Windows 10 October 2018 Update

We’re now on the third Windows 10 feature update after last year’s big Creators Update. I had not bothered writing about the two intervening updates as there wasn’t much to say, but the most recent one brought some nifty new functions you should be aware of. First, here are How-To Geek’s comprehensive feature lists for … Continue reading “Windows 10 October 2018 Update”

Some Windows Histories

For some reason, this year everyone decided to publish extensive articles on the history of Microsoft Windows and related technologies. Reading all of them will probably take you a month but they are quite informative, so I wanted to collect them here in case you missed some or all of them. Doing Windows at the … Continue reading “Some Windows Histories”

Windows 10 “Creators Update”

The latest big feature update for Windows 10 has been released, entitled “Creators Update” (version 1703) due to several new applications for creating, viewing, and printing 3D models. That sounds great but Paint 3D seems more like a toy than a tool at this point. I could find no way to show or input measurements, … Continue reading “Windows 10 “Creators Update””

DPI Settings in Windows 10 “Creators Update”

Windows 10 started its journey to simplified display settings with an awkward combination of dialogs in the modern Settings app and the legacy Control Panel, as described in my previous post on the subject. With the recently released “Creators Update” (version 1703) the journey appears to have reached its destination. All display settings, including all … Continue reading “DPI Settings in Windows 10 “Creators Update””

Windows 10 Fall Update (1511)

Windows 10 just received its first major feature update, only known informally as “Fall Update.” The name was not changed to Windows 10.1 or the like, although System: About in the Settings app now shows the new version tag 1511 corresponding to build 10586. The original release was based on build 10240 with version tag … Continue reading “Windows 10 Fall Update (1511)”

Windows 10: Something Happened

I’ve been running Microsoft’s long-awaited Windows 10 on my Dell XPS 15 (model 9530) for a week now. Yesterday I detailed the changes to DPI settings, today I cover the installation process and my general impressions of the new Windows version. I’m focusing on the traditional desktop experience as I always have a keyboard and … Continue reading “Windows 10: Something Happened”

DPI Settings in Windows 10

Important Update — Windows 10 “Creators Update” (version 1703, released in April 2017) brought a greatly simplified interface for high DPI settings and additional per-application compatibility options. Both are described in a new post, DPI Settings in Windows 10 “Creators Update”, which obsoletes the post below for “Creators Update” and newer. Windows 10 has once … Continue reading “DPI Settings in Windows 10”

Stop Automatic Execution Blocking

For years I’ve had an advisory page on a terrible Windows anti-feature I’ve dubbed “automatic execution blocking.” Windows sets a flag in files downloaded from the Internet so you cannot run them without a confirmation dialog. Worse, this flag is automatically propagated to files within downloaded archives when you use Windows facilities to unpack those … Continue reading “Stop Automatic Execution Blocking”

Windows 10 Announced

Microsoft has officially announced the successor to the ill-conceived Windows 8, codenamed “Threshold” and now surprisingly numbered Windows 10 rather than 9. You see, “Windows 9” also matches the start of “Windows 95” and “Windows 98”… and a lot of short-sighted coders used a startsWith string check to determine Windows versions. Also, the internal version … Continue reading “Windows 10 Announced”

The Last Version of Windows 8

Windows 8.1 Update 1 (with a capital U) has arrived to close off the catastrophic Windows 8 era at Microsoft. If the overhyped Windows 8.1 did little but bring the new Metro environment finally up to release quality, U1 is at least more honest about its fairly minor changes – and comes with the promise … Continue reading “The Last Version of Windows 8”