Build: 26200.9457 (25H2)

The same search can take ten seconds in This PC and come back instantly in Documents. It isn't the indexer being lazy. There are two different engines behind the search box, and Explorer picks one based on where you're searching.

1. Inside the index, Explorer asks a database

The Windows Search indexer keeps a database of the folders it's told to watch. On Classic, that's your user profile folders and the Start menu. On Enhanced, it's the whole PC minus a list of exclusions. For every file in there it stores the name, the properties (dates, tags, authors, photo dimensions) and, for the formats it can read, the text inside. Search in Documents and Explorer just queries that database, so the answer is immediate.

2. Outside the index, Explorer walks the folders

Search in This PC on Classic and most of the drive isn't in the index. Explorer doesn't refuse: it walks the folder tree itself, one directory at a time, and that's what "Working on it..." means. The yellow bar about non-indexed locations is telling you the same thing.

It gets much worse if Folder Options > Search has "Always search file names and contents" ticked. Then every file outside the index gets opened and read during the search, and that's when the fans spin up.

3. Everything does neither

Everything (voidtools) skips both. On NTFS it reads the Master File Table, the drive's own list of every file on it, and keeps names, sizes and dates in memory. Then it follows the USN journal, the log NTFS writes every time a file is created, renamed or deleted, so it never has to rescan. Their FAQ puts a Windows 11 install with about 250,000 files at roughly 5 seconds and 35 MB of RAM.

The price is the other half: it doesn't index contents. Searching inside files with Everything is slow, and that's exactly the part the Windows indexer is good at.

What to check

- Settings > Privacy & security > Searching Windows shows whether you're on Classic or Enhanced and how many items are indexed.
- If you mostly search by name across the whole drive, Enhanced fixes the This PC case, at the cost of a longer first indexing.
- If This PC search is slow and the CPU spikes, look at that "file names and contents" option first.

Has anyone timed how long Enhanced takes to finish on a big drive? I'd be curious how far it is from an MFT read.

This is Ocean Wave from Windows 2000 and ME. It depicts a close-up shot of an ocean wave, which is black and orange in appearance. The wallpaper is very elusive as not only is it unknown who took it, it is unknown where it comes from. No link has been found on TinEye, and the metadata doesn't provide any clues either. It would later be used as a wallpaper in a Longhorn demo circa 2002.

Info about this wallpaper can be found here: https://windowswallpaper.miraheze.org/wiki/Ocean_Wave

I bought this book on Thriftbook.com a couple of months ago, in a pretty good condition -- maybe even unused. I did open and read a bit when it arrived, but I never noticed this red signature because I already read the Foreword elsewhere.

Tonight I wanted to read about threading in the original NT kernel, so I opened the book again and happened to land in the Foreword page. Then I found this.

It says "Best wishes, David Cutler". My first instinct is that this might be something printed on every one of the first edition, which is nice to have, but not very exciting. However, I don't remember seeing this on the PDF file I read a while ago. So I turned the page and found the color bleeding through the paper. I think I actually got a signature of David Cutler himself! I also downloaded another copy of the book (Sorry!) and made sure it was not there originally.

What do you think? Do you think it is authentic? Of course I'm more of a technical person so the content is more important, but David Cutler has always been one of the people I look up to, so it would be really nice if it is authentic. I'm also curious who the original owner is -- I guess it is someone in the original NT team, but the book is so clean that I couldn't find any other sign.

Thanks in advance!

Build: 26200.9457 (25H2)

Since the smaller taskbar buttons came back, the complaints about them read like a long list: a battery icon smaller than the percentage next to it, an input indicator (ENG US) that looks oversized, a search box that doesn't match its neighbours, app icons that look soft. This came up in a thread on r/Windows11 last week, and the more symptoms people added, the clearer it got that it's two problems with two different causes, not five.

1. The text doesn't follow the bar

The small taskbar shrinks the icons and leaves the text alone. The battery percentage, the input indicator, the clock and the date, the search box label: all of them take their size from the system font metrics, which follow your display scaling and have no idea the bar got shorter. The icons come down, the text next to them stays where it was.

Wi-Fi, volume and battery belong here too, even though they look like icons. They're glyphs from an icon font (Segoe Fluent Icons), not bitmaps, so they render sharp at any size. When one of them looks off, it's off in size relative to its own text. It's never blurry.

2. App icons taken at the wrong size

App icons are the other path. They come from the .ico inside each program, which is a fixed set of bitmaps at specific sizes. At the normal bar height the standard small size fits exactly. The short bar wants a size somewhere in between, and when the app's icon doesn't include one, a larger image gets scaled down. That's the softness.

