A technology enthusiast claims that the oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 is CDPLAYER.EXE from November 1992. The app had to run on Microsoft’s newest consumer OS without modifications or emulation involved to be chosen as the ‘winner’ of their experiment. Blogger Enlyth expected something from the early NT era, as Windows 11 doesn’t support 16-bit apps, despite its strong backward compatibility. Finding an app that is almost 34 years old that still works with a simple double-click is a remarkable result.

At the beginning of their journey to find the oldest Windows UI app that just works on Microsoft’s newest OS, Enlyth confirmed FREECELL.EXE from February 1993 would still run without issues. This game was distributed alongside the Win32s environment, designed to allow some 32-bit applications to run on the 16-bit operating systems like Windows 3.1 and 3.11. Win32s was made available in beta in October 1992, but went mainstream in July 1993.

A tip Enlyth received via a tech forum suggested that FREECELL.EXE was a candidate for the oldest GUI app remaining compatible with Windows 11. However, the blogger wasn’t satisfied with this easy win and dug through “some early NT 3.1 pre-release versions that seemed promising.” Build 347 caught the detective’s eye, specifically CDPLAYER.EXE, linked on Nov 16, 1992. That indeed seems to be the earliest GUI app that works without modification or emulation on Windows 11. But this knowledge almost defied Enlyth’s eye as their system is, like many modern systems, optical-drive-less. Luckily, adding a small DLL (cdemu.dll) allowed Enlyth to emulate a CD drive and demonstrate that the 1992-era application still functions as intended.

I wanted to verify that CDPLAYER.EXE was still usable on the latest Windows 11 release. Unfortunately, the multi-part.ARJ archive of Windows NT 3.1 that I found on Archive.org threw up errors when I tried to pick through its contents. I have a USB-attached optical drive that plays CD audio in Windows 11, so I thought I could get CDPLAYER.EXE to run without any extra DLL.

Lastly, Enlyth wanted to push the envelope a little and see what even more ancient Windows apps might work if they got some help from the Winevdm project on 64-bit Windows. “Using otvdm does feel like cheating,” admitted the digital sleuth, and we’d agree. However, being able to run 16-bit apps in Windows 11 ratcheted back the wheels of time. The result was that Enlyth managed to enjoy “a fully playable version of REVERSI.EXE dated 15-Nov-1985.” That’s a GUI-driven game distributed as part of Windows 1.01 and is roughly 41 years old.

A new "Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)" option has been spotted in a version of Windows 11 made available to Windows Insiders on October 23, with the feature set to enable a boost in application performance on compatible chips. At the moment, those chips don't exist. But when they do, this feature is the one that you'll want to flick on if you're using one of them. The new toggle was reported by Neowin after it was first spotted by a poster on the X social network. The feature debuted in build 29295 as an Experimental build, so it's unlikely that it will make its way to the version of publicly available Windows 11 anytime soon.

Intel announced APX back in 2023, confirming that it features 16 additional general-purpose registers and three-operand instruction formats with a new data destination register for many integer instructions. Doubling the number of general-purpose registers from 16 to 32 will allow code compiled with APX to run with 10% fewer loads and 20% fewer stores than Intel 64's baseline, says Intel. APX has been available in the GCC compiler since version 14, with subsequent versions up to GCC 17, which is targeting a 2027 code freeze, adding additional support. LLVM and MSVC have preliminary support, as well. Although enablement has been going steady for the past two years, developers will still need to recompile their applications with the proper flags for APX-capable CPUs to leverage those instructions.

Not that there's any real need to rush just yet. The fact that no APX-capable chips are on sale yet means that enabling the feature in Windows 11 build 29295 does nothing currently. But it's clear that Microsoft is getting its ducks in a row ahead of time. Intel's Nova Lake Core Ultra 400-series chips are expected to be the first to feature APX support, but they won't break cover until early 2027. Even then, it's likely that the 28-core version will debut first, with the 52-core model made to wait until later in the year. These are consumer chips, of course, with Intel's Xeon 7 'Diamond Rapids' bringing APX support and up to 256 cores to the data center, also in 2027.

The good news is that you might not have to buy a new chip to enjoy improved Windows 11 performance. Five years after Windows 11's debut, Microsoft has already said that it's working to make its operating system play more nicely with machines with just 8GB of RAM. But what Microsoft gives with one hand, it soon takes away: an expansion of the Windows 11 Memory Integrity feature will reduce gaming performance on some systems.

Professional Windows crusher NTDEV has showcased their next-generation tool for compressing Windows 11 into the tiniest of tiny installs. Based on their newest and unreleased Pico11, they managed to create a “proof of concept I put together to see how small I could make a Windows 11 ISO while keeping a working desktop and a few familiar apps.” Moreover, it’s a perfect installer to shove on a 700MB CD-ROM without wasting space, with this demo version weighing in at 699,811,840 bytes.

The test system (a VM with 4GB allocated) used around 883MB of RAM.

In the above video, NTDEV demos a freshly installed Windows 11 ISO that had been processed with Pico11. The desktop looks familiar to anyone currently using Windows 11. “Calculator and Settings still open, Notepad saves files, and Paint still lets me draw questionable logos,” highlights the dev. However, it is also pointed out that “Task Manager might look a little older than you remember.” The older Task Manager seems to be a lightweight legacy version. It may have been possibly swiped from Windows 7, but its exact origin isn’t divulged by NTDEV.

At this time, NTDEV admits what you see is “an experiment, not a replacement for a normal Windows installation,” and that’s mainly because Windows Update and general servicing have been removed to fit inside the constraints of CDR capacity. If you are interested in creating Windows installs like this, the good news is that NTDEV says they are working on adding what they describe as Pico11 capabilities to the Tiny11 builder tool, which you can find on GitHub.

Tiny11 has already demonstrated impressive Windows 11 ISO building capabilities with its Tiny11 mode, Tiny11 Core mode, and Custom mode. Pico11 sounds most closely related to Tiny11 Core as it eschews servicing and recovery support. However, there appears to be some more under-the-hood tweaking, which may have been evidenced in this new showcase by the presence of the older version of Task Manager.

Tiny11 has historically been responsible for even smaller Windows 11 installs, but the extreme 100MB distillation of the OS, for example, came without any Windows 11 UI. Builds could also be remarkable for using tiny amounts of RAM – as little as 176MB. More typical and useful were custom builds powered by Tiny11 where 'bloatware' was removed and that weighed in at around the 2GB mark.

Hopefully we will learn more about Pico11 and get greater insight into its capabilities soon.

Windows XP became available at retailers for the first time on this day back in 2001. It was ushered in with Microsoft's largest and glitziest launch event since Windows 95, but the bigger news was its delivery of an OS with modern underpinnings and features. Thankfully, it lived up to the hype and would ensure nearly 13 years of favor among enthusiasts, but that might be partly due to the failure of the unloved Vista.

