#windows-11

#windows-11

Compressing files into a ZIP folder is a great way to bring order to your digital life. By bundling everything together into a small archive, you free up storage while keeping related content together. You can even safely delete the original, since a copy is preserved. ZIP folders also make sharing large files much faster. Instead of waiting minutes for multi-gig downloads or uploads, compression cuts down on those transfer times to a fraction of what they'd be otherwise.

A major selling point of the Xbox Ally and Ally X is that they ship with a full screen version of Windows that plays nice with handheld PCs. As part of the company's recent Xbox Partner Showcase, Microsoft has announced that the Windows "full screen experience" or FSE is finally rolling out to all other Windows 11 handhelds starting November 21.

It feels like Microsoft is blindly racing toward another Windows 8 situation. Windows 8 was arguably the most divisive release of Windows in its 40-year history, as Microsoft attempted to overhaul the operating system for a touch-first future. Spooked by the iPad, the company shipped a radical overhaul that ditched the familiar Start menu and left users frustrated and confused. They weren't quite ready for the future that Microsoft envisioned.

GPU giant Nvidia acknowledged that the update caused dips in gaming performance for some and has pushed out a hotfix based on version 581.80 of its Game Ready Driver. First spotted by Windows Latest, the hotfix is a quick and dirty (or, in official parlance, "run through a much abbreviated QA process") patch to address some specific issues. In this case, the Windows 11 October update is slowing down games.

As spotted by X user Phantomofearth, there's a new, hidden setting in the latest Beta and Dev builds of Windows (build number 26220.7070) that allows you to enable haptic feedback for certain UI functions and to control the strength of the buzz. Invisible by default and not-yet-working (even if you have a haptic mouse), the new controls live under Bluetooth & Devices -> Mouse in the Settings app.

Check the boxes next to up to 16 apps you want, click the Install Selected button, and your browser downloads a single executable that installs them all. This capability is only available in the web version of the store, and not the app that lives on your Windows 11 taskbar.

The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 provides a handy way to capture screenshots of text, images, and other items that appear on your screen. But sometimes you might want to learn more about the item you've captured. For that, the tool now offers a visual search engine that uses Bing to dig up information on the content in your screenshot.

HP withdrew an update to its OneAgent software for Windows 11 after it was found to cause serious authentication problems on some AI PCs. The update removed crucial Microsoft certificates used by organizations to log in via Microsoft Entra ID. This caused systems to lose connection to their cloud environment. Rudy Ooms of Patch My PC discovered the error. He found that the problems arose after a silent background update from HP.

Prior to the patch, one of the few workarounds was to use a PS/2-style mouse, keyboard, and port. But those have largely gone the way of the dinosaurs. If you're running Windows 11, it's unlikely you'd have these types of peripherals and a PC that supports them. That's why you'll want to install the new patch ASAP and make sure WinRE is able to work properly if you ever do need it

The ROG Xbox Ally X, the handheld console collaboration from Asus and Microsoft, is an impressive, yet expensive, piece of gaming tech. The pricier of the two portable gaming devices dropping on 16 October, the all-black ROG Xbox Ally X will cost you a cool 799 (899/$999/A$1599) to sample its splendour. (The less powerful ROG Xbox Ally, which comes in white, will run you 499/599/$599/A$999.) Thankfully, the pricier option has said splendour in spades.

Figuring out how and where to find every feature in Windows can be challenging, even for advanced users. If only we had a guide that could direct us to a specific setting just by asking about it. Well, that's the idea behind a new skill coming to Microsoft's Copilot app for Windows. Rolling out to Insiders Now rolling out to Windows Insiders is a cool new feature that aims to help you better navigate Windows.

Installing that update finally fixes an age-old problem that prevented you from accessing notifications on a secondary monitor. "The Notification Center functionality is now available on secondary monitors," Microsoft said on the support page. "To open it, select the date and time in the system tray on the taskbar. With the August 2025 non-security update ( KB5064081), you can also show a larger clock with seconds above the calendar."

Microsoft is closing a popular loophole that allowed users to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account. The change has appeared in recent Insider builds of Windows 11, indicating it is likely to be included in the production version soon. Microsoft refers to these loopholes as "known mechanisms" and is talking about local commands in this instance. You can learn all about these in our piece for getting Windows 11 installed with a local account, but suffice to say start ms-cxh:localonly is no more.

An update coming to all Windows 11 Insiders on Copilot Plus PCs will introduce a new AI-powered feature on its Photos app that will place images of receipts, screenshots, identity documents, and handwritten notes in their own folders. Microsoft says the Photos app will automatically categorize these images based on their visual contents, even if the text in the image is in a language other than English.

The ROG Xbox Ally X, which the company describes as the "ultimate high-performance handheld" that's "built for the most demanding players," will set you back $1,000. Meanwhile, the ROG Xbox Ally "for everyone from the casual player to the avid enthusiast" is priced at $600, and you can pre-order that model from other retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart.

If you're tired of staring at the same old static wallpapers in Windows 11, there's help on the way. Microsoft has just added support for animated video backgrounds in the latest Insider builds of its popular operating system, heralding their likely appearance in a production update soon. The hidden capability, which was first spotted by feature-finding guru phantomofearth, works with any MP4 or M4V video file and adjusts it to fill your screen.

The way this works is silicon partners build and maintain execution providers that Windows ML distributes, manages, and registers to run AI workloads performantly on-device, serving as a hardware abstraction layer for developers and a way to get optimal performance for each specific silicon," Microsoft says in the announcement. In simple terms, the platform enables AI-infused apps to tap into PC hardware that's best suited for their specific workload, such as GPUs for power-intensive tasks, NPUs for power efficiency, and CPUs for flexibility.

Specifically, this bug prevented people from using the integrated camera with Windows Hello facial recognition. This stopped users from running a facial scan to sign in to the Camera app, any app or service that normally supports facial scanning via Windows Hello, or any other app or device that relied on the integrated camera. Also: Windows 11 lets you run a network speed test right from the taskbar now - how to try it