We love PowerToys here at XDA, to the point where we often ask why Microsoft hasn't just added the entire suite into Windows 11 as official tools yet. I'm not exaggerating when I say that using Windows 11 without PowerToys means you're leaving some seriously nice features and tools on the table, and you really ought to give it a go to see what you're missing out on.

Microsoft is testing its much-needed refresh for the Windows 11 Run menu, offering a modern interface that the company says is faster and comes with support for dark mode. The redesign is rolling out now to Windows 11 Insiders in the new Experimental Channel.In a blog post explaining the changes, Microsoft says it decided to drop the Run menu's "Browse" button - a shortcut to user files - after finding "very low usage." Instead, Microsoft added support for a new "~" command, which leads to your user directory.Microsoft says it built the new Run menu using code from Command Palette, a utility available through PowerToys that allows you t …Read the full story at The Verge.

The only C I ever got back in elementary school was in art class. I am, by every measure, terrible at design. Though I like to think that I have a good aesthetic sense, I'm not the greatest at actually bringing what's in my head to life. Over the years, I've really tried to hone my design skills.

I'm not one to glaze Intel CPUs when they have been mired in controversy and subpar generational improvements for the last two years. Many Raptor Lake CPU owners suffered lasting damage to their chips due to an overvoltage bug, which severely damaged confidence in the company's products. Then, the Arrow Lake CPUs disappointed everyone with poor gaming performance and stability issues. So, you'd be forgiven for ignoring Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs, but it's not hyperbole when I say that these chips are about to break new ground for Chipzilla. Nova Lake is not only bringing record-breaking core counts, but also adopting cutting-edge transistor and power delivery technologies. Moreover, it aims to go toe-to-toe with the Ryzen 3D V-Cache that has given AMD its long-standing edge in gaming. And it also plans to kickstart a new era of longer-lasting Intel sockets, rivaling AMD at its own game.

When shopping for a mini PC, there's a lot to look for. CPU is a large part of the equation, and it's one of the things I look at first, but it's not the most important one. A powerful CPU is great, but the latest and greatest from both Intel and AMD don't always have the most PCIe lanes, even if they have the best performance. The biggest differentiator between mini PCs now is expansion space, and one of the things that's bit me hard in the past is ignoring PCIe lane count—the lifeblood of a mini PC's ability to expand.

It took me a while to get into Esoteric Ebb, a new CRPG from developer Christoffer Bodegård. The elevator pitch is basically Disco Elysium, but in the fantasy style of Dungeons & Dragons: You play as a cleric wandering around a small town who's trying to figure out, among other things, the mystery of why a tea shop in town exploded, and all the while, you're having conversations with different character traits in your head. Like Disco Elysium, you see the world from an isometric, top-down perspective. Also like Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb requires a lot of reading, weighing the opinions of your competing voices, and making some bold dice rol …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 126, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I need 10 or 15 skirts from Calvin Klein, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) Happy Ruthless Self-Promotion Week! We're dedicating almost all of this issue to the stuff we've been making recently. Personally, I've been reading about the Tesla diner and Dwarkesh Patel and The Rest Is History, starting a Ted Lasso rewatch to get ready for season 4, watching a robot injure Joanna Stern, continuing down the rabbit hole of gorgeous Japanese stationery, wondering if those cool shoes …Read the full story at The Verge.

I used to think of NotebookLM as one of those Google tools that seemed interesting at first, but not enough to open every morning. I could see the appeal, but I already had my tools for dumping my information and hoping it would help later. Everything changed once I tried using NotebookLM to pick a topic back up after leaving it alone for a few days. Now that I’m using it daily, I don’t have to reopen docs, go through tabs, and try to remember why I saved all this information in the first place. Now NotebookLM doesn’t feel like a demo. It’s the first tool I open every morning.

Microsoft has a user faith crisis on its hands, and it knows it. It spent the better part of 2025 trying to convince the Windows userbase to adopt Copilot across the operating system, including adding the AI assistant to as many Windows applications as it could. Unfortunately for Microsoft, its users weren't so keen on having Copilot in Notepad for whatever reason, and the company has since stopped its AI-fuelled conquest and has begun working on the core OS again.

If you're someone who loves to read, an e-reader is an absolute must. It's way easier on the eyes when compared to a phone or tablet, and the battery life can last for weeks at a time. While I used to use a Kindle, I recently switched over to a Kobo Libra Colour.

I recently built a 10-inch e-paper dashboard for my 3D printer using Seeed Studio's new reTerminal E1003, and I was surprised at how much I loved it for what it was. It sat next to the printer, told me what I needed to know at a glance, and was an otherwise easy-to-ignore piece of tech. I liked it enough that I started thinking about where else an always-on panel like that might earn its keep, and the answer was obvious: a smart home. So, I rebuilt the dashboard from scratch, pointed at Home Assistant instead.

Talking about hard drives in 2026 might be a bit odd, but not everyone uses an all-SSD PC yet. Spinning drives were left behind by SSDs long ago, at least for primary storage, but they remain quite valuable for secondary and NAS storage. In fact, buying HDDs rather than SSDs in this market may be the smarter move, given the sky-high SSD prices. If your PC has one or more hard drives spinning away 24/7, you may be stressing them more than you really need to. Hard drives don't need to be operating at their maximum speed all the time, and can spin down when not in active use. However, Windows doesn't make this setting apparent, hiding it in the power settings, making it practically invisible to most users. Configuring this setting once you know where to look is pretty simple, so let's get into it.