To get to the emergency restart option, you need to press the familiar Ctrl+Alt+Del keyboard shortcut, known by pretty much everyone who's ever had to fix a Windows PC at some point. This shortcut is designed to work even if your computer is otherwise unresponsive, and gives you access to options for locking your PC, signing out of your account, and bringing up the Task Manager.
Down in the lower right corner, there's also a power button: Click this and you get the standard Sleep, Shut down, and Restart options. However, if you hold down Ctrl and then click the power button, that takes you to the emergency restart page, together with the warning about losing any unsaved data. Click OK, and your computer will reboot itself almost instantly.
If you can get to the screen after Ctrl+Alt+Del, then you'll want to try the normal restart option first—you'll only need to go down the holding Ctrl route if that doesn't work. Presumably, that will be because there's a program or a part of the Windows code that isn't shutting down properly to clear the way for a restart.
Independent researchers have discovered, or should we say rediscovered, a major security vulnerability in Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Previously known as Terminal Services, RDP appears to be designed to always validate a previously used password for remote connections to a Windows machine, even when that password has been revoked by a system administrator or compromised in a security breach. //
The flaw violates universally acknowledged operational security (opsec) practices – and then some. When a password is changed, it should no longer provide access to a remote system. "People trust that changing their password will cut off unauthorized access," Wade said. //
According to Microsoft, the behavior is a design decision meant to "ensure that at least one user account always has the ability to log in no matter how long a system has been offline."
The company had already been warned about this backdoor by other researchers in August 2023, making the new analysis ineligible for a bounty award. Redmond engineers reportedly attempted to modify the code to eliminate the backdoor but abandoned the effort, as the changes could break compatibility with a Windows feature that many applications still rely on. //
brucek brucekMay 2, 2025, 3:30 PM
And on the flip side, RDP doesn't recognize a valid Microsoft Account password that is not cached on the local machine. This can easily happen on a new install where you've only logged in using methods other than the password (PIN, windows hello, etc.) This is a great way to lose an hour wondering why you can't log in because it's so easy to think the problem must be some other configuration problem with setting up RDP or elsewhere in the system. //
FireStormOOOMay 2, 2025, 9:05 PM
This is cached credentials working the same way it had for decades, and it's been configurable by GPO for almost as long. The administrator chooses how long the server will remember stale credentials if it can't reach a domain controller immediately to check. No, the defaults don't make sense for a server that expects 100% availability of your authentication infrastructure.
The Windows Time service (W32Time) synchronizes the date and time for all computers managed by Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). This article covers the different tools and settings used to manage the Windows Time service.
I just got a note from @Microfix that pointed me to an interesting discussion from Ionut Ilascu at BleepingComputer:
After Microsoft ends support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020, 0Patch platform will continue to ship vulnerability fixes to its agents.
“Each Patch Tuesday we’ll review Microsoft’s security advisories to determine which of the vulnerabilities they have fixed for supported Windows versions might apply to Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 and present a high-enough risk to warrant micropatching”
Micropatches will normally be available to paying customers (Pro – $25/agent/year – and Enterprise license holders). However, Kolsek says that there will be exceptions for high-risk issues that could help slow down a global-level spread, which will be available to non-paying customers, too.
Many of you know that 0Patch has been issuing quick fixes for bad bugs in recent patches. In all cases, I’ve refrained from recommending them, simply because I’m concerned about applying third party patches directly to Windows binaries. That said, to date, they’ve had a very good track record. Whether they can continue that record with patches-on-patches-on-patches remains to be seen, of course.
I fully expect Microsoft to release patches for newly discovered major security flaws, even after January 14. Whether those will step on the 0Patch patches is anybody’s guess.
Definitely something worth considering….
