An October surprise — that’s how many are interpreting Microsoft’s 11th-hour revelation that it will be providing a virtualized copy of Windows XP as a free compatibility add-on to Windows 7 ...

In context: Piracy has been a part of Windows history from the very beginning. Microsoft began taking the issue seriously with Windows XP, and Dave Plummer has now revealed that the first unauthorized ...

Microsoft, like any company, has its detractors. Everyone from computer scientists to people who just hate Windows 10 have gone after it at some point. But an old, ugly rumor has just come back, with ...

What was Microsoft’s best Windows