The NYC launch event for Windows XP in 2001 was the centerpiece of a lavish $500 million campaign Microsoft had planned for the new OS. However, celebrations were somewhat muted due to the aftermath of 9/11. Microsoft actually dumped its intended ‘Prepare to Fly’ launch slogan for ‘Yes You Can’ for this obvious reason.

Nevertheless, the launch was still a significant event and featured NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani joining Bill Gates on stage. Gates framed the big launch as evidence that “New York is back and open for business.” There was also a free lunchtime concert in Bryant Park featuring Sting, followed by a Times Square NYC takeover. Meanwhile, retail stores like CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy opened at midnight for eager tech beavers to grab a copy of Windows XP at its freshest.

At the launch presentation, Gates said that the debut of Windows XP represented the end of the era of MS-DOS, which had underpinned a UI or shell known as Windows for many years. For consumers, that stretched all the way up to the much maligned Windows Me.

As we mentioned in our 40-year retrospective of Windows last year, Windows XP was the real ‘Start Me Up’ moment. That’s because it brought the Windows NT core to consumer PCs – replacing the archaic DOS and its restrictions and drivers. Thus, Windows XP would become well regarded for reliability, performance, and security (after a few teething troubles), and its new UI was claimed to make tasks 25% easier to complete, too.

Some of the technical features that would be widely welcomed in XP included USB plug-and-play support that worked, built-in CD burning software, and ClearType support as new LCDs started to usurp bulky CRTs on desks.

During Windows XP’s supported life (October 2001 to April 2014), there would be three major Service Pack (SP) releases. It also saw DirectX 8.1 to 9.0c arrive for gamers. In the meantime, Windows Vista made something of an unwanted splash, launched to consumers in January 2007. Windows XP’s lengthy extended support meant that folks could skip Vista entirely and move straight to Windows 7 when it hit retail and new-build systems in October 2009.

Overall, it is interesting to observe that Windows XP’s lifespan was actually over two years longer than Windows 10, which was (in)famously launched as “the last version of Windows.”

After the rough reception of Windows Vista, Windows 7 launched in 2009 to largely positive reviews. Even 17 years later, it remains one of the most beloved versions of Windows ever released. But how does this nearly two-decade-old operating system hold up on modern hardware? We managed to install Windows 7 on a modern PC and put it to the test across eight DirectX 11 games and two DirectX 9 titles to see how its gaming performance compares to Windows 11 today. Surprisingly, Windows 7 still carves out many notable wins over its successor.

At launch, Windows 7 was very similar to Windows Vista in many respects. Vista had introduced significant changes under the hood compared to Windows XP, including technologies such as SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyDrive, new asynchronous APIs, and other I/O improvements. It also introduced native processor power management and various memory-management enhancements. On the visual side, Vista was the first version of Windows to feature Windows Aero, with its distinctive glass-like window borders.

Windows 7 retained many of these underlying technologies while addressing several of Vista’s biggest criticisms. One notable improvement was greater control over User Account Control (UAC), allowing users to adjust how frequently they received UAC prompts. In Vista, these prompts could appear far too often, becoming a major source of frustration for many users.

Windows 7 also benefited from something that had nothing to do with the operating system itself: more powerful hardware. When Vista launched, many mid-range and budget PCs struggled to deliver smooth performance, particularly when using more demanding visual features such as Windows Aero. By 2009, however, PC hardware had advanced considerably, and the performance required to run these features smoothly was no longer a significant concern for most users.

The Challenge of Running Windows 7 on a Modern PC

Getting Windows 7 running on modern hardware is not as straightforward as installing a current version of Windows. At 17 years old, the operating system predates many of the technologies used by modern PCs, meaning driver support is extremely limited. For example, Windows 7 does not include native NVMe or USB 3.0 support, so the necessary drivers have to be slipstreamed into the installation ISO. Microsoft did eventually release patches that added NVMe support, but without injecting the appropriate drivers into the ISO, the Windows 7 installer will not recognize an NVMe drive.

Our system is based on AMD’s AM5 platform (with the full system specifications detailed later in the article), which presents another limitation: there are no official Windows 7 chipset drivers for the platform.

Fortunately, we are using an RDNA 2 GPU, which does have Windows 7 driver support, allowing us to use a relatively modern graphics card for our testing.

The motherboard is also an important consideration. Modern motherboards that have dropped CSM (Compatibility Support Module) and legacy boot support can make installing Windows 7 considerably more difficult, and in some cases may prevent the operating system from booting altogether. Fortunately, our motherboard still supports CSM, so this was not an issue for our setup.

Test System

Windows 7 system specs

• AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 64GB (2x32GB) G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5 @6000 MHz CL30
• Seagate Lightsaber FireCuda (530) NVMe SSD
• ASUS ROG STRIX B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• HAGS not supported by driver
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
• AMD Adrenalin 22.6.1 for Windows 7 (2022)

Windows 11 system specs

• AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 64GB (2x32GB) G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5 @6000 MHz CL30
• Seagate Lightsaber FireCuda (530) NVMe SSD
• ASUS ROG STRIX B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• HAGS not supported by driver
• Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.9278)
• AMD Adrenalin 22.6.1 for Windows 11 (2022)

For Windows 7, we disabled Secure Boot, enabled CSM, and set Boot Device Control to Legacy OPROM Only. Enabling CSM means that we no longer have access to Resizable BAR (it's not supported anyway). For Windows 11, we disabled VBS (Virtualization-Based Security) and HVCI (Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity).

It is important to note that while we used Adrenalin 22.6.1 for both Windows 11 and Windows 7 testing, the two packages contain different internal driver versions. Although both packages were released in June 2022, the Windows 11 driver is based on a more advanced codebase than the Windows 7 driver.

In both cases, we performed a clean install of each operating system and filled the SSD to about 50-60%.

Performance Testing

We tested ten games in total: eight using DirectX 11 and two using DirectX 9. The DirectX 11 titles are the primary focus, as both systems support them natively. By comparison, our Windows 11 system will run DirectX 9 games through the D3D9On12 mapping layer, while our Windows 7 system will run them natively. There are ways to get around the use of D3D9On12 on Windows 11, but we want to evaluate the out-of-the-box experience that most gamers would encounter. As a result, we expect Windows 7 to have an advantage in the DirectX 9 titles.

It will become apparent in the results below that the advantages of each operating system will vary depending on whether we are CPU-limited or GPU-limited.

Metro 2033 Redux (DX11)

Metro 2033 Redux was released in 2014 and features a new lighting engine, higher visual fidelity, and new locations for certain levels. The game is predominantly GPU-bound, but there are moments when GPU utilization drops sharply as you traverse the game world. At these points, the CPU becomes the limiting factor, resulting in a corresponding drop in performance.

