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Each Windows user has a user profile that holds customizations and personal files. Users may install software, download files or change the look and feel of Windows. Backing up user profiles may not be something that most users are familiar with. There are full system backups after all, which include user profile data. User backups…
Zip archives are widely used on today’s Internet and on desktop computer systems. The Zip archive format is popular and used for distributing files, programs or saving space. Archives contain one or more files. A Zip archive needs to be extracted, which is called unzipping. Windows 11 supports the Zip archive format by default. It…
Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system supports a wide range of color settings. Users may customize the color for window borders and title bars, the Start button and the taskbar. Microsoft distinguishes between color modes, which refers to dark, light and custom modes, and individual color settings of each mode. This has not changed in the…
Barely a week goes by without another AI announcement from Microsoft. It all began with the integration of ChatGPT into Bing Search. Called Bing Chat, it allows Bing users to communicate with a custom version of ChatGPT directly from the Bing website. Exactly a year later, AI has found its way into a wide range…
Microsoft announced a dedicated Copilot key for Windows recently. Yusuf Mehdi himself announced the “year of AI” and the introduction of the Copilot key for Windows 11 PCs. Microsoft and several OEMs will ship upcoming devices with the key on the keyboard. Information about the key is scarce at the moment. While Microsoft did publish…
I ran into a bit of trouble recently when I tried to fully erase old hard drives that I no longer needed. Since I wanted to sell or give away the drives, I had to make sure that the new owner would not be able to restore any data from the drives. My usual routine,…
Hardwipe is a privacy software for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Its main purpose is to erase hard drive data permanently so that it can’t be recovered anymore with recovery software. You may remember my guide on making files unrecoverable on hard drives. I used the encryption software VeraCrypt for that, as it runs a full…
When Microsoft launched Windows 11 in late 2021, it did not only block millions of Windows PC owners from updating to the operating system, it also made the use of Microsoft Edge mandatory for certain operations. Want to open support articles? Edge is required. Web search results? Edge is required. Links to articles and other…
Upcoming versions of Windows will include a new repair feature that Microsoft calls Fix problems using Windows Update. The feature, which was first spotted in January 2023, uses the capabilities of Windows Update to reinstall Windows. Since it adds another repair option to Windows, you may wonder how it differs from existing options. In this…
UCheck is a software updates checker for Windows. It is a freemium product, which means that it is available as a free, limited version, and a commercial version. The price of the commercial version starts at $12 per year. Earlier this week, I reviewed WingetUI, an open source program to install, uninstall and update software…