0patch promises to keep delivering security updates to Windows 10 even after Microsoft stops next year. Should you use it? We help you decide. //
It’s a way to (likely) get some extra security on a Windows PC by blocking potential flaws from being exploited. But you’re also trusting an additional vendor’s security software. //
If you’re going to connect a Windows 10 (or Windows 7) PC to a network after it’s no longer receiving patches, you should take some security precautions. Ensure you’re using a browser that’s still getting updates on your operating system and an antivirus that’s still supported. And yes, 0patch could also be an additional layer of security against nasty flaws.
“In the short term, it is a good option to buy time, but eventually, the operating system should be upgraded to a regularly supported version,” said Kron.
I was looking for a simple way to connect two laptops and exchange files without the hassle of endless configuration tweaks, and I stumbled across this amazing app from the PowerToys toolset called Mouse Without Borders. It’s free, and it revolutionizes how you interact with multiple machines. You can control up to four computers using a single mouse and keyboard, effectively turning them into one cohesive workspace. Here’s an easy guide to setting up Mouse Without Borders for connecting two laptops.
download Microsoft PowerToys from Microsoft's GitHub page or from the Microsoft Store and install it on both laptops. Make sure that you install the same version on both devices or update PowerToys on the device that has a lower version to be on the same page.
You also need to connect both laptops to the same network or Wi-Fi hotspot. Then, open PowerToys, look for Mouse Without Borders, and enable the feature on both devices.
The only step left to do is to actually connect the laptops. You will see a Security key field. Take the key from one device and press Connect on the other. Now, enter the security key from the other device and type its name; then, click the Connect button again.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
after you connect two or more (up to 4) devices, you will be able to work with them as they are one device. You will see that you can go with the mouse cursor from one device screen to the other and control both of them with one mouse and keyboard. //
You can simply drag and drop files from one device to the other with your mouse as if it were the same system. The files will be copied into a dedicated Mouse Without Borders folder, and you can use them from there. Moreover, you can share the same clipboard. So, if you copy images or text from one device and press Win + V (to open the clipboard) on the other device, you can simply paste it wherever you want. //
sometimes, it simply disconnects, and you have to refresh the connection. That’s not tragic because the app has a Refresh connections button, and pressing it fixed the problem immediately for me. //
Sea
Ive been testing all options available for windows and windows without borders was the 2nd best I found
I have 2 dual 4k 32in monitors on my desktop and wanted to easily connect my work laptop on 1 screen without a dock.
StarDocks Multiplicity has lots more nice features like KVM, SeamlessDisolay and audio relay. File transfers are a breeze.
You can even setup tailscale for accessing either machine while not on the same network
By 21st century standards, DOS is so tiny and simple that it can run on almost anything. It has a library of thousands of apps, including some very powerful tools. Many were shareware or public domain, and are legal to use for free. Even many formerly commercial apps are legally freeware now. As an example, there's a good assortment at the FreeDOS repo. FOSS was not a big thing in the DOS era – it predates the invention of the GPL, for instance – but DOS versions of some of the big-name FOSS apps, such as Emacs and Vim, do exist. //
There's one purpose where being the digital equivalent of a hermit in a cave in the desert is an advantage. A function for which a total lack of ability to connect to a WLAN and access the Web is a desirable thing: a standalone, non-networked, multimedia-free writing machine.
Early versions of many of the big-name word processors ran on DOS, including the classic WordPerfect and the original Microsoft Word. There are other writers' tools, too, such as Symantec's GrandView outliner. Not all are free to use these days, but a surprising number are. For instance, one of the most popular British apps from the 1980s boom times, Arnor Protext, is now freeware. Even some of the big names, when the last inheritor ceased trading years ago, as we described regarding MicroPro's WordStar last year. //
Microsoft Word 5.5 came out in 1990 and was the first DOS release with a modern CUA user interface – in other words, drop-down menus using standard keystrokes. It still works well and Microsoft released this version as freeware in 1999 as a Year 2000 fix for all previous versions of Word for DOS and OS/2. (Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to Word 6.0 for DOS, which was the final DOS version and is a little more pleasant to use.) //
The result of the holiday season at the end of last year is our USB-DOS project on GitHub. It's a – so far, very small – collection of images of bootable USB keys. There are both FAT16 and FAT32 images. The FAT16 image will fit on a 256 MB key, if you can still find one that tiny; the FAT32 image will fit on a 4 GB key with a lot of room to spare. The first release, version 1.0, contains MS Word, Arnor Protext, an outliner, and the WordPerfect Editor. It boots straight into a graphical menu that lets you run the apps without ever even seeing DOS's command line. The second release, version 1.1, is nearly twice the size, but that's because it adds in the DOS components from Robert Sawyer's WordStar 7 archive, including file conversion utilities, and substantial documentation as PDF files. For that reason, we also added Adobe Reader for DOS.
