Best of Windows — April 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of wincmdWindows Command Line·4w

    PowerToys 0.99 is here: new monitor controls, easier window management, and Dock upgrades

    PowerToys 0.99 ships two new preview utilities: Power Display for controlling monitor settings (brightness, contrast, color profiles) directly from the system tray, and Grab And Move for dragging/resizing windows via Alt+Click anywhere on the window. Command Palette and the Dock receive major improvements including a Compact Dock mode, persistent calculator history, better pinning controls, crash fixes, and Windows Terminal profile pinning. Keyboard Manager gains editable recorded keys and a new Disabled action. ZoomIt adds scrolling screenshots and text extraction. Image Resizer migrates from WPF to WinUI 3, and Advanced Paste fixes modifier-key injection issues with Electron/Chromium apps.

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    Article
    Avatar of xda-developersXDA Developers·7w

    I replaced PuTTY, Notepad++, and WinSCP with modern tools, and I wish I had sooner

    A developer shares their experience replacing three long-standing Windows tools with modern alternatives. PuTTY is swapped for Windows Terminal, which now handles SSH natively and offers a tabbed interface with portable JSON-based config. Notepad++ is replaced by VS Code, praised for its integrated terminal, Git support, and project-level editing. WinSCP is replaced by Cyberduck, which supports more protocols including S3 and cloud storage backends. The author notes the transition was faster and easier than expected.

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    Video
    Avatar of christitustechChris Titus Tech·6w

    Sorry Windows 10 Users...

    A sysadmin with 25 years of experience revisits his earlier warnings about Windows 10 end-of-life security risks. After attempting to exploit an unpatched Windows 10 1607 instance using Metasploit and the EternalBlue/DoublePulsar exploit, he found it surprisingly difficult — largely because a secure, business-grade network with deep packet inspection blocked the attacks even when the OS firewall was disabled. He softens his previous stance: while updating is still recommended, unpatched Windows 10 is not as immediately exploitable as commonly feared, especially on a secure network. He recommends Windows 10 LTSC for legacy use cases and encourages users who dislike Windows 11 to consider switching to Linux.

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    Article
    Avatar of xda-developersXDA Developers·7w

    I stopped treating my old 250GB SATA SSD as e-waste, and now I can't live without it

    A personal account of repurposing an old 250GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD that had been unused since upgrading to NVMe storage. The drive found new life as a dedicated Windows 11 installation to avoid dual-boot complications on the primary NVMe drive. Future plans include converting it to external storage using a cheap SATA-to-USB enclosure for portable media use.

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    Article
    Avatar of xda-developersXDA Developers·7w

    CachyOS is dethroning Windows at the one thing it owned for decades

    CachyOS, a performance-focused Linux distribution, is now matching or beating Windows 11 in gaming benchmarks. Powered by Valve's Proton compatibility layer and specialized schedulers like BORE, CachyOS is challenging Windows' long-held dominance as the go-to gaming OS. While anti-cheat compatibility remains a hurdle for some major titles, growing Linux Steam market share and improving performance suggest the gap is closing fast.

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    Video
    Avatar of davesgarageDave's Garage·5w

    Task Manager is LYING About Your CPU Usage (Here's the Truth)

    A deep dive into how Windows Task Manager actually measures CPU usage, written by the original Task Manager author Dave Plummer. The post explains that Task Manager uses cumulative process execution time deltas rather than wall-clock intervals as its denominator, making measurements robust against timer imprecision. Key insights include: why a single-threaded process maxing one core on an 8-core machine shows ~12% instead of 100%, how the idle process acts as an accounting bucket for unused cycles, why the display is a time-averaged window rather than instantaneous, and how modern dynamic CPU frequency scaling means time-based accounting no longer reflects actual work done. Also covers historical quirks like the 99% CPU cap (which hid a rare kernel accounting bug), PID reuse edge cases, and WOW (Windows on Windows) 16-bit task attribution.

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    Article
    Avatar of windowsWindows Blogs·6w

    Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 28020.1812 (Canary Channel)

    Microsoft has released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 28020.1812 to the Canary Channel. Key changes include a new touchpad setting to customize the right-click zone size (default, small, medium, or large), refinements to the drag tray sharing feature with a smaller peek view to reduce accidental invocations, and enhancements to the Windows Security app's Secure Boot section with color-coded status badges and certificate status visibility. The Feedback Hub has also been updated to version 2.2604.101.0 with design improvements including better default window sizing, session-persistent window size, mouse back button navigation, and fixes for community feedback display and upvote buttons for Chinese language users.

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