Although Windows 11 delivers a higher average frame rate, Windows 7 handles the CPU-related performance drops much better, resulting in significantly stronger 1% lows. Installing the AMD chipset drivers and enabling Resizable BAR improves 1% lows on Windows 11 slightly, but it still falls well behind Windows 7.

Windows 11’s more advanced graphics driver appears to provide an advantage in GPU-limited scenarios, while Windows 7’s lower CPU overhead offers more consistent frame pacing, though with lower peak performance.

Batman: Arkham Origins (DX11)

Batman: Arkham Origins runs on a modified version of Unreal Engine 3 and uses several DX11 enhancements such as Tessellation, Ambient Occlusion HBAO+, Percentage Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), and Depth of Field (DoF).

When CPU-limited at 1080p, Windows 7 once again puts in a strong showing, outperforming Windows 11 in both average frame rate and 1% lows. Surprisingly, Windows 7 also comes out ahead at 4K in Origins, though with a far smaller advantage. As we will see throughout the remainder of our testing, however, this is a rare occurrence. Even so, Windows 7 maintains a slight performance advantage over Windows 11 at 4K in this title.

Batman: Arkham Knight (DX11)

Batman: Arkham Knight was both a critical and commercial success, despite a notoriously troubled PC launch plagued by severe bugs and major performance issues. Visually, however, the game still holds up remarkably well, and modern hardware is more than capable of brute-forcing this demanding PC port.

Windows 7 again delivers higher performance at 1080p when we are CPU-limited. Windows 11 jumps ahead when we become GPU-limited at 1440p and 4K.

Batman: Arkham City (DX11)

Batman: Arkham City was the second entry in the series, following Arkham Asylum, and the first to support DirectX 11. This introduced features such as tessellation, which adds greater geometric detail to characters and environments.

In Arkham City, our system is GPU-bound at every resolution tested, giving Windows 11 the advantage across the board.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (DX11)

The Witcher 3 faced some controversy at launch over reductions in image quality compared to its initial reveal. CD Projekt Red quickly released a patch addressing these concerns and improving the game’s visuals. From a performance perspective, however, the game was extremely demanding at launch.

While the game is very GPU bound in general, at 1080p we did encounter a slight CPU bottleneck, which gave Windows 7 an advantage in 1% lows. At 1440p and 4K, Windows 11 takes a slight lead.

Control (DX11)

Control is the newest title we tested for this comparison, having launched in 2019. While the game introduced several ray tracing features, these were exclusive to the DirectX 12 API. Since Windows 7 does not support DirectX 12, we tested Control using DirectX 11 on both operating systems. Even without ray tracing, Control remains the most graphically advanced title in our Windows 11 vs Windows 7 comparison.

Windows 11 wins across the board. This is not a surprise, as we are GPU-limited across all resolutions tested.

Hitman: Absolution (DX11)

Hitman: Absolution was released in 2012 and was the first game to use the Glacier 2 engine. The updated engine could handle crowds of up to 1200 characters, which was unprecedented at the time. The game also featured several DirectX 11 enhancements, including global illumination and tessellation.

This is another game that pushes the GPU hard, regardless of resolution. Our test system was GPU-limited even at 1080p.

Hitman 2 (DX11)

Hitman 2 was released in 2018, making it the second-newest game in our operating system comparison. It features detailed environments, dense crowds, and full reflections across many surfaces, making it an impressive-looking title overall.

Hitman 2 is another example where our test system is GPU-limited at every resolution, giving Windows 11 a clean sweep across the board.

Batman: Arkham Asylum (DX9)

We now move to our first DirectX 9 game. As previously mentioned, Windows 7 should have an advantage here because our Windows 11 system must use the D3D9On12 mapping layer for DirectX 11 games. But just how much of an advantage?

Significant advantages for Windows 7 in average frame rate and 1% lows, especially at 1080p and 1440p. The advantage is reduced at 4K, but the performance is still smoother overall in Windows 7. Another translation layer, such as DXVK, may close the gap.

Borderlands 2 (DX9)

Borderlands 2 is our second DirectX 9 game and the final overall game tested.

Once again, another massive win for Windows 7 at the lower resolutions. The performance at 4K is virtually identical.

Bottom Line

Windows 11 is optimized for GPU-hungry games

The results are interesting, but perhaps not entirely surprising. The DirectX 9 results are largely in line with our expectations, given that Windows 11 must run these games through the D3D9On12 mapping layer, yielding substantial advantages for Windows 7.

The DirectX 11 results are more nuanced, but a clear trend emerges: Windows 7 has the advantage when we are CPU-limited, while Windows 11 performs better when we are GPU-limited. This makes sense given that Windows 11 uses graphics drivers built on a more advanced codebase, while Windows 7 is a leaner operating system with fewer background processes and, consequently, lower CPU overhead.

Microsoft has recently detailed its K2 plan, which aims to improve the performance and reliability of Windows 11. We hope these continued efforts to improve Windows 11 pay off.

The lower CPU performance we observed in Windows 11 cannot be attributed to its most notable security features, such as VBS (Virtualization-Based Security) and HVCI (Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity), as we disabled both during testing. Notably, Windows 7 does not support VBS or HVCI at the software level, while Windows 11 supports hardware virtualization extensions (such as Intel VT-x or AMD-V) and Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). Additionally, fixed-function hardware can reduce the impact of virtualization to varying degrees, based on the CPU architecture's capabilities. However, additional telemetry and other background services still pop up and use precious CPU cycles.

Using the latest chipset drivers and enabling features such as Resizable BAR does not help Windows 11 close the gap in CPU-limited scenarios by any significant margin. Ultimately, we would like to see Windows 11 become leaner and more efficient, as our results suggest there is still some performance left on the table, particularly on the CPU side.

Windows 11 was released five years ago, on October 5, 2021. It feels like it's been around longer, as Microsoft’s latest OS has generated numerous headlines, mostly concerning the pain it put users through. We’ve all aged with it. Things might be settling down, at last, though, as the 26H2 update started to roll out just a few days ago, and it is not promising a revolution, simply a “predictable and low-disruption” update.

After the crowd-pleasing Windows 10’s return to form, it was all too predictable that Windows 11 would misstep in some unexpected way, or actually in several ways. Microsoft is pretty creative with its misreading of the market. At release, the biggest issue with the new OS was that it sought to force lots of capable hardware into retirement. This issue churned for months, with folks wrangling system files to bypass minimum system requirements, and Microsoft seemingly shifting the goalposts around at the same time.

Another early controversy was Microsoft continuing to push users into setting up Windows using an online Microsoft account, and cutting off avenues of avoidance. Again, communities had to fight the OS to make it work the way they wanted, often with a simple local account. This struggle continues to this day. Microsoft paints the requirement as good for users, providing OneDrive backups, syncing across devices, and providing extra recovery and security features. However, forced online accounts are also a commercial vehicle for selling digital goods and services.