When you install a fresh, clean copy of Windows – say, if you're switching to the LTSC edition – Ninite is here to kickstart provisioning the new OS.
Ninite is a very simple, but very clever, tool that automates the process of installing a user-configured suite of apps and runtimes onto Windows. Not only will it help you get up and running as quickly and easily as possible, but if you keep the tiny custom installer, you can re-run it later and it will update everything it originally installed to the latest version. //
If you're also missing some important device drivers, Snappy Driver Installer Origin can help you there, as we have described previously. With LTSC there's much less need for O&O AppBuster but O&O ShutUp10++ makes it trivially easy to turn off most Microsoft telemetry.
The folder, typically c:\inetpub, reappeared on Windows systems in April as part of Microsoft's mitigation for CVE-2025-21204, an exploitable elevation-of-privileges flaw within Windows Process Activation. Rather than patching code directly, Redmond simply pre-created the folder to block a symlink attack path. //
For at least one security researcher, in this case Kevin Beaumont, the fix also presented an opportunity to hunt for more vulnerabilities. After poking around, he discovered that the workaround introduced a new flaw of its own, triggered using the mklink command with the /j parameter.
It's a simple enough function. According to Microsoft's documentation, mklink "creates a directory or file symbolic or hard link." And with the /j flag, it creates a directory junction - a type of filesystem redirect.
Beaumont demonstrated this by running: "mklink /j c:\inetpub c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe." This turned the c:\inetpub folder - precreated in Microsoft's April 2025 update to block symlink abuse - into a redirect to a system executable. When Windows Update tried to interact with the folder, it hit the wrong target, errored out, and rolled everything back.
"So you just go without security updates," he noted.
Can't run Windows 11? Don't want to? There are surprisingly legal options
Windows 7 - updated to Jan 2020, Jan 2021, Jan 2022, or Jan 2023
Scheduled future adoptions:
Windows 10 v22H2 - Scheduled for adoption in October 2025
O&O Syspectr is a simple cloud application that lets you remotely connect and manage your IT! As soon as there is an issue with your PC or an update available, O&O Syspectr lets you know or automatically acts!
To register, all you need is an email address. In less than 5 minutes, you are all set-up – it’s that easy! You can manage your PCs remotely from any internet capable device, including cell phones and tablets!
O&O ShutUp10++ means you have full control over which comfort functions under Windows 10 and Windows 11 you wish to use, and you decide when the passing on of your data goes too far. Using a very simple interface, you decide how Windows 10 and Windows 11 should respect your privacy by deciding which unwanted functions should be deactivated.
O&O ShutUp10++ is entirely free and does not have to be installed – it can be simply run directly and immediately on your PC. And it will not install or download retrospectively unwanted or unnecessary software, like so many other programs do these days!
This step-by-step guide will help you get started developing with remote containers by setting up Docker Desktop for Windows with WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux, version 2).
Docker Desktop for Windows provides a development environment for building, shipping, and running dockerized apps. By enabling the WSL 2 based engine, you can run both Linux and Windows containers in Docker Desktop on the same machine.
Unix introduced / as the directory separator sometime around 1970. I don't know why exactly this character was chosen; the ancestor system Multics used >, but the designers of Unix had already used > together with < for redirection in the shell (see Why is the root directory denoted by a / sign?).
