Microsoft

The lukewarm reception to Windows 11 is clear from the wave of third-party tools built to fix it. One of the most recent is Crapfixer Rebirth Version, a utility that’s been around for about seven years (although it looks older), which has now been given a full refresh.

Winhance is another tool you’ll definitely be interested in. It can debloat and optimize Windows -- and keep it that way. Although it’s been designed for Windows 11 it works just fine on Windows 10. Winhance was originally a PowerShell GUI application, but version 4 is a standalone app that can be installed or uninstalled easily, and it also comes in a portable version, so there's no reason not to get started with it today.

Ahead of next month’s Patch Tuesday release, Microsoft has released a preview, non-security update for Windows 11. The KB5055627 update is an interesting one, largely because it sees the launch of a preview version of the controversial Recall feature.

But there is more to this update than the feature that sparked so many privacy concerns. While there are changes and fixes for all Windows 11 PCs, the vast majority of the KB5055627 update -- or at least the most exciting elements of it -- are for Copilot+ PCs only. This is the start of a two-tier Windows 11 user experience.

Using Windows 11 can be enough to make anyone turn the air blue, but being irritated by aspects of the operating system is not the only reason for swearing at your computer.

Profanity is a part of everyday language, but Microsoft has been very prudish about it -- to the extent that the Voice Typing feature censored curse words. But this is changing. An update to Windows 11 means that it is possible to dictate swearwords and have them converted into text.

We regularly suggest operating systems to consider if you’re feeling disillusioned by Windows 11, and judging by their popularity, Microsoft should be concerned by just how many people are looking to jump ship.

Commodore OS Vision has just been updated to version 3.0, and it’s a major overhaul. The Linux-based operating system offers the modern features you’d expect, but with a retro twist. It’s also packed with classic Commodore content that will appeal to anyone who owned one of those systems in the past.

Six-hundred-forty-four in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft announced the deprecation and removal of the Maps app by July 2025 from the Microsoft Store. The app won't be uninstalled on user machines, but it won't receive updates anymore and can't be installed again if it is removed by the user after July 2025.

Despite making claims to the contrary, Microsoft is not really thought of as being a company that takes much notice of user opinion. All too often it seems that incredibly unpopular options, features and changes are introduced with little regard for what users actually want.

But, to buck the trend, Microsoft has apparently been listening to feedback from people who are unhappy about the encroachment of Copilot into... well, pretty much everything, really. The decision to include a physical Copilot key on keyboards has been one such unpopular move, and the reaction from Windows 11 users has forced Microsoft’s hand.

Six-hundred-forty-three in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

The Windows 11 Snipping Tool is getting improved OCR support. The functionality is now available directly via a button or the shortcut Shift-Windows-T. You had to take a screenshot first previously to extract text from it.

A vulnerability in the Windows NTLM authentication protocol, which is known to have been actively exploited for at least a month, has been added to the US CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.

While Microsoft deprecated NTLM last year, it remains widely used. Security researchers discovered the hash disclosure spoofing bug, and Microsoft quietly patched it in March. But the creation of a patch is one thing -- having users install it is something else. By adding the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-24054, to its catalog, CISA is raising aware that action needs to be taken.

Canonical has announced the arrival of Ubuntu 25.04 -- "Plucky Puffin." This latest interim release introduces a number of updates across the desktop, as well as developer tools, and improved hardware support, with a focus on boosting performance and improving the user experience.

Ubuntu 25.04 ships with GNOME 48, offering new features like a Preserve Battery Health mode, HDR support, and Canonical’s triple buffering patches, now accepted upstream. A new Wellbeing Panel helps users manage screen time, while a redesigned install and boot experience adds improved partitioning options and experimental Dracut support for faster system startup.

Users of classic Outlook for Windows have been complaining since last year that Microsoft's email client has turned into a massive resource hog. Months later, the company has conceded that the complaints are justified.

Microsoft is eager for everyone to move away from the classic version of Outlook to the newly updated edition of the app, and there have been suspicions voiced that high CPU usage is an underhand tactic to encourage the move. But having acknowledged the problem, Microsoft says that it is working to come up with a fix.

We’re huge fans of PowerToys, and one of the greatest modules included in the utility collection is Text Extractor. As the name suggests, this provides a way to pull text out of images ready to edit and use in other documents. Microsoft has also added a similar tool to Microsoft Photos, and now the company has brought it to another area of Windows 11.

The increasingly useful and powerful Snipping Tool has been updated with a text extractor button in the app’s capture bar. This makes the process of copying text from your screen to the clipboard insanely quick and easy, eliminating the need to take a screenshot before extracting text.

Nitrux, which is one of our favorite Linux-based Windows 11 alternatives, is rolling out a major upgrade to how users manage software on the system. The move, which is aimed at improving reliability and user control, replaces two aging tools -- the NX Software Center and the zap CLI -- with a new, purpose-built system called NX AppHub.

For those unfamiliar, Nitrux doesn’t use a traditional package manager like apt or rpm. Instead, it focuses on AppImages, which are self-contained applications that run independently of system libraries. Although this approach avoids dependency issues, it previously came with a rather major downside -- apps were often outdated or pulled from unreliable sources. That’s where NX AppHub comes in.

The latest annual Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report from BeyondTrust, reveals a record-breaking number of reported vulnerabilities last year.

Total vulnerabilities reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2024, an 11 percent increase from the previous record of 1,292 in 2022. Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities comprised 40 percent of all those reported.

Microsoft is starting the process of lifting a compatibility hold that was preventing some Windows 11 users from updating to Windows 11 24H2.

The block has been in place since September, stopping users with certain unnamed wallpaper customization applications from installing the latest version of the operating system. Microsoft has still not provided a list of the apps that it has, until now, considered troublesome, but says that it will “gradually remove this safeguard hold”.

Oh, look! It’s another update from Microsoft with weird or unwanted side effects. This time around it is the KB5057588 update, which is an update to the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).

Sysadmins are being freaked out by the appearance of an error message that reads 0x80070643 -- ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE. Time to panic? Nope! Microsoft says to just ignore it.