Microsoft’s new ReFS file system was originally introduced on Windows Server 2012. It’s included on Windows 10, where it can only be used as part of the drive-pooling Storage Spaces feature. ReFS will be improved in Windows Server 2016, and a leak from Microsoft indicates that it will be part of a new edition of Windows 10, named Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs.

Private browsing mode doesn’t offer complete privacy, but it does prevent your browser from saving your history, searches, cookies, and other private data between browsing sessions. You can have your browser always start in private browsing mode if you prefer it.

A device’s MAC address is assigned by the manufacturer, but it’s not to hard to change—or “spoof”—those addresses when you need to. Here’s how do do it, and why you might want to.

Windows 10’s Creators Update added a new virtual touchpad that works like the touch keyboard. You can use this touchpad to control the mouse cursor on a device with a touch screen.

Computer monitors are fairly simple, in use if not in actual construction: plug ’em in, turn ’em on, look at your computer stuff on the brighter part. But misleadingly easy as they might seem, there’s a lot of stuff going on inside that blank plastic case…and a lot of stuff that can go wrong.

Microsoft’s Surface Pen, included on most of its first-party Surface machines, is one of the nicer options as far as modern touch screen styluses go. The latter version of the Pen, introduced with the Surface Pro 3 and subsequent models, includes a few customization options that weren’t present before. Here’s how you access them.

Microsoft doesn’t want you to keep installing Windows 7 (or 8) on new PCs. If you try, you’ll see an “Unsupported hardware” message and your PC won’t receive any security updates from Windows Update. Other hardware features may not work properly, either.

To the surprise of many, Windows has remained dominant as personal computers shift more and more to tablets and touch screen interfaces. And to the consternation of Microsoft, Google’s Chrome browser remains the dominant software on desktops (including laptops and Windows-powered tablets), despite some touch screen tools that are a bit lacking versus Chrome on Android phones and tablets.

Windows is designed to be almost universal in its support of PC accessories, particularly USB-based add-ons like external hard drives, flash drives, game controllers, webcams, microphones, and other peripherals. Most things work out-of-the-box thanks to pre-loaded drivers, but occasionally a gadget will still give you the dreaded “USB device not recognized” error.

Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update, codenamed Redstone 3, will be released in September 2017. Here are all the new features you’ll see in the latest version of Windows.

There’s more than one Xbox One. You can already buy the Xbox One S, a redesigned Xbox One with a few upgrades. Microsoft is also working on a major upgrade named the Xbox One X, which will arrive on November 7 and was codenamed “Project Scorpio”.

You turn on your computer one day and Windows refuses to boot—what do you do? “Windows won’t boot” is a common symptom with a variety of causes, so you’ll need to perform some troubleshooting.

Screenshots are great, but sometimes you need to create a video recording to really get your point across. You can record your computer’s desktop, your smartphone’s screen, or your tablet’s display.

Windows 10’s Creators Update added support for Dolby Atmos positional sound. This includes two things: Support for Dolby Atmos hardware and virtual Dolby Atmos sound that works in any pair of headphones.

Microsoft is building an ecosystem of “Mixed Reality” headsets from various PC manufacturers. They’ll be much less expensive than the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and will require much less powerful PCs. Mixed Reality features are here today in the Creators Update, but the headsets themselves will be available for purchase sometime in the 2017 holiday season.

Apple claims their live streams are only available in Safari on macOS and iOS. But you don’t have to miss the new iPhone launch if you’re using a Windows PC or Android device. Apple doesn’t make it obvious how to do this, but you can watch its live events on any operating system.

You are no doubt reading this article because you’ve stumbled across the Console Window Host (conhost.exe) process in Task Manager and are wondering what it is. We’ve got the answer for you.

Microsoft is working on a version of Windows 10 that will run on ARM hardware. Unlike Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 that powered the original Surface and Surface 2, this will be a full version of Windows 10 with an emulation layer that allows it to run traditional desktop apps from outside the Windows Store.

With Microsoft’s new Fluent Design, announced alongside the Fall Creators Update, Windows 10 is gaining more and more transparency—or, technically, translucency. If you don’t like this effect, you can flip a switch to disable transparency in all parts of Windows 10, from the taskbar and Start menu to apps like Calculator and People.

You can now hide pages in Windows 10’s Settings app, just as you can hide icons in the Control Panel window. The pages won’t just be hidden in the app itself—there will be no way for users to access the hidden pages. Support for hiding Settings pages was added in Windows 10’s Creators Update.

Windows 10 S is “the soul of today’s Windows”, according to Microsoft. It’s a new version of Windows intended for school PCs, but available to everyone. It’s designed to be more simple and streamlined, so it only runs applications from the Windows Store—unless you spend another $50 to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.

Duplicate file finders scan your hard drive for unnecessary duplicated files and help you remove them, freeing up space. Here are our picks for the best duplicate file finders, whether you’re looking for something easy to use, an application you may already have installed, or a powerful tool with the most advanced filters.

The Storage Spaces feature built into Windows allows you to combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive. It can mirror data across multiple drives for redundancy, or combine multiple physical drives into a single pool of storage. Storage Spaces is similar to RAID or LVM on Linux.

Annoying as they might be, it’s important to keep Windows updated…just ask the victims of the latest ransomware attack. If you haven’t used your PC for a while or you just want to make sure you’re updated with the latest software, it’s easy to manually check and make sure in Windows.

Windows plays a startup sound and other sound effects regularly, and they can get obnoxious. They’re especially annoying on Windows 7, where Windows plays a click sound every time you switch folders in Windows Explorer. You can disable them entirely—or even set custom sound effects, if you prefer.