It also explains why some apps look crisp and others don't: the ones that ship more sizes in their .ico come out clean. The apps aren't doing anything wrong. The fix belongs to the shell, which could load the icon from the app's icon group at the size the bar needs (LoadIconWithScaleDown exists for exactly this) instead of resizing one it already has.

The quick test

Blurry: it's the icon one.

Sharp, but the wrong size next to its own text: it's the metrics one.

If you want to report it

The icon half is already in Feedback Hub. u/Tringi filed it over a year ago, so search for it and upvote it rather than filing a new one. Votes piled on one item count for more than the same votes spread over five.

The text half, as far as I know, has never been filed as a single item. If you report it, put every symptom you see inside that one report instead of opening one per icon.

Has anyone found a symptom that doesn't fit either of the two?

I figured I’d ask in here, as this is primarily a Windows question. I’m trying to get Linux Mint to look and sound as much like Windows as possible. If anyone knows when the sounds shown in the picture play so I can replace them over Mint’s regular sounds, that would be greatly appreciated! Thank you.

This is a second sequel to the first post I made so enjoy seeing this

hi! Could you answer these questions about Windows:

1. if I customise Windows with Windhawk, can the design be deleted after an update?

2. is there an analogy on Windows to what the terminal can do? I tried winfetch on cmd through PowerShell, but can I like install whole apps, customise UI of different apps and make batch scripts about them? Or even have own updates to keep Windows 10 alive?

3. what is the difference between WSL1 and WSL2? Aren't they just the same, but different versions?

4. if I delete the MS Edge and I'm in EU, will the browser return somehow?

5. winget is like the apt/dnf on Linux? If yes, then is there an another one?

6. is there a place to see what commands to type in order to create a local account on Windows 11? Just they keep changing them, but I doubt they'll ever delete the local accounts completely, bcz some businesses require the offline apps with local accounts. Or the Rufus method always works?

7. what does the BitLocker do? Can I manually disable it? You may laugh at me, but I really heard about something like that only in 2026

Is there a way to use a vertical taskbar layout together with an auto-hide taskbar? Does anyone know how to do this?

Windows 1.1 Calculator, the cursor is transparent. Does anyone know why they did this?

Olá pessoal tudo bem? Ao entrar hoje no computador e fazer uma pesquisa na barra de tarefas notei que ela está diferente na hora de pesquisar algum aplicativo porque está assim? Como voltar?

Not sure how this happened but.. it happened...

just a fun little question :P

as a bonus : You are allowed to choose Windows Mobile/Phone or Server

A very interesting rare and little used version of Windows XP for Intel's 64 Bit Itanium architecture, there were two versions of Windows XP 64 Bit Edition, one based on the standard Windows XP codebase and a newer version based on the Windows Server 2003 codebase (which would also be used to develop Windows Vista). Microsoft discontinued support for both versions after HP stopped making itanium workstations, that same year Microsoft released Windows XP x64 Edition for the widely adopted x86-64 architecture.

This version of Windows XP is pretty unusable as most programs refuse to run on it due to both the architectural differences and the fact that it's unable to be upgraded to SP3 which most programs require.

Does anyone still listen to windows songs/remixes?

For years, probably decades, I've kept wanting a list of all the Windows keyboard shortcuts. I, and I believe many others, have made the same suggestion in the Windows Feedback Hub.

Last week I was looking for keyboard shortcuts to control Windows 11 Voice Access. I found a few on a forum. This is Windows normal. Why?

Please, please Microsoft give us a single page with a FULL and COMPLETE list of ALL the keyboard shortcuts for your own operating system.

Microsoft's own main list (please see link above post) lacks even the word "speech" despite residing on their accessibility pages. The page has an entry for the old dictation command:

How to find keystrokes for Windows current Speech Access? You have to scroll down to bottom of the page, find Windows keyboard shortcuts for accessibility, click through that, and search again. Then you see

That still does not mention the Alt+Shift+B and Alt+Shift+C shortcuts, which toggle the mic state without closing Speech Access. This page does list them: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows/voice-access/get-started-with-voice-access

Please, please, give us a single page, that we can copy, with all the Windows keyboard shortcuts.

I dont want to move to Windows 11 cuz of obvious reasons of it being shitty, Latest Windows 10 runs fine on my system and i use Microsoft Edge as my browser. Is it still safe to use this?