Things had settled down in Windows land by 2024, but Microsoft spoiled the broth again with the introduction of the Copilot+ PC era. In some ways, it showed some foresight in sensing that AI was going to be big. Nevertheless, this was another clear misstep, with gaffes/scares like the AI-centerpiece Windows Recall app.

Copilot+ PC’s failure was confirmed by Microsoft and its OEM partners when they quietly killed off all Copilot+ PC branding earlier this year. For now, built-in AI is being de-emphasized, and Microsoft is looking at a cross-platform agentic model.

A change of direction

This year has also seen Microsoft publicly realize that people need Windows 11 as a foundation for their productivity tasks and gaming fun. The OS isn’t the destination. Thus, in spring, execs promised to clean up and optimize Windows 11 for its basic everyday use. Going forward, Microsoft has dangled the carrot of faster built-in apps, lower memory/resource use, and other foundational OS optimizations.

Windows 11 26H2 was released to consumers last week. As a battle-scarred Windows veteran, I’ve not clicked the update button yet on any of my machines, but there are reasons to be optimistic that it doesn’t deliver new nightmares. Version 26H2 is being distributed with the promise to deliver a “predictable and low-disruption” update. Boring is good.

Despite the aforementioned controversies, as well as the usual collection of silly/scary bugs that needed ironing out, people are still using Windows 11. It is widely adopted and dominates the PC landscape. MacOS and Linux have made inroads in terms of users, but Windows still looks mostly unassailable on roughly 76% of all desktop/laptop computers. Among Windows versions, it holds nearly 72% of the market, with Windows 10 rapidly declining and dipping under 28% at the most recent count.

Russian president Vladimir Putin voted online in the State Duma elections on Friday. That’s a pretty ordinary-sounding thing for any president to do, but this filmed-for-the-press event has been widely shared outside of Russia. Why? The official video appears to show Putin voting on a PC using an unlicensed copy of Windows on a Dell PC. The president then comments, “You can’t go wrong,” as he clicks on his choice of candidate. Moreover, folks are throwing scorn at the aging Russian president’s mouse skills. If this were an audition for an eSports team, it would have been a clear fail.

The above embed comes via the nonprofit Central European news aggregator Visegrad24. The magnified section of the video shows a screen effect that looks very similar to the Windows activation reminder watermark. However, the other overlay on the screen is obviously from a different computer, and it’s dated 2018. We found some established Russian media sources with the video recording, like Komsomolskaya Pravda, and there does indeed appear to be a watermark present shown on Putin's computer screen at the end of the voting clip.

Russian state media source TASS explains that the vote was to elect deputies to the 9^th State Duma. It says that over recent years “Putin has preferred to cast his vote remotely.” It also reveals that some former Ukrainian territories will get to participate in this vote. “For the first time ever, residents of the recently incorporated Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, will participate in legislative elections for the lower house of the Russian parliament,” says the official Russian news agency.

Returning to the social media bubbling up over the Kremlin clip, some valid points seem to be raised. Putin’s comment about “you can’t go wrong” is almost a reverse Vranyo. There is hardly going to be uncertainty about the result of any vote in Russia. Hot tip: We think that United Russia, the ruling pro-Kremlin party backed by Vladimir Putin, is going to do well this year.

We also note that the president seems to be voting on a foreign (Dell brand) computer. By law, Russian officials must use computers with certain levels of localization, so it might be reasonable to assume this machine was set up entirely for Putin’s voting publicity clip. That would also go some way to explain an unactivated, unregistered copy of Windows being used. It’s likely a fresh, clean copy of Microsoft’s OS run separate from any government network.

As for Putin’s computer skills, it looks like his interactions with the online voting forms are largely being hampered because he can’t see properly, rather than a hand-eye-coordination issue. There are uncomfortably pregnant pauses between the 73-year-old squinting and leaning into the screen and clicking the mouse. Either Putin should wear his glasses, or the Kremlin administrators are going to need to code a Big Picture Mode for his nuclear launch computer.

Anyone old enough to be messing with PCs in the early to mid-2000s probably has the following burned into their mind: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. That's neither a magic spell nor a password for a cabal — it's the best-known Windows XP key, letting anyone install and run the operating system with its incantation and just the one CD. Ever wondered how or why Microsoft let such an apparent gaping hole in its copy protection? Former engineer Dave Plummer explained in an X post.

First off, there were actually two versions of the original Windows XP media: Retail and Volume. The former was for anyone who just bought the OS off the shelf, while the latter was reserved for Microsoft partners and OEMs that needed to easily install it on thousands of machines without needing to individually activate every single one at install time.

Retail and Volume media had different keys, too, and the installer would validate the key you input against specific data on the disc, "encrypted so hard that even today it hasn't been decrypted [...]" (Someone will take those words as a challenge). The magical piece of cryptic data was nothing other than the whole 10 MB of... Microsoft Bob. The short-lived assistant was technically the antecessor of the much-maligned and memed-upon Clippy, and did its best in 1995 to introduce newbies to basic computing tasks.

Regular Joes and Janes weren't supposed to be anywhere within a stone's throw of a Volume disc, though, as those were strictly enterprise-only. The final version of the CD, called Release to Manufacturing, or RTM, was complete in August 24, 2001 — two months before the official launch on October 25. The discs were available to OEMs and partners before the release date so those companies could have their wares ready with Windows XP on them.

Plummer notes that "very few" organizations had access to the Volume image and the corresponding Volume License Key (VLK) and believes that someone at a major OEM, potentially Dell or Intel, leaked the Volume media and the key together before the official release. The pirate group Devils0wn then quickly spread it online for everyone to enjoy

Later on, when Service Pack 1 arrived, the FCKGW key was among the 640 blacklisted from the operating system due to leakage. Service Pack 2 and its Windows Genuine Advantage checks went a couple steps further and blocked updates entirely on machines with a blacklisted VLK. Plummer states that Microsoft didn't want to cause unnecessary trouble for customers, hence its laissez-faire attitude and choice to stick to just blacklisting affected keys.

Many theories over the years proposed that the FCKGW key worked because Microsoft's key generation algorithm was very basic, a notion outright dismissed by Plummer. He plainly states that algorithm was written by "ACTUALLY smart guys with heads so big that they bumped the doorjamb on the way into your office."

The truth of the situation was far simpler: as is usual with computing, ultimately the problem was between the keyboard and the chair. It's a good a time as any to reminisce about that compact disc you totally don't have on a bookshelf somewhere with the FCKGW key written on it with a Sharpie.

Microsoft has issued an out-of-band update for its recent Windows 11 patch, which has caused a number of bugs and issues. The September 2026 update was just released last Tuesday, and although it packs a number of new features and fixes nearly 1000 security flaws (commonplace in this day and age), there are also a few unfortunate regressions.

