easily locate the driver package if you extracted the downloaded zip file to a folder on the system drive. Everything about this user experience is terrible, but at least the ditching of A: makes it slightly less terrible. I can’t believe we’re at Windows 11 in 2022, and this UI is still identical to what was first shipped in Windows 95.

Windows 11 is going to be a year old in July 2022 and Microsoft will be giving users an anniversary present – a new feature update with a long list of much-needed improvements. The update is apparently codenamed “Sun Valley 2” internally and it is going to be similar to the anniversary update for Windows 10. Sun Valley 2 or version 22H2 would be a version of Windows 11 with some important improvements to make it faster, smoother and more modern, and to integrate WinUI more closely with the rest of the operating system. For example, a new Windows Run with dark mode could show up in this release. We’re also expecting new native apps. Considering Windows 11’s modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu, I think they still got some work to do.

So, you want to use Windows 2000 in 2021? Well, you’ve come to the right place, although we’re not the only place you’ll want to keep handy. You’ll find some great tips, software advice, and know-how at the MSFN Windows 2000 Forums. Special thanks to @win32, who provided many of the pointers and suggestions used in this guide. This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

An additional change that Microsoft is planning is that it is switching the default terminal app in Windows 11 to Windows Terminal. This modification will be rolled out in 2022 via the Windows Insider Program first before being made available generally. Microsoft hasn’t defined a firm timeline as of yet, but it’s clear that we can expect this to happen sometime next year. That would mean the end of the regular cmd.exe, which is currently the default command line in Windows. Of course, the new Windows Terminal application includes cmd.exe as an option as well, so it’s obviously not like it’s going away.

We are very excited to introduce to all of you the redesigned Notepad for Windows 11, which includes a number of changes we think the community will enjoy! First, you will notice a completely updated UI that aligns with the new visual design of Windows 11, including rounded corners, Mica, and more. We know how important Notepad is to so many of your daily workflows, so we designed this modern spin on the classic app to feel fresh, but familiar. I mean, it’s just a notepad application, but finally seeing a modern Notepad from Microsoft is quite something for a company that’s been so lazy with its first-party applications for such a long time. I wonder if word wrap is still turned off by default?

Last week, we reported that MediaTek is planning to build a chipset for Windows on ARM. As it turns out, the Windows on ARM chipset space could be even hotter than that, because there’s a reason that we’ve only seen Qualcomm SoCs in ARM PCs so far. Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, and speaking with people familiar with it, we’ve learned that the deal is set to expire soon. That certainly explains the dearth of Windows on ARM devices. Well, that, and the fact nobody wants Windows on ARM devices.

Microsoft has already made it more difficult to switch default browsers in Windows 11, and now the company is going a step further by blocking apps like EdgeDeflector. Third-party apps like EdgeDeflector and even Firefox have offered workarounds to Microsoft forcing people to use Edge in Start menu search results, even if their default browser is not Edge. Microsoft has been forcing Windows 10 and Windows 11 users into Edge and its Bing search engine in the Start menu search results, and now with the new Widgets panel in Windows 11. It’s a frustrating part of Windows that doesn’t respect your default browser choice. EdgeDeflector lets you bypass these restrictions, and open Start menu search results in your default browser of choice. Clearly, this should be illegal.

Ars Technica: If you don’t want to (or can’t) run Windows 11 on your PC, the good news is that Microsoft will be providing at least a few app updates to Windows 10 to keep it feeling useful. One of those app updates is Windows 11’s revamped Microsoft Store, which is now available to Windows 10 users in the Release Preview Insider channel. The new Microsoft Store isn’t dramatically different from the old one in its design, though a few of the changes are clear improvements—viewing your app library and grabbing updates for the apps you already have installed happens on the same screen now, which is handy. But the real reason to install it is its dramatically improved app selection. Microsoft has loosened the rules for the kinds of apps that can be submitted to and downloaded from the store, and apps like Zoom, Discord, the VLC Player, Adobe Reader, the LibreOffice suite, and even the Epic Games Store are all available to download through the store. Once installed, the apps look and work the same way as the standalone versions. We’ll see how long it lasts, but I think it’s great that Microsoft isn’t just completely abandoning Windows 10 now that its successor is out the door. This new store is clearly a major improvement, and giving Windows 10 users access to it is not something they had to do.

A week ago we posted on a hack to install the Google Play Store and Google Play Services in Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) for Windows 11. That allows access to a much wider range of Android applications, vs the very small 50 app limited selection from the Amazon App Store. That process was pretty convoluted, however, including requiring the use of a Linux environment on Windows. Now the same team has created a somewhat simplified process using GitHub Actions to customise the WSA. If you’re on Windows 11 and would really like to run Android applications properly – instead of using the Amazon App Store – this is the way to go.