#windows

#windows

The MacBook Air maintained its place on the throne as 'Most Popular Notebook,' with Apple boosting memory to 16GB while pruning $100 off the cost.

Rising RAM prices have made upgrading your PC more expensive. Virtual RAM is a less expensive way of boosting an older computer's performance, but it has limited use cases because it can't match the speed of physical RAM.

"I *really* don't think i486 class hardware is relevant any more," Torvalds said in 2022, noting that while some people may still operate 486 systems they aren't relevant from a kernel development standpoint. "At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels."

What started in 2019 as a couple of utilities for things like window and shortcut management has gradually expanded to nearly 30 useful tools, including a keyboard shortcut creator, an image-to-text extractor, and a better search bar than the one that's built into Windows proper. PowerToys has become wildly popular among Windows power users, with more than 70 million downloads to date, but it's also completely free, with no ads, Office upsells, or ham-fisted Copilot integrations.

When Windows 10 was released in 2015, it was immediately controversial, with critics zeroing in on one feature in particular: telemetry. I spent many months in those early days reading one article after another on the subject that read, in retrospect, like entries from the diary of a mad conspiracy theorist.

Microsoft PC Manager, which first appeared in beta form in 2022, and is now available for free to anyone who wants to give it a try. Microsoft promises it "effortlessly enhances PC performance with just one click," and will "keep your PC running smoothly." In other words, it's intended to clean up some of the clutter and baggage that your PC may have accumulated over the years.

Microsoft keeps touting its Copilot AI as the greatest invention since the wheel. Toward that end, the company has been force-feeding more and more AI into Windows in the belief that everyone is yearning for an "agentic OS." Well, based on much of the user feedback, that's not quite the case. In fact, the more Microsoft keeps promoting AI as some white knight riding in to rescue Windows users, the more that people have been pushing back. The main argument?

I don't think any organization wants to pay for ESU licenses. Many organizations will migrate, but a non-trivial subset will rely on ESU as a safety net because their constraints are less about 'deciding to upgrade' and more about validating dependencies and coordinating operational downtime.

January 13 marked another milestone for legacy systems, as support for the software - codenamed Longhorn Server - expired for customers that bought Microsoft Premium Assurance (PA). Extended support ended for Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020. It was possible to keep the lights on until January 10, 2023, via Extended Security Updates. A fourth year came courtesy of Azure, which took the code to January 9, 2024, but that was it for anyone without PA.