The 25H2 update finally reintroduces a movable taskbar, just like we've had since Windows 95, with an option to make the height smaller for compact displays. Likewise, the Start menu now has multiple configurable layouts, and you can toggle each main section on or off. Microsoft also revamped Windows Search — perhaps to finally be useful — and users can now choose to only have it display local results. Explorer got a handy tweak in the form of using KB, MB, GB size indicators, as well.

The update has also surfaced some serious bugs. First off, PCs with AMD Radeon GPUs are crashing, apparently due to the update provoking driver instability. Reinstalling the driver doesn't appear to help, and the reports unfortunately cover most contemporary AMD graphics cards. Microsoft did not mention AMD GPUs specifically in its latest update.

Microsoft noted that it has fixed an issue with Remote Desktop Services where RDS might become unstable, causing connection and sign-in failures.

Microsoft is also aware of an issue with audio output and microphone input going dead. Additionally, there are seemingly reports of audio devices starting up with a botched configuration, like tweaked 3D audio settings or speaker setups. The apparent workaround seems to be putting audio in a standard 2.0 configuration, but Microsoft has now addressed this issue in the emergency patch.

Explorer may display a black screen after logging in, leaving you with a perfectly functioning operating system but no visible UI. The File History backup feature is reportedly not detecting external drives, effectively making it useless. Of particular concern to enterprises, systems administrators, and homelabs, the Remote Desktop Service is also experiencing issues. Last but not least, Microsoft says it has addressed an issue where Claude Cowork is nonfunctional due to the update breaking HC-managed Linux VMs with Plan9 shared folders

Owners of HP and Lenovo systems are also advised to consider holding off on this update. Ever since the August 2026 patch (and now, cumulatively, with the September update), there are reportedly serious issues on both camps. On the HP side, there are instances of the update triggering BIOS corruption, leading to a failed install with no ability to recover the OS — though seemingly the OEM has published a new BIOS revision, so it's hard to say which side is to blame. Meanwhile, Lenovo users might have their machines black-screen or shut down out of the blue, seemingly due to power mismanagement.

While it's heartening to see that Microsoft has significantly increased its Windows development speed and is seemingly listening to customer feedback, a string of bugs after a major feature update are still common.

Microsoft has finally solved one of the biggest pain points of Windows with the rollout of Cloud Rebuild. The new recovery feature can reinstall Windows 11 even when an existing Windows installation is corrupt or refuses to boot. Available as a beta through the newly released Windows 11 Insider Beta Preview Build 26220.9343, the feature is essentially a hassle-free alternative to creating a Windows installation USB drive when a PC needs to be recovered.

According to Microsoft, Cloud Rebuild is designed to restore a Windows 11 PC to a “clean, known-good state” by downloading a fresh image of Windows along with the required drivers directly through Windows Update. Unlike the existing Reset this PC functionality, it does not depend on the health of your existing Windows installation, nor does it require users to have a USB drive or custom recovery image available.

Available via the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), users can access it by selecting Troubleshoot > Recovery and uninstall > Cloud rebuild from WinRE. Speaking of which, Microsoft has also improved networking support in WinRE. The recovery environment can now reuse eligible Wi-Fi profiles saved within an existing Windows installation, allowing a PC to connect during recovery without requiring administrators to separately configure Wi-Fi credentials in WinRE. Once the PC is connected, Cloud Rebuild checks Windows Update for the target Windows build and downloads the required files. Users can then confirm the Windows edition, language, and build before starting the reinstall.

The only catch here is that Cloud Rebuild completely wipes the system drive, meaning that the process removes all data stored in your main installation or C: drive, including locally stored files, accounts, applications, and settings, before reinstalling Windows. Thus, it is recommended to back up all your important files either locally or using a cloud-based service before starting the process. Once the installation is complete, the PC boots into the Windows out-of-box experience, similar to a fresh installation of Windows. For admin-managed PCs using Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune, the system can automatically reconnect to the organization's management infrastructure and restore assigned applications, policies, and backed-up settings.

Cloud Rebuild could particularly be useful when Windows becomes too corrupted to boot normally. Instead of finding another PC, creating installation media, and manually reinstalling Windows, users can potentially perform the entire recovery process directly from WinRE. The feature is still in preview; however, we can expect a wider release later this year.

If you are yearning for a quick-shot retro Windows experience on your modern Windows 11 or macOS system, then there’s a new vibe-coded clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager that may interest you. Developer Mayuki has released a neat little nostalgia project dubbed ReProgman – named after the ancient Windows 3.1 ‘progman.exe ’, which was the primary shell of the era – until Windows 95 swept it away three decades ago.

ReProgman looks pretty authentic to my eyes, and it brought back memories of why I wasn’t sad to see it shrivel away from Windows machines. In a social media post about the release of ReProgman, Mayuki seems to agree with my sentiments. “I asked Claude to create a clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager,” wrote the developer (machine translation). “I think you'll enjoy reminiscing with it for about 30 seconds.”

Claude Code worked pretty swiftly to churn out this clone of the Windows 3.1 shell. The first version that was precipitated in about an hour was “pretty decent” but needed some effort to iron out the wrinkles. Then Mayuki complains again that actually using ReProgman induced boredom after about half a minute of usage.

The end-user-ready releases of ReProgman weigh in at between 12 and 16MB, so they are quite a trivial download and don’t need installing. Thus, it isn’t very taxing to give them a try for a spot of nostalgia-tinted navigation around your present system’s programs and files. Mayuki says that building and running this application needs the .NET SDK 10.0+. The code has been released on GitHub under the MIT license.

In conclusion, Miyuki’s ReProgman provides an easy trip down personal computing's memory lane, specifically to the Windows 3.X era of the early to mid-1990s. However, some will prefer to get their retro computing kicks by running the actual MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 combo on real hardware. As we discovered recently, that doesn’t limit users to dusting off an old i486 or similar. Back in April, an enthusiast demoed Windows 3.1X on ultra-modern bare metal with a system using a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti.

Microsoft just released another version of Windows 11 designed for developers, dubbed Project Zenith. According to the Windows Blogs, this operating system is optimized for developer workflows and will first become available on the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, Team Red’s direct answer to the Nvidia DGX Spark, although it will also arrive on more devices from Microsoft’s OEM and other silicon partners soon. Redmond calls Project Zenith “a ready-to-code distraction-free Windows experience on developer-class devices with 64 GB+ unified memory and 250+ GB/s memory bandwidth,” claiming that “developers can jump right in.”

It comes with pre-installed tools like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, PowerToys, WinAppCLI, Windows Dev Skills, Intelligent Terminal, PowerShell 7, Git, GitHub CLI, AzureCLI, Core Utils, Oh My Posh, Python 3.14+, uv, NVM, Node 24+, WSL 2+ Ubuntu, and .NET 10. Aside from that, Microsoft said it pre-configures Windows 11 so developers don’t have to dig through the settings menus of various apps to configure them for their needs.

