I made a feature-length documentary about Metro UI, the design language behind Windows Phone and Windows 8, and it premieres on YouTube this Friday, November 20, at 1 pm Pacific. Tap "Notify me" if you want a reminder.

Some context: I grew up on Windows, Zune is what got me into tech, and Windows Phone was my first smartphone. I was also one of the people defending Windows 8 at the time. I've wanted to see this story told properly for a long time, so I made it myself.

It runs ~80 minutes and goes from where Metro came from (Encarta, Media Center, and Zune) through the warehouse where a small team designed Windows Phone 7, the launch, the Nokia years, Windows 8, and what happened to the ideas after. It's built around interviews with Bill Flora, Thamer Abanami, Ben Rudolph, Thomas Markert, and Jez Corden, plus comments by Bill Buxton, and J Allard, Joe Belfiore, and Laura Butler from Pete Bernard and Rob Tiffany's WTF Show.

Two things I'd love this sub's take on:

• Was Windows 8 better than its reputation?

• What would Windows 11 look like today if Metro had stuck?

Thanks to the mods for the OK. I made it, it's on my own channel, and it's independent, with no ties to Microsoft. I'll be in the premiere chat on Friday and in the comments here.

When I was younger, I used to go to my mother’s office, they let me play on a computer that They did not use oftenly or maybe never, the thing is that I saw a program called winrar asking for a subscription, i was really curious about it, but I never found out

Yes this is real, not real hardware though

I was thinking does windows forces app to close when alt+f4, or does the app it by itself? Or does windows ask for close?

I had this pc lying around in my storage room idk if it works or not. What should I do with this?? What OS should I install

Also asked in r/ w7, xp, vista

I have an idea for a small but useful feature that could be implemented as an open-source project or a Windhawk mod.

The idea is simple: when hovering over an app's taskbar icon, its window preview would appear alongside a volume slider.

• Click the speaker icon to mute or unmute the app.

• Hover over the slider and use the mouse wheel to adjust its volume.

• Control each application's volume independently.

I've attached a Photoshop mockup to demonstrate how it could look.

I think this would be a convenient quality-of-life improvement. What do you think?

That's very old feature. Isn't it?

This has been driving me crazy because I KNOW I remember seeing this, but I cannot find a single trace of it online.

Back in the Windows Millennium Edition (Windows ME) days, I remember something that would appear on the desktop. It was like a little animated scene or video, possibly involving an elevator.

A real-looking man, dressed like an office worker (possibly wearing a suit), would come out of an elevator, look around, and then disappear again.

I remember it happening while using the computer, almost like a little desktop animation that appeared randomly. It wasn't a game, as far as I can remember.

I've searched Google, YouTube, and various Windows ME nostalgia pages, but I cannot find anything remotely resembling it.

What do you think? Will Windows 10 security extensions be quietly pushed beyond Oct 2027, as they were this year?

I'm one such hold out. More laziness than determination. I like to do fresh installs when changing OSs.

I did love this concept design and I want to do something like that for my PC. How can I do that?

I've always wondered about this, on both Windows and Mac.

Note: I don't have admin access for my work computer so I can't do any Sudo codes that would enable this if it's possible that way. Mostly curious why it's standard to just be blank here.

THIS IS NOT A VM

PC= HP Elitedesk 800 g1 Mini Dekstop PC, 2gb DDR3 for Better compatibility, 180gb SSD, Intel core i5 4590t "Haswell" (4th gen), HD graphics 4600.

I used Windows 9x quickinstall, a project on GitHub that let you install Windows 98 and Windows ME on modern hardware thanks to multiple patches. I flashed the USB.img on a USB drive and installed W ME by selecting It on this PC. In the setup I formatted the SSD With the disk manager by clicking on "Disk" , made It bootable and then I clicked on "install". I applied these patches: creigfix CPU patch, driverEX patch and RAM patch (for systems that use more than 1-2gb of RAM i think)In the following menu. I left the default parches Active. Then I booted into Windows ME successfully, but the mouse was not working. So in system manager I associated to the mouse the HID mouse driver, that can be installed with the keyboard only using TAB and other keys, as the keyboard was working correctly. Then the system freezed, So I turned The PC off with the Power button and then Turned it on again. And... Guess what? The mouse was finally working correctly! So I turned the PC off again, put its ssd in another PC and trasfered velocity9x on It, as I wasn't able to use a USB drive and when i plugged in One a Blue screen appeared. So I installed also this driver in the "Adapter" section and unlocked 32 bit colors and HD resolution (but I left It on 600p).

According to the GitHub Page: The first step when troubleshooting issues during the hardware detection phase is to disable the skipping of legacy non-PnP detection!

Also I think the only way to get Audio Is via USB. I used i jack to usb adapter and plugged in during the First restart of the system (After the first components detection)

BIOS settings= storage: IDE, USB 3.0: Turned off, Internal speaker: off

Olá, bom dia a todos.

Eu uso um software de registro de ponto bem antigo e preciso trocar de PC. A empresa não dá mais suporte pra este software e por essa razão eu não consigo reinstalar ele do zero. Eu vou trocar de PC e irei usar um software para transferir meu Sistema Operacional pro outro SSD, mas atualmente uso Windows 10. Existe alguma forma de forçar via Windows UPdate a atualização pro 11?

Meu Windows é original mas na época optei por não atualizar pro 11.

Today, a user on r/techsupport asked if the Windows Store version of Lively Wallpaper is legitimate or not. Since GitHub was down, I couldn't check if it's official, but having seen the many scam forks of LibreOffice that are on the store, I initially responded saying that it's the same kind of scam. Later, u/MON5TERMATT replied to me saying that it has been sold to another company that did, in fact, add a subscription. By that point, GitHub was back up, and the situation is much worse than it seemed. The new company hasn't updated the source code on the GitHub repo (which is still linked on the website) since they acquired the project, but they have updated the binaries on the Windows Store, adding in-app purchases. This is extremely fishy. There is no good reason to do this, unless you want to mislead people to think that the project is still open-source. Personally, I would immediately uninstall this app from my devices.

I've noticed that whenever I need the same file in multiple folders on my PC, I end up having to copy and paste it into each folder individually.

For example, if I want a document in my work folder, a project folder and an archive folder, I have to repeat the whole process for each one.

Is there an easier way of doing this that I'm missing, or does anyone else find this a bit tedious?

Just curious how other people deal with it.

So reportedly, windows overhauled their directx and it made the raytracing performance apparently significantly better. My question is, to what extent will raytracing probably improve in actual games and how long before the 3rd party gaming engines adapt to the new direct x?

SuperCopier is 23 years old, the perfect version, the 2.2 Beta is 18 years old, this software is a ppure perfection, and Windows never got even close to a software like that to manage the file copies. When you use it, you absolutely can't go back to the Windows copy manager.

I use it since 2010 and I can't imagine a world without it.

Do you know it ? Do you use it ? Since when ?

Not necessarily something important.

I mean little things like startup sounds, animated assistants, custom themes, Media Player skins, desktop gadgets, weird icons or even the sounds Windows made when you did something.

Modern Windows does a lot more, but some of those tiny details made the OS feel strangely memorable.

What small Windows feature do you still remember for no real reason?

I wanna be able to make some sort of UI kit with windows longhorn assets and i am wondering if anybody managed to extract a lot of assets from Windows Longhorn builds, mainly for the Plex theme from builds 4011 or eariler, If there is someone that did do that then please let me know

Windows 11 23H2 with no optimizations, installed with using DISM and the installation took around 3 hours