Chipp.in Tech News and Reviews
Windows, Security & Privacy, Open Source and more
Quick Machine Recovery is a relatively new feature of Windows 11 that promises speedier troubleshooting of system failures. Announced earlier this year, the feature has now landed in a recent Windows Insider test build of the Canary channel. What is Quick Machine Recovery? Microsoft describes it as an automated recovery feature that is designed to…
It is easy to sort files in Windows’ File Explorer. Just activate one of the displayed column headers, e.g., type or size, and Windows will sort all files using the selected value. Select size and files will be displayed from largest to smallest. Click again, and the sort order is reversed. Did you know that…
When you use the built-in search in Windows, you may get a variety of resuts, depending on how search is configured. By default, Windows Search runs the search on the Internet as well to return Internet results and local results, including cloud content results. You can turn this off, if you want local-only results. Depending…
Crapfixer is the latest open source Windows tweaker by serial developer Belim. He calls it “the tool Microsoft would build, if they hated bloatware as much as we do”. I have reviewed several of his tools in the past, including the tweaker TidyOS, the app remover NoBloatBox and the tweaker ThisIsNot11. The main idea behind…
Tweaking apps offer a user-friendly option to customize the Windows operating system. Most focus on the removal of apps, disabling certain features, or improving privacy. While it is possible to apply any tweak manually, it is probably safe to say that the majority of Windows users prefers apps for the job. TidyOS is an open…
Microsoft has released out-of-band updates for Windows shortly after it released the cumulative security updates for Windows earlier this week. These new updates are available for Windows 11, version 23H2 and 22H2, as well as several Enterprise and server versions of Windows. Good to know: out-of-band updates are usually released to fix pressing issues. Most…
While it is generally recommended to install Windows security updates, there are situations that make you want to postpone the installation. Maybe it is because of another faulty update that Microsoft released, a bug that you already experienced after an update was installed on your system, or just the desire to keep the PC running…
If you’d ask me to name the most annoying feature of Windows 11’s Start menu, I’d probably pick the Recommended section. Here specifically the inability to remove it from the Start menu. While you can configure Windows to stop giving recommendations, you cannot remove the then-blank section from the Start menu. That is, until now….
When Microsoft launched its Edge web browser, it used Windows to quickly push the usage share of the browser. One of Microsoft’s ways of doing so was to create artificial protocols in Windows that would open only in Edge. Clicks on web searches in Start or news would always open in Edge, even if the…
If you have used Windows long enough, you have probably come into contact with Startup Repair at one point. The feature aims to resolve issues that prevent the operating system from starting up. It is a hit and miss kind of feature for many users though, as it relies solely on local files. All in…