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Microsoft's Windows 11 Insider Beta Preview Build 26320.9876 introduces a setting letting users permanently turn off the pop-up prompts for Sticky Keys and Filter Keys. Previously, pressing Shift repeatedly or holding it down would trigger an activation prompt for these accessibility features, often interrupting gaming or other tasks for users who don't need them.
A Microsoft employee recounts sneaking into the empty upper level of San Francisco's Civic Auditorium before the Windows 2000 launch event, watching staff rehearse the show. The rehearsal featured a giant mock-laptop stage prop, video montages, and an announcement revealing actor Patrick Stewart as the event's celebrity host.
Microsoft's Windows XP went on sale at retailers 25 years ago today, backed by a $500 million marketing campaign. The launch event in New York featured Bill Gates and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with a free Sting concert in Bryant Park, though festivities were toned down following the September 11 attacks. The OS marked Microsoft's shift away from the MS-DOS-based Windows line toward the more stable Windows NT core for consumers.
Windows 11 26H2 retains a compatibility fix called EmulateHeap that reproduces Windows 95's forgiving memory-management behavior for older applications that depend on it. The feature traces back to a 1990s bug in SimCity, where Microsoft rewrote part of Windows 95's memory allocator to stop the game crashing rather than wait for a patch, and later generalized that fix into EmulateHeap to keep other legacy apps running on newer Windows versions.
Creative director Mike Lacher built and shared a free browser-based parody titled "Triple-A Minesweeper," which wraps the classic Windows game in modern AAA trappings: engine/audio-tech splash screens, cinematic loading sequences, a hand-holding handler character named Nora, and chatty side characters like 'The Don,' 'Clyde,' 'Dr. K,' and 'DJ Dan.' The parody even jokes about future 'loot boxes and brand integrations' supposedly arriving next year, and Nora visibly highlights safe tiles during play.
A hobbyist blogger describes rediscovering a childhood attempt to copy a German point-and-click adventure game, 'Findus bei den Mucklas,' from library CDs, and finding disc images of the series preserved on archive.org. The post walks through extracting data from CloneCD-format .ccd/.cue/.img files, which combine a data track with multiple audio tracks, using the ccd2iso tool to get the game files running again.
Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, an event that drew crowds lining up for the software in a way never repeated for a Microsoft product. The operating system marked a major upgrade over Windows 3.x, introducing true multitasking instead of relying on applications to cooperatively share resources. It also better exploited faster processors, unlike Windows 3.1, which plateaued in performance around 100 MHz regardless of chip.
Microsoft shipped Windows NT 4.0 to retail on August 24, 1996, bringing the Windows 95 graphical interface—including the Start Menu, Taskbar, and Explorer shell—to its business-focused NT platform for the first time. Previous NT versions had used the older Windows 3.x-style interface, so this release aligned the look and feel of Microsoft's consumer and workstation operating systems.