MS-DOS 2.0 introduced \ as the directory separator in the early 1980s. The reason / was not used is that MS-DOS 1.0 (which did not support directories at all) was already using / to introduce command-line options. It probably took this usage of / from VMS (which had a more complicated syntax for directories). You can read a more detailed explanation of why that choice was made on Larry Osterman's blog. MS-DOS even briefly had an option to change the option character to - and the directory separator to /, but it didn't stick.
/ it is recognized by most programmer-level APIs (in all versions of DOS and Windows). So you can often, but not always get away with using / as a directory separator under Windows. A notable exception is that you can't use / as a separator after the \\? prefix which (even in Windows 7) is the only way to specify a path using Unicode or containing more than 260 characters.
Some user interface elements support / as a directory separator under Windows, but not all. Some programs just pass filenames through to the underlying API, so they support / and \ indifferently. In the command interpreter (in command.com or cmd), you can use / in many cases, but not always; this is partly dependent on the version of Windows (for example, cd /windows works in XP and 7 but did not in Windows 9x). The Explorer path entry box accepts / (at least from XP up; probably because it also accepts URLs). On the other hand, the standard file open dialog rejects slashes. //
The underlying Windows API can accept either the backslash or slash to separate directory and file components of a path, but the Microsoft convention is to use a backslash, and APIs that return paths put backslash in.
MS-DOS and derived systems use backslash \ for path separator and slash / for command parameters. Unix and a number of other systems used slash / for paths and backslash \ for escaping special characters. And to this day this discrepancy causes countless woes to people working on cross-compilers, cross-platform tools, things that have to take network paths or URLs as well as file paths, and other stuff that you'd never imagine to suffer from this.
Why? What are the origins of this difference? Who's to blame and what's their excuse?
Why does Windows use backslashes for paths and Unix forward slashes?
– phuclv Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 16:55While your question is perfectly reasonable, your phrasing seems to imply that you think the UNIX approach was already a de facto standard and MS-DOS was unique in deviating from it. See, as a counter-example, how the Macintosh OS used
:as its path separator until MacOS X introduced POSIX APIs. This question goes into the history of that decision and answers point to:and.as path separators predating UNIX's use of/.
– ssokolow Commented Aug 1, 2022 at 20:10@ssokolow UNIX was there with its forward slashes long before MacOS and DOS were created.
– SF. CommentedAug 2, 2022 at 8:13@SF. And, as the answer phuclv linked says, DOS got it from CP/M, which got it from VMS. I don't know why VMS chose
\when UNIX chose/seven years before VMS's first release (going by Wikipedia dates), but it wasn't a settled thing. Other designs were using:and.in the mid-60s, half a decade before UNIX decided on/, and UNIX broke from Multics's>because they wanted to use it for shell piping.
– ssokolow Commented Aug 3, 2022 at 5:31Use of UNIX back then wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Almost all of industry and many schools used manufacturer-written and -supplied operating systems, especially from DEC. And within the more well-known CS schools (not that it was called "CS" then) there was also a lot of use of homegrown OSes. So the influence of UNIX wasn't as pronounced as it is today, as well - that took many years to develop.
– davidbak Commented Aug 3, 2022 at 16:51
A:
PC/MS-DOS 1 used the slash (/) as the command line switch indicator (like DEC's RSX11 and DG's RTOS before), so when DOS 2.0 introduced subdirectories, they did need a new one. Backslash () came somewhat natural - at least on US keyboards.
With 2.0 IBM/Microsoft also tried to reverse that decision and introduce a syscall (INT 21h function 3700h and 3701h) and a CONFIG.SYS option (SWITCHAR=) to set a different switch indicator. All manufacturer supplied commands would obey that new char. Set to a hyphen (-) would make the syntax more like Unix.
In fact, in paths, the OS didn't care. All dedicated path names, like in syscalls, can be written with either slash. It's only within the command line scan of each command, that simple slashes get interpreted as switch indicators. The idea was that people could/should migrate to a Unix-like style, but that didn't catch on.
