Windows: While a normal Windows 10 installation isn’t usually that difficult to manage, there’s probably a lot running under the hood of your operating system that annoys you. Maybe it’s a feature or two you wish you could turn off, or perhaps you’re concerned about what kind of data Microsoft collects on that which you do on your PC — or where it’s located.

Microsoft has launched public testing for the newest version of its Edge web browser, which it built on top of Google’s “Chromium” open-source framework. Not only does this mean that Edge should (supposedly) work better with sites designed to modern web standards, but it also means that you’ll be able to run Chrome extensions in Edge—making the browser much more bearable than previous incarnations.

With the latest Windows 10 update, Windows 10 1809, Microsoft has changed the default USB drive transfer setting to favour quick removal over better performance.

Microsoft made PC gamers’ dreams come true last week when it announced the Halo: Master Chief Collection would be available on PC through Steam and the Windows Store later this year, and now you can sign up for a chance to play the game early via the company’s new Halo Insider program.

If you’ve noticed that some of your games on Windows 10 have been particularly unresponsive in the last week, you aren’t alone. Microsoft confirmed that a recent Windows 10 update, patch KB4482887, introduced a bug that dramatically increased lag. Don’t sweat it, though. Microsoft has, thankfully, dealt with the issue quickly in a new patch, KB4489899, which reportedly fixes the issue.

As of this week, Windows 10 Mail finally has a Dark Mode worth using. After a few weeks of testing, the upgraded Mail and Calendar app now includes a more useful version of the feature for the email side of the app: one that actually makes the whole app dark, and offers the ability to quickly go “bright” when it’s tough to read.

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

Windows 10 users may soon notice their hard drive storage organised a bit differently.

Upcoming builds of Windows 10 will support a new feature designed to ensure system updates occur more smoothly. Reserved Storage will ensure there's enough free space on your hard drive so that system updates can download and install seamlessly.

Not all smart speakers are created equal. In fact, some barely meet the qualifications to be called “smart” in the first place—but they’re getting better at answering your questions, assuming they can understand what you’re saying.

For a while now, software makers have been making it safer, through various means, to run applications you don't quite trust more safely. Various techniques such as protected memory have helped and the widespread availability of virtualisation lets you create disposable environments. But Microsoft is taking that a step further with a new feature called Windows Sandbox. It's an extension of a feature that's already part of Windows 10 that will let you run whatever app you want in a dynamically created and destroyed VM.

Another day, another tech company being disingenuous about its privacy practices. This time it’s Microsoft, after it was discovered that Windows 10 continues to track users’ activity even after they’ve disabled the activity-tracking option in their Windows 10 settings.

There's certainly a market out there for a lightweight version of Windows 10; long have the masses complained about the increasingly bloated size of the OS over the years. And, while a "Lite" SKU has recently been spotted in the wild, it's not the skim-flavoured thing we'd like it to be. Rather, it's aimed at Chromebooks, going from reports.

If you have a laptop with switchable graphics, odds are you're familiar with the option to force which GPU — Intel or NVIDIA / AMD — your PC should use when running a particular program. However, Windows 10 has introduced another per-app feature that lets you pick which performance profile should be used, handy is you want every drop of speed from your hardware.

At this point, Microsoft should probably call it a day on Windows 10's troubled 1809 update. Last week, the company again had to block the patch for some users. There's a tiny ray of sunlight for Microsoft however, with the blame falling — at least partly & on Intel's shoulders.

Since the late 1980s, when the mouse became the main way people invoked actions from the applications they use, the art of the keyboard shortcut has slowly disappeared. I started using a PC in the time when a pointing device was an expensive option on laptops.

So, I became pretty adept at using keyboard shortcuts. But it turns out the creators of our software still include them even though we are more likely to use a touchpad, mouse or touchscreen these days. What are some of the lesser known keyboard shortcuts you can use with Windows?

Over the last month, Microsoft's done an amazing job of convincing people to never install Windows again, after a data-deleting Windows 10 update made it through QA. Now, relenting to pressure from enterprise users, Microsoft has begun work on a "status dashboard" for updates to prevent IT admins from being caught flat-footed in the future.

While Dark Mode seems to be all the rage with software makers, Microsoft is bucking the trend. Although there is a dark mode option in Windows 10 (Edge and Microsoft Office have their own dar modes if you don't want to go dark system-wide), they are offering a new Light Mode in the latest test build of Windows 10.

Researchers at the Netherland’s Radboud University have uncovered serious security issues with several solid-state drives that use hardware-based encryption—vulnerabilities. This could allow an attacker to access a drive’s “encrypted” contents without needing the password that decrypts it.