It’s primarily designed for AI developers, especially since the devices it’s installed on are designed to run 30B+ parameter models locally and without meters. The company also made it more secure for developing and running agents, deploying features such as OS-enforced identity, containment through Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), and enterprise-grade manageability for agents.

Project Zenith is Microsoft’s response to the AI token crisis, which has caused costs to spiral out of control, especially as agents use 1000x more tokens compared to standard AI. While frontier models would still be available on the cloud, AI developers could run everything else locally through devices like this, powered by this version of Windows 11. This should help AI developers keep using their agents without feeling the bite of tokenized billing, which is especially crucial for those working in smaller organizations or experimenting at home.

One big tradeoff with Project Zenith, though, is that it’s only available on expensive devices, at least for the moment. The AMD Ryzen AI Halo, with its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, 128GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, 2TB SSD, and integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, costs $3,999.99 on Micro Center. Even if Microsoft eventually makes Project Zenith available for separate purchase and installable on other mini-PCs, the 64 GB+ unified memory requirement will be a major roadblock, especially with skyrocketing RAM prices driven by the AI boom.

Microsoft will begin automatically enabling its Memory Integrity security feature on a broader range of eligible Windows PCs through quality updates starting in October 2026, extending the kernel-level protection to more existing devices by default. In a September 1 blog post, Microsoft said the rollout will provide stronger protection for more devices against attacks targeting the Windows kernel, while PCs that already have Memory Integrity deliberately disabled will retain their existing configuration.

“Windows quality updates will begin enabling memory integrity protection on eligible devices,” Microsoft said. The updates will also enable Virtualization-based Security (VBS) where required, which provides the isolated environment underlying Memory Integrity. Before making the change, Windows will automatically assess each device using what Microsoft describes as readiness signals covering its hardware capabilities, compatibility, and performance.

The October rollout is basically an expansion of Microsoft’s existing default-enablement policy. Memory Integrity is already switched on by default on clean Windows 11 installations that meet Microsoft’s hardware requirements, as well as on Secured-core PCs. Current requirements include an 8th Gen or newer Intel processor for Windows 11 22H2, an AMD Zen 2 or newer processor, at least 8GB of RAM on x64 systems, an SSD of at least 64GB, compatible drivers, and enabled hardware virtualization. Automatic activation under that policy applies to clean installations and not upgrades of existing devices.

Memory Integrity — also known as Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI) — has existed since the Windows 10 era and was originally released as part of Microsoft’s Device Guard security technology. It uses VBS and the Windows hypervisor to move kernel-mode code-integrity checks into an isolated environment, helping prevent malicious or untrusted code and drivers from executing in the Windows kernel. Windows 10 generally left the protection optional outside configurations such as S mode, while Windows 11 made it more of a default security feature on compatible new installations.

The feature comes with a performance wrinkle familiar to PC gamers, leading many gamers to disable it. Microsoft acknowledged in 2022 that Memory Integrity and Virtual Machine Platform could affect gaming performance on some Windows 11 configurations, and advised gamers prioritizing performance that they could temporarily disable these protections while playing, warning that doing so reduces security. The company’s own gaming guidance subsequently continued to recommend temporarily disabling Memory Integrity and VMP where they interfere with gaming performance.

The security feature’s impact on performance depends on the hardware. Microsoft says Memory Integrity performs better on newer processors with hardware features designed to accelerate the required isolation, while older CPUs relying on software emulation can experience a larger performance hit. Driver compatibility can also prevent activation, with Microsoft documenting issues ranging from malfunctioning software to incompatible gaming anti-cheat solutions.

For most users, the October change requires no action. Eligible PCs will be evaluated and updated automatically, while administrator policies and previous user choices remain in place. Microsoft specifically says systems where Memory Integrity has already been disabled “won’t be automatically changed by this rollout,” leaving gamers and other users who previously opted out in control of the setting.

The majority of PCs are sold with Windows 11 licensed, paid-for, and pre-installed. This fact irks many folks, especially Linux aficionados who intend to wipe all traces of Microsoft’s OS while their shiny new machine is box fresh. The Refund4Freedom site was put together by the Italian Linux Society and the Free Software Foundation Europe to help address this unfairness. “Consumers should be able to buy laptops without any specific operating system, and should not have to pay the license price if they don't want to,” asserts the site, and they have information and forms to help you get your cash back.

Refund4Freedom doesn't just help PC buyers in the quest to get Windows refunds; they have three key demands. Prevention is better than cure, right? The first demand is that “Device manufacturers and vendors should not impose an operating system or software on consumers, and should not force them to pay for software that they don't want.” This is central to the site’s message and purpose. However, it also wants to promote the idea that consumers should have the right to buy hardware without pre-installed software and see the price of the product with and without Windows, etc. Refund4Freedom also urges manufacturers and vendors to clearly outline the steps for requesting and obtaining a refund for pre-installed OSes and software. Of course, the process for consumers should be as friction-free as possible.

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal.”

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal,” notes Refund4Freedom on its website. Some are more helpful than others when it comes to refunds. You can read more on the website about each brand surveyed, but it looks like Acer and Lenovo both operate reimbursement procedures for Windows. Asus has a hidden reimbursement procedure, but we only get told of the Italy-centric way to reach out to Asus about it. Dell and HP don’t have any reimbursement procedure for Windows, according to the site.

Whichever brand of PC you buy, and the above list is far from exhaustive, you should follow a deliberate rejection procedure. If you intend to shun Windows, Refund4Freedom tells users to start up the PC and take pictures showing the contract clauses addressing reimbursement. Do not format or erase the computer at this stage. The next step is to contact the manufacturer's customer service. Do this in a recordable way, and so email/messaging is encouraged for records.

If the above two steps aren’t working out for you, the Refund4Freedom site has a pre-made form you can fill in and forward. However, this is again Italy-centric. For example, towards the end it mentions the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), as well as a ruling by Judge Dr. Mirko Buratti of the Court of Monza… So, perhaps you can swap in some rulings appropriate to your country for this part of the form? Get your favorite LLM to hallucinate some local court rulings for you.

Finally, and whatever the outcome, Refund4Freedom asks its readers to report their experience, good or bad, to the aforementioned AGCM. To inspire you, the site includes several user reports of success, and I note one user getting back as much as €150 from Acer (~$175). That was a combination of Windows license reimbursement and a larger legal fee refund. A more typical reimbursement level is roughly $60.

Like clockwork, it's a new month and a new OS-breaking bug has been discovered in Windows 11's latest monthly update, KB5121003. Users reported random system instability, with games freezing or outright crashing, and even BSODs in worst-case scenarios. Microsoft investigated the issue and reached a vindicating conclusion — RGB software installed on affected PCs was interfering with core system components, causing Windows 11 to become unstable.

Online multiplayer titles such as Arc Raiders, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals were most affected by this issue. Reports mentioned these games exhibiting a pretty classic crash pattern. They'd suddenly hang and become unresponsive, show an "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" blue screen, and force your computer to restart automatically.

