China’s Ministry of State Security has told some state-linked organizations to remove a customized version of Windows 10 from their machines.

VLC developers say a Windows 11 issue involving Microsoft Defender can interfere with the media player’s plugin cache and cause unusually long playback delays.

MSN Weather acts as the native weather app for Windows 11 and all it does it run a bunch of Chromium subprocesses in the background to retrieve the forecast data. This causes it to use 5x more memory than the macOS weather app. And, oh, you also get to enjoy ads!

You can run the deGDID script on your computer to delete cached GDID keys and prevent Microsoft’s servers from minting new ones in the background. The firewall you put up with this script will break certain Microsoft services and features, however, but you can always reverse it.

Microsoft once recommended 32GB of RAM as a future-proof “no worries” upgrade for gamers, but it seems that it wants you to forget that it ever gave that suggestion. That’s because laptop manufacturers, including Microsoft itself, has once again started selling models with a base configuration of 8GB of RAM as companies memory prices skyrocket out of control.

While the company’s minimum OS specifications officially say 4GB, most PC builders know that 16GB is the bare minimum for a smooth experience on Windows 11. However, the memory chip shortage and the resurgence of 8GB laptops are likely forcing Microsoft to optimize Windows.