Articles about Windows 11

Cortana may have been Microsoft's response to Siri, but while Apple's digital assistant prevails, the Windows maker's offering has slipped into insignificance. Never much-loved by users, Microsoft's Cortana has been in its death throes for a while and now the company is finally moving on.

With the release of Windows 11 Build 25921 a few days ago, Microsoft has introduced the option to uninstall the Cortana app, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. The company had already announced plans to stop supporting Cortana in Windows as a standalone app, and that time has now come. A Microsoft Store update is also being used to forcibly deprecate the tool.

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When Microsoft released Windows 11 build 23516 a few days ago, the biggest change was billed as being improvements to screen casting. There were other changes, fixes and additions that Microsoft shouted about, but there was also a hidden feature that the company kept quiet about.

Cast your mind back a few months and you may recall that we learned of Microsoft plans to introduce the option to fix problems with Windows 11 using Windows Update. This handy feature is now available in the latest Dev build of Windows 11, but it is hidden and disabled by default. With the help of ViVeTool -- or Microsoft's own StagingTool -- however, it can be enabled.

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Earlier in the week, Microsoft rolled out a new Insider build for testers in the Dev Channel. Today, arriving just in time for the weekend, it delivers a new flight for those on the Canary Channel.

Windows 11 Build 25921 brings some interesting new features including HDR background support and rich thumbnail previews for cloud files on Start. It also lets users uninstall Cortana.

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Five-hundred-and-fifty-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 leaked its internal staging tool for a brief period this week. It works similarly to the open source tool ViVeTool, in that it gives administrators the option to enable or disable Windows features that are not enabled for all users at the time.

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Starting next month, Microsoft is making some significant changes relating to Transport Layer Security (TLS) in Windows 11.

This security protocol has been one of the more controversial system requirements for the operating system, and the company has revealed plans to disable older versions -- specifically TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 -- by default from September. Microsoft has already determined that this will cause problems for a fairly lengthy list of apps, including some of its own.

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Windows 11 is still a relatively young operating system and Microsoft is actively working to improve it and add new features along the way, as is obvious from the insider test builds that get released on a weekly basis.

However, there are still issues and design inconsistencies that ruin the OS for many users. This is where Rectify11 comes in.

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If you've been following news about the Insider builds of Windows 11 over the last couple of years, you're probably aware of the incredibly useful utility ViVeTool; we've referred to it many times here on BetaNews. This handy piece of software makes it possible to unlock Windows 11 features that Microsoft is testing with select groups of users.

It turns out that Microsoft has its own internal tool which works in very much the same way as the likes of ViVeTool. Called StagingTool, it provides access to features and options of Windows 11 that would otherwise be unavailable, and Microsoft has just leaked details of its existence.

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Today is a big day for Windows Insiders. The August 2023 Bug Bash has begun (running through until August 7) and there's a new Windows 11 build for testers in the Dev Channel to get their hands on.

Windows 11 Build 23516 features the usual selection of fixes and improvements, and also improves the screen casting experience that lets users wirelessly extend a display to another nearby PC, TV or other external screen.

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When you've spent any amount of time using Windows 11 with two or more monitors, it's hard to go back to a single display setup.

But while working with multiple screens is a great productivity boost, it is far from being a perfect experience. Thankfully, Microsoft feels the pain of Windows 11 users and is bringing some helpful changes to settings that will make the experience far more pleasant.

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With so many apps and websites vying for our attention, notifications and alerts have become part and parcel of being a technology user. For some time, Microsoft has used the Windows 11 system tray to indicate that there are notifications that should be looked at -- but this notification indicator is about to become less useful.

In the latest build of the operating system, the company has made an unusual change that means the system tray no longer shows how many notifications are there, just the fact that there are notifications. It is not clear what prompted the decision to remove notification counts, but is likely to be a polarizing change.

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Five-hundred-and-fifty-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.

Microsoft plans to end support for the Mail and Calendar apps for Windows at the end of 2024. The new Outlook for Windows application will replace the apps and users will be migrated automatically to the new application starting in August 2023.

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Earlier this week, Microsoft released a preview of next month's KB5028254 update for Windows 11 22H2. While this cumulative update fixes a lot of bugs, a large number of people who have installed it are complaining of Start menu issues.

Although Microsoft concedes that there is a problem, acknowledging that some users may find that the Start menu simply does not open, the company insists that it is not at fault, instead pointing the finger of blame at third parties.

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Today is a big day for Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev Channel as the software giant releases a new test flight, Build 23511. The main highlight in this release is a big improvement to Windows Spotlight.

Microsoft has previously tried out various treatments for Spotlight and has now settled on a single experience that the company says "includes previewing images at full screen, multiple opportunities to learn more about each image and a minimized experience."

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As part of this month's batch of update previews, we've already seen the KB5028245 update for Windows 11 21H2. For those who are running the more recent Windows 11 22H2, however, there is now the KB5028254 update.

There are many, many similarities between the KB5028245 and KB5028254 updates, and this should come as little surprise. The cumulative update for Windows 11 22H2 does have differences, though, including boosting the accuracy of brightness settings.

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As we approach the end of the month, we reach the time when Microsoft releases preview versions of the updates that will get official launches next Patch Tuesday. This time around, it is the KB5028245 update for Windows 11.

With this cumulative update, Microsoft addresses a series of problems in Windows 11 21H2, including a VPN issue that could lead to excessive ARP requests to the network gateway. Also fixed are a bug that causes incorrect reporting of the L2 cache, and another that prevents the Windows Notification Platform from issuing notifications from apps.

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