An official update posted on Microsoft's Windows 11 25H2 health status page says, "this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features." The software governing these devices would install drivers or code components with file names similar to "inpoutx64" to control the RGB. When you'd launch a certain game, inpoutx64 would trigger the issue and cause a crash.

Microsoft didn't explain the underlying cause, but it's likely tied to anti-cheat not appreciating a kernel-mode driver in user space. RGB software, like other apps, should be limited to user space, but the driver it uses to interface with peripheral controllers runs in kernel space. For anti-cheat software, this is essentially an exploit waiting to happen, so it tries to block the driver to make sure it doesn't inject malicious code.

If the driver is blocked upon startup and the RGB software unknowingly tries to push a lighting change or monitor a temp sensor, for instance, it hits a wall, and Windows throws up the EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error. If the driver is terminated mid-use while executing assembly instructions at the Ring 0 level, it causes a critical kernel fault. Kernel space typically can't recover from unhandled errors like these, so Windows triggers a blue screen as a precaution to protect your hardware.

Microsoft says it's "presently working to understand the relationship between these RGB components and the games which trigger this issue." The company will provide more info later, but for now, you can use the Registry Editor to manually disable the driver as a temporary solution. Embark Studios, developers of Arc Raiders and The Finals, also shared this method to fix crashes for now.

This could break some RGB software functionality, but you can use universal programs like SignalRGB or OpenRGB to control your devices as long as they're supported. Their specialized drivers have strictly defined whitelists that don't scare anti-cheat software. Still, if you're facing this issue, Microsoft suggests reporting it via Feedback Hub—that's how issues like this get prioritized in the first place.

China's Ministry of State Security has told some state-linked organizations to remove a customized version of Windows 10 from their machines, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The order reportedly accelerates a planned retirement that the software's developer had scheduled for February 2027, and it sent Chinese OS vendors' shares surging, with Hunan Kylinsec and Archermind both hitting Shanghai's 20% daily limit and China National Software climbing 10%. Bloomberg's sources attributed the directive to data security concerns but didn't specify what vulnerabilities Beijing is worried about.

The affected software is the government edition developed by C&M Information Technologies (CMIT), a joint venture set up in 2016 between Microsoft and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group, with the Chinese side holding the majority stake. The build is based on Windows 10 Enterprise but strips out OneDrive and other consumer-facing components, disables certain native functions, keeps updates and activation inside China, and lets government users substitute Chinese encryption algorithms for Microsoft's standard cryptography. China Customs and Shanghai's Commission of Economy and Informatization were among the first pilot customers when the edition launched in 2017.

Microsoft ended mainstream Windows 10 support globally in October 2025, which left CMIT's edition as the only Windows still officially sanctioned for Chinese government use. "Microsoft is not aware of a security incident affecting this product," a company spokesperson told Bloomberg, adding that it continues to receive regular security updates.

Beijing banned Windows 8 from government procurement in 2014, ordered a three-year replacement of foreign PCs in government offices starting in 2019, and in 2022 told central agencies and state firms to scrap foreign-branded computers entirely. The domestic stack built to absorb that demand now includes Kylin V10, UnionTech's UOS, and Huawei's HarmonyOS 5 laptops, and it reaches down to the silicon in systems like Huawei's Qingyun desktops running the homegrown Kirin 9000X.

StatCounter's traffic data shows how little of that campaign has reached the consumer market. Windows accounted for 87.64% of Chinese desktop web traffic in July 2026, and Windows 10 alone still made up 43.56% of Chinese Windows usage, compared with 50.01% for Windows 11, ten months after mainstream support ended. Roughly two in five Chinese desktops are currently running an unsupported Microsoft OS, the gap that CMIT's edition was meant to close for government users.

It's not clear what the scope of the new directive is, with Bloomberg's reporting covering “some” state-linked entities. CMIT didn't respond to the outlet's request for comment.

Popular open-source media player VLC has run into an unusual issue on Windows 11 that causes it to take as long as 33 seconds to start playing a simple MP3 file, the side effect of a recent unexplained change to Windows. The issue was publicized after game developer Jonathan Blow said he had stopped using VLC in favor of Microsoft's Media Player because of the delay. He also used the incident to criticize the state of open-source software running on Windows.

Responding to Blow's complaint, the developers behind VLC player fired back and claimed that the media player itself was not responsible. According to the VLC team, the bug is primarily due to a Microsoft Defender issue introduced through a Windows 11 update that conflicts with VLC's plugin cache.

"This is because of a « bug » from Microsoft Defender in one update of Windows 11, who magically made VLC plugins cache quarantined by Windows. Reinstalling VLC or regeneration of the plugin cache will fix this. Calling open source software embarrassing when it is a Windows update that broke it is quite disrespectful," the account responded.

The cache is an important part of how the media player works, as it relies on plugins for codecs, demuxers, and input/output modules. Instead of putting everything into a single executable, VLC loads these components as and when required and uses a cache to avoid having to scan the entire plugin directory every time it loads. The issue seems to occur when Microsoft Defender quarantines or blocks VLC's plugins.dat cache file. As a result, VLC can take a noticeable amount of time to process its plugin system before finally beginning playback. We also tried to replicate the issue on a Windows 11 machine; however, VLC launched normally, and we did not experience any noticeable delay when playing an MP3 file.

The easiest way to fix this is to reinstall VLC or regenerate the plugin cache. The VLC Windows installer includes a dedicated executable file to reset the cache files. This can be accessed by either heading to the VLC installation folder and running vlc-cache-gen.exe or its shortcut within the Start menu called "VLC media player - reset preferences and cache files." Do note that this also removes any customized preferences, such as audio settings like equalizers, keyboard shortcuts, subtitles, etc.

A more reliable solution is to add an exception for the VLC installation folder in Microsoft Defender itself. This should prevent Microsoft Defender from interfering with VLC's cache files and avoid the same issue from recurring. While the workaround seems relatively simple, it is still far from being ideal. One should not have to jump through hoops just to play an MP3 file. While Microsoft is yet to comment on the issue, it remains to be seen whether a future Windows Defender update will address the underlying cause.

Windows is in a tough spot right now, with years of neglect and stagnation reaching a boiling point with customers. Lack of optimization, bloat, ads, forced AI slop, and persistent tracking have forced Microsoft to admit its missteps and commit to fixing the OS at large. Windows Latest's new testing shows that the built-in weather app is a perfect representation of the state of Windows. The "app" consumes up to 1.2GB of RAM while idling, and it serves up a bunch of ads while you check the temperature.

MSN Weather is the default weather app that ships with Windows, which explains why it's filled with promotions throughout, despite being part of a paid OS. To be clear, the app looks very modern and has all the data you could ask for, such as live radar overlays, hourly wind and precipitation breakdowns, air quality index, and moon phases. It's also accurate because the data is sourced from a bunch of different providers across the world, but mostly Foreca.