With DOS 3.0 the SWITCHAR= option got removed fom CONFIG.SYS, but the syscalls are still availabe up to today. //
A:
The README.txt file in the MS-DOS 2.0 source code, which was apparently intended to guide OEMs on how to build custom DOS builds for their hardware, indicates that the decision to use backslash was requested by IBM: Microsoft had been originally intending to use forward slash, and the change happened late in the development process. This is probably why the kernel ended up supporting the use of either character -- it was, presumably, too late to change over fully.
The user manual contains some significant errors. Most of these are due to last minute changes to achieve a greater degree of compatibility with IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS). This includes the use of "\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-" as the switch character.
This is true, but very widely misinterpreted – the forward slash as an option character did not come from IBM, IBM's own operating systems (mainframe and minicomputer) never used that syntax. What IBM objected to, was Microsoft's proposal in DOS 2.0 to change it from slash to dash – IBM cared about backward compatibility. But IBM wouldn't have had a problem if Microsoft had made it dash all along, starting with DOS 1.0; IBM didn't care what the syntax was in the initial version, but they didn't want it changed in a subsequent.
– Simon Kissane Commented May 26, 2023 at 1:47
The sound of Windows 95 about to disappoint you added to Library of Congress significant sound archive
Along with Celine Dion and Elton John - plus some good music too
...
And here’s what The Library of Congress had to say about the significance of the Windows boot chime:
The 1990s witnessed the beginning of ubiquitous use of personal computing that is a familiar aspect of the world today. This revolution gained significant momentum in August 1995 with the release by Microsoft of the Windows 95 operating system. This iteration brought more of the computer’s operation under a graphical user interface (GUI), making a home computer more accessible to a non-specialist audience of consumers.
To mark this and other improvements, Microsoft chose to incorporate a brief start-up sound that would play when Windows 95 booted up. The company chose the ambient music creator and prolific music producer Brian Eno to compose this sound. Eno, now a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has also been a pioneer in the creation of ambient and electronica music. Eno delivered 84 sound elements to the Microsoft designers, who ultimately selected a sound almost twice as long as requested but which they felt conveyed the sense of welcome, hopefulness and progress that they envisioned. //
The OS was, however, often unstable. Users hearing the sound now deemed historically significant will likely have memories of hearing it more often than they wanted to – and often at inconvenient moments.
chiasticslide Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
14y
191
Subscriptor++
If seeing is believing, they're just removing the actual script from the installer. But the script is only a 3-liner CMD. Hopefully entering this manually should still work. Or slipstreaming it into the ISO somehow. Or switching to a different OS.
Code:
@echo off
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
shutdown /r /t 0
As you may have gathered, Super Display turns almost any Android device (and Chromebook) into a portable monitor connected to a Windows PC or laptop via a USB cable or Wi-Fi network. //
Super Display consists of a Windows driver and an Android app. You’ll need to install both for it to work. Once that’s complete, the host Windows machine views the Android devices as another monitor. This includes access to the regular array of display settings, including resolution, refresh rate, location of the monitor in the array, and even customization options. Super Display also includes some limited quality adjustments if the connection drags for any reason. //
As mentioned, Super Display is a puzzle of two parts. You’ll first need to install the Windows driver and then the Android app.
- Download the Super Display driver on your Windows PC.
- Once the driver is installed, install the Android app on whichever device you want to connect.
- Once the app is installed on your phone, open it.
- Grab a USB-C (or micro-USB) cable and connect your Android device to your PC.
- Follow the prompts on your Android device’s screen.
Super Display includes a three-day trial, which is more than enough time to determine its usefulness. However, you’ll need to invest $14.99 to unlock it for life.
7+ Taskbar Tweaker allows you to configure various aspects of the Windows taskbar.
Most of the configuration options it provides can’t be tweaked using the taskbar properties or the registry.
The tweaker is designed for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10.