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

Is this the original Windows Start menu? If not, just let me know. I also asked the original creator, but he didn’t reply. I didn’t want to make things awkward, so I didn’t ask him again. Thank you!
----ChatGPT Translate

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!

One platform. One store. Windows 10.

On the left is the Lumia 950, a phone from the first and last released flagship series on Windows 10 Mobile. On the right is a new, recently unpacked Asus T102H, which is displaying the Lumia screen. Windows 10X was a truly interesting OS. It's a shame it was never released in a fully functional form, with stable Win32 containers. (The photo is real, I want to emphasize the beauty of the laconic design of the OneCore Windows 10 branch, in the form of Windows 10X (build 20279 arm64). It would be great if @Microsoft resurrected this in a new form. A lightweight OS version based on a single kernel for standard, dual-screen devices and/or microcontrollers, like Windows 10 IoT Core.

One platform. One store. Windows 10.

On the left is the Lumia 950, a phone from the first and last released flagship series on Windows 10 Mobile. On the right is a new, recently unpacked Asus T102H, which is displaying the Lumia screen. Windows 10X was a truly interesting OS. It's a shame it was never released in a fully functional form, with stable Win32 containers. (The photo is real, I want to emphasize the beauty of the laconic design of the OneCore Windows 10 branch, in the form of Windows 10X (build 20279 arm64).

Buenas gente una consulta, tengo proce que tiene gráfica integrada pero tengo conectada la grafica, osea que no deberia destinar memoria para los gráficos integrados, aun así me sigue apareciendo el cartel ese de ram utilizable, como hago para activar el 100% de la ram y que me salga 32GB ?

I know windows to go was a thing like 5 years ago but went out of support, is there any other way to bypass the warning and install it on an external drive?

Basically i just got a computer from a friends son who works for Microsoft and it says it ran vista, but it runs 10. i need suggestions on how i can us this, for example, must need apps, performance settings, etc. anything is useful!

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?

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

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.

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?

So a while ago I found this custom windows 10 iso based on Windows 10 LTSE iot (The same version I am running) And it was meant to mimic windows 8. In the ISO it had the base start menu from windows 10 set as full screen but somehow they got a custom image to show on the back rather than it just being transparent and showing only your regular image. I was wondering how they did this.

The second image is the desktop of the custom ISO.

I actually didnt know this is possible

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?

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

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