The author explains that getting accurate forecasts is not a cheap endeavor, so it's not like Microsoft is running a charity. But the comparison falls apart when you look at what the competition is offering. Apple's native weather app on macOS is just as beautiful, detailed, and accurate, yet it's free of ads. It also only consumes about 250MB of memory to show all that data, so 5x less than Windows. This is because MSN Weather is technically not even an app to begin with; it's a web wrapper that's pinging a bunch of browser tabs in real-time.

When the author clicked on the Task Manager entry for MSN Weather, they saw 8 Chromium-based subprocesses, confirming that they're just looking at a website being rendered via WebView 2. For context, native Windows apps are supposed to adhere to the WinUI framework, which the company is slowly adopting over Win32 and UWP. Microsoft is committed to updating all the native apps Windows ships with to Win32, which should significantly improve their optimization, but we don't know if the ads will suddenly disappear as well.

The author saw Adobe Acrobat ads while checking the forecast, and we saw two ads — one for LendingTree and another for Spotify. Apart from that, scrolling around the app and clicking on the different menus and boxes was fast enough. We have to emphasize that the app really is granular and well-built from an aesthetic point of view; Microsoft gets full points for that, or is it MSN? That distinction is another issue that makes the weather app conundrum a bit more confusing.

When Microsoft promised to rebuild all native Windows 11 apps, it didn't explicitly say those would include MSN-branded services too, like MSN Weather and MSN News. Seeing as though they're simply called by their utilitarian names in the OS, there's a strong chance that these memory hoggers will also be eventually upgraded. For now, just stick to your phone, especially if you were among those who immediately Googled how to remove the weather widget from your taskbar that fateful day.

Last month, we covered a federal criminal case in which Microsoft's Global Device Identifier (GDID) helped the FBI catch an alleged hacker. Despite the noble cause, the implications of a persistent tracker built into Windows became difficult to ignore, and it was enough of a tipping point to convince Windscribe to do something about it. The VPN company has created an open-source project and script called "deGDID" that aims to strip GDID off your PC — but does so at the cost of breaking some Microsoft cloud services.

You can find the script on GitHub and run it via PowerShell with admin privileges. It's completely free and works in a very straightforward manner. There are three main execution flags that dictate how deGDID operates: –Status, which is read-only and tells you if a GDID is active on your rig; –Status –Redact, which generates logs with the GDID redacted so users can share diagnostic data more confidently; and –Protect, which completely wipes the GDID and prevents the creation of new ones.

A fourth flag, –Unprotect, allows you to reverse the script in case you need to revert back to the default state. But –Protect is the one worth discussing. First, the script looks for server-issued GDID keys in the registry, where they remain cached, and purges them all. This is something you can do manually as well. In fact, Windscribe tried it on a virtual machine, but the GDID keys are silently re-minted in the background upon a reboot or whenever Windows contacts Microsoft servers again.

To close this loop, the script then modifies the ACLs (Access Control Lists) and registry permissions to prevent the OS from fetching and subsequently trying to remint the GDID keys. It puts up a firewall against the internal DeviceAdd endpoint, which completely cuts off Microsoft identity services from even seeing this as a registered Windows PC. This one-two punch completes the process, and the existing GDID keys are not only wiped, but the possibility of new ones being created is put to bed as well.

Keep in mind that old keys that are already server-side cannot be removed; Microsoft has access to them indefinitely. This script also only works on unmanaged systems with admin accounts. If you're part of an organization or domain, deGDID will refuse to run. More importantly, though, since it blocks Microsoft's DeviceAdd pipeline, some core Windows services will break because they'll fail to authenticate your Microsoft account.

The reason deGDID is even needed in the first place is that Windows has no native toggle to turn off GDID. It exists as a permanent device ID that can track you without your consent. It works across IP addresses since it sits beneath the layer where VPNs operate, so no amount of network tunneling can obfuscate it. This can explain why Windscribe was compelled to create deGDID — to combat a potentially invasive system that has the power to wreak havoc in the wrong hands.

We tried the script on a Windows 11 computer, and it worked as intended. Running the –Status flag showed multiple cached GDIDs that were then removed by the –Protect flag, and a new GDID didn't show up even after restarting. As expected, some Microsoft apps freaked out and returned connection errors. Account verification through login.live.com was also blocked across all browsers, though login.microsoftonline.com still worked. Online games and other apps continued to behave normally as well.

Windscribe says deGDID is a research project, and it will continue to evolve as more information about how GDID works is uncovered. For now, the fact that it can make core Microsoft services and features fail might be too much of a tradeoff for some. The script also doesn't promise to kill every GDID instance, and Microsoft already has your previous keys, so this is certainly not an ideal solution — but it's a good start to the fight against hidden trackers.

In May of this year, Microsoft said that 32GB of RAM is now the future-proof “no worries” configuration if you’re a gaming enthusiast, and that 16GB of RAM is now the new “practical starting point” if you want to have a smooth experience with Windows 11. However, it seems that the company is backtracking on this announcement as it removes all references to the post on the Windows Learning Center website, according to Windows Latest.

Microsoft previously posted a blog titled “How to optimize your gaming PC setup” in November 2025, where it said that 32GB is the ideal capacity for hardcore gamers who demand the best possible quality for AAA games or use mods a lot. However, this page is no longer available, and people who attempt to visit the link are automatically redirected to the Learning Center Homepage.

Many manufacturers are once again releasing laptops that just have 8GB of RAM. Microsoft is part of this move, as it dropped its budget Surface Go and Surface Laptop Go models and introduced 8GB base versions of its Surface Pro 12, Surface Laptop 13, and Surface Laptop for Business. Thankfully, Redmond is not leaving users who cannot afford expensive RAM out to dry, as it recently promised to optimize the operating system and reduce its footprint by this year.

Even though Windows 11’s minimum specifications just require 4GB, the prevalence of many web-based apps and interfaces on the OS use up a lot of memory on many systems. While using web-based React and WebView2 is easier for developers, they’re not as efficient as apps that are built to run natively on Windows. This wasn’t a problem when memory was cheap and plentiful, as people could just spend a few dollars to upgrade their Windows PCs. However, now that memory modules are expensive and it’s hard to find the best prices for DDR5 and DDR4 kits, developers are going to be forced to optimize their software to use as little memory as possible.

This was actually what Windows programmers had to do in the 1980s and 1990s, when every Microsoft engineer had a stopwatch to ensure that their work remained fast, even on the limited hardware of the time. Even the original Task Manager, which was built by the same person who integrated ZIP file support into Windows, was only 80KB big so that it could run smoothly on “potato” hardware.

Hopefully, both Microsoft and app developers will rise to the challenge brought about by the memory shortage and make Windows efficient once more. This is especially true as Microsoft is now facing some competition from macOS and Linux (although Windows is, by far, still the most popular operating system today).