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Last year, a puzzling screenshot revealed the first design clues of the upcoming next-generation Windows "12." It pictured a radical approach to the traditional UI elements, such as the taskbar, notification area, search bar, and more. Although that screenshot is nothing but a mockup, it sparked a heated discussion among users. While people argue whether turning Windows "12" into a macOS-like alternative is good, this concept video envisions a variant to please all.

It's Saturday, which means that it's time yet again to recap all the important news of the past few days from the world of Microsoft. This was an absolutely jampacked news week as you'll soon find out with items about Windows security, Microsoft Edge, and the end of Windows 10. Find out more in our latest digest covering April 23 - April 28!

Developers and enthusiasts who want to test Windows 11 and its dev tools can download the latest Windows 11 Development Environment (WDE) release, also known as "free Windows 11 virtual machines from Microsoft," from the official website. Microsoft has bumped its virtual machines to version 2304 and set the expiry date to July 18, 2023.

After almost eight years of active development and support, Microsoft is ready to announce the last Windows 10 version. What was initially supposed to be "the last version of Windows," came to Windows 11 (and the upcoming Windows "12"), and lots of other changes in Microsoft's flagship product. And now Microsoft is announcing the final Windows 10 release. According to a post on the Tech Community forums, 22H2 is the last Windows 10 version, with the end of support scheduled for October 14, 2025.

Pete Batard has released a significant update to its popular tool Rufus, an app many use to create bootable USB drives and bypass Windows 11's hardware requirements and software annoyances. Version 4.0 is now available for download from the official website and GitHub with fixes, improvements, and other notable under-the-hood changes.

Mozilla has released another bug-fixing update to address a bunch of nasty bugs plaguing users on different platforms. Version 112.0.2 is now available for download with a fix for high memory usage, broken notifications on Windows 8, and invisible text on Linux.

Rufus and Ventoy are two of the most popular software utilities used to create bootable USB media. In case you aren't aware, another similar app called WinToUSB (also called Windows To USB) received an update recently and it now supports the Windows 11 Lite ISO. Windows 11 Lite is not an official Microsoft release though, and it instead is meant to refer to the recently released Tiny11 DVD release dubbed live11. Aside from that, the latest WinToUSB 7.9 has also received other minor undisclosed bug fixes.

Mozilla confirmed a rare memory leak in recent versions of its open source web browser Firefox that occurs under rare conditions.
 
The organization released Firefox 112.0.1 a few days ago, the latest stable version of the web browser. The update addressed a issue related to cookies in Firefox. Affected Firefox versions would set the last used date of cookies thousands of years in the future, which had the result that users were logged out of web services.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania' tops the chart, followed by 'Ghosted'. ‘Avatar: The Way of Water' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

It's the end of yet another week and it's time again to recap all the important events that transpired in the Microsoft-verse during the past few days. This time, we have news items related to Windows features like Taskbar and LAPS, rumors about Samsung ditching Google as the default search engine, and lots of app updates. Without further ado, let's dive into the latest weekly digest covering April 16 - April 21!

When Windows 10 was released, Microsoft shipped it with a modern home screen background. With Windows 11, the company took it to a level further with multiple abstract wallpapers.
 
Microsoft also packed 6 themes in the operating system, including some really cool dark themes.
Where are the desktop wallpapers located in Windows 11?

Ant Download Manager & Video Downloader
 
Ant Download Manager (AntDM) is a tool that allows you to repeatedly increase the speed of file downloads due to multiple download streams, resume, schedule downloads, capture and download audio and video streams.

Automatically processes download errors, recovers from temporary network errors, reconnects in case of server response delays, has the ability to resume interrupted downloads due to loss of connection, network problems, computer shutdown, or unexpected power outages.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Avatar: The Way of Water' tops the chart, followed by 'Shazam! Fury of the Gods'. ‘65' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This year is going by fast, we are already in the middle of April. With the end of yet another week comes a new edition of Microsoft Weekly where we discuss everything important that happened in the world of Microsoft within the past few days. This time around, we have news items related to a few Windows bugs, upcoming features for the OS, and GPT integrations.

NTDEV, the developer behind the popular tiny10 and tiny11 projects, has released a new creation called live11. It is the first bootable Windows 11 live DVD designed to run entirely on RAM and fit on a 4GB virtual hard drive (VHD).
 
live11 works like any other Windows live CD (or DVD/USB). You can burn the ISO to a USB or optical drive (if you want to do it the old way) and boot the OS without installing it on your HDD or SSD. After that, you get a fully working Windows 11 suitable for troubleshooting, data recovery, virus removal, or other tasks.

Just yesterday, we told you that Winamp was preparing to launch a new audio player, called Winamp. The new version of Winamp is now available and most existing Winamp users may be surprised to learn that it is a web-based application.
 
Head over to Winamp, create an account, and start using the service on the Web. It is quite the leap from a desktop audio player that has attracted a large fan base thanks to its features and customization options, to a web-based player.

Microsoft has released a patch update for PowerToys 0.69, which was released a week ago along with a couple of new PowerToys. However, some bugs were discovered in that release and therefore a patch was deemed important enough to release an update. it contains all of the features present in the previous release as well as a number of bug fixes that are listed below.
 
This is a patch release to fix issues in v69.0 to fix some bugs we deemed important for stability based on incoming rates. See v0.69.0 for full release notes.

Microsoft is about to change one of the oldest methods of taking screenshots in its operating system. The upcoming Windows 11 feature update will change what happens when you press the Print Screen key, the OG of taking screenshots or sending your monitor's content to the clipboard (before GUI-based systems, hitting the Print Screen key would copy what is on your monitor and send to the standard printing port).

Windows gives you the ability to create folders to keep your files nice and organized. By default, Windows comes with some pre-made folders to organize your content: documents, pictures, videos, desktop, among others.
 
But did you know you can create your own folders to help keep your files organized?

It is safe to say that few people like the "Recommended" section on Windows 11's Start menu. And the main problem is not the section itself but rather Microsoft's unwillingness to let users disable it without resorting to third-party apps or heavy tweaking. This article will show how to remove the "Recommended" section in Windows 11 and get more space for apps and shortcuts.

The major Winamp Player revamp, which has been in works for a while, is finally almost here. The release date for the the new app is two days away from now as it is launching on April 13. The announcement was made by the Winamp team via its official Twitter handle:

Windows 11 is a controversial operating system that sparked a lot of heat among users due to questionable changes and weird feature regressions. As it usually goes, third-party developers do the lord's work and fix what Microsoft cannot or does not want to fix. Not so long ago, we published an article about 11 great apps for Windows 11 users. Now we want to focus on applications that aim at improving or replacing existing features with much better alternatives. All ten apps from this article are available in the Microsoft Store at no cost or with free trials.

Microsoft has released the Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 11 22H2 (KB5025239) and 21H2 (KB5025224). Both of the updates come with a number of improvements and roll in updates that were pushed out as part of separate updates at the end of March. Below, you’ll see the release notes for both versions of Windows 11, with the new features from the end of March updates included too.

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which means it's Patch Tuesday time again. As such, today Microsoft is rolling out the monthly security update (also called "B release") for April 2023 on Windows Server 20H2, and Windows 10 for the latest versions, 21H1, 21H2, and 22H2. The new updates are being distributed under KB5025221, bumping up the builds to 19042.2846, 19044.2846, and 19045.2846.