If you're using a Windows 10 machine, you might want to consider disabling Cortana — at least on the Lock Screen — if you aren't planning to install the latest Windows updates for whatever reason. (And, generally, do you really need a smart assistant helping you out when your PC is locked?)

I confess, I've never really used Windows 10s Game Bar, because I'm probably the last person who should be broadcasting their gaming habits on an online service. I'm terrible at Fortnite, I min/max in Pillars of Eternity, and I play a lot of Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms -- not exactly the sexiest of titles to stream, unless you like watching me click on all the things.

If you've been trying to install the April Update to Windows 10 and have hit a road block there may be a good reason. Microsoft has stopped the software from installing to computers running Avast Antivirus after some people experienced a blank desktop with no icons. This follows issues with installations on Intel and Toshiba SSDs which Microsoft has issued a patch for.

Hooray. You bought a brand-new Windows laptop and, for whatever reason, the manufacturer was nice enough to let you go through the installation process yourself instead of filling your new system full of crapware for you. Just kidding. It's rare when that happens, and buying a laptop that's full of junk is one -- but certainly not the only -- reason why you might want to reinstall your operating system from scratch.

For many of you, a single pair of speakers or headphones is all you probably need for your desktop or laptop system. For others, rocking out, gaming, and listening to movies is a constant battle with Windows over which connected audio device the operating system should use to blast noise.

I discovered a strange quirk with the Windows 10 install on my notebook — the "Run as administrator" option was missing from the context menu for Windows Installer files, which use the extension ".msi". This isn't great, as many installers require admin privileges to make system-level changes.

If you wanted an exhaustive reference for all the command line tools and utilities available in Windows, "/h" was as good as it got. Well, that was until last month, when Microsoft published a whopping big PDF with information on every single terminal command the operating system has to offer.

Build is Microsoft's annual developer conference. It's a busy couple of weeks for developers with Facebook running their event last week and Google has their event kicking off now as well. Microsoft has announced several new tools and services for developers today. Here's a snapshot of some of the more interesting announcements.

Microsoft and Apple have been locked in a pitched battle since the early 1980s. Back in the early days of the personal computer, there were dozens of options to choose from - everything from the TRS-80 to Amstrad to IBM's OS/2. But, by the early 1990s two operating systems emerged as the most popular - Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS. Both have undergone significant transformations, playing catch-up and leapfrog with each other. Here's what I wish Apple would learn from Microsoft.

There's a new Windows update available, and it's got quite a few goodies inside for you to explore: It's one of those rollouts that in days gone by would have been marked by a decimal point increase in the version number. Here's everything you're getting in the latest update for Windows 10.

Now that Windows has shifted to two incremental releases each year, rather than the large, monolithic updates that used to fall every few years, we can get our hands on new features faster than ever before. The new release, imaginatively dubbed the April 2018 Update, just snuck into April and has lots of new features but there are also some things disappearing. Here's our look at what's in and what's out.

Microsoft has finally launched the Windows 10 April 2018 Update. The title is dry, but the updates are good, especially if you're coming from Google's Chrome OS or Apple's macOS. In those cases you might notice some, uh, familiar features. It's almost like Microsoft picked through some of the coolest features its competitors have and finally put them into Windows.

Microsoft's big Windows update - not a "spring" update but the more boringly named "Windows 10 April 2018" update - has arrived today for eager Windows users who manually trigger the update for their desktops and laptops.

Microsoft is officially rolling out the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, also known as the Spring Creators Update, to computers tomorrow. While that might mean you'll get it first thing, the company typically rolls those updates out slowly, which means you also might be waiting for a bit. If you're anxious to get it now, here's a rundown on how to make that happen. If you'd rather not bite the bullet on the update right now, then you can also delay having that update come to your computer.

That's right. The "Spring Creators" update is no more; Microsoft is now calling its upcoming mega-update to Windows the "Windows 10 April 2018 Update", and the company is barely locking this name in by releasing the update on Monday, April 30 - the last day of the month.

It sounds weird, but when you click that power button on the start menu to shut down Windows 10, you aren't shutting down Windows 10. Sure, Windows 10 goes through the motions of shutting down. And your computer sure looks like it shut down. And it sort of did, but it didn't.

Windows: Sometimes, finding the right Windows settings to automate some portion of your digital life feels like digging through the nooks and crannies of your couch to find loose change. In this case, Windows' "Storage Sense," a handy way to automate hard drive cleaning, has probably been staring you in the face for a while, you just never thought to activate it. And you should.

I encountered a quirky problem the other day when I was trying to clean up one of my hard drives before copying its contents to another drive: I couldn't delete a folder.

Microsoft Windows can get messy. It's not (always) the operating system's fault. You download tons of apps and files, and create new content stuff of your own, until your "Downloads" directory looks like a landfill for old content. Your desktop is so full of icons, you can't see your pretty wallpaper. Your Start Menu looks like an app buffet. In short, your operating system is a mess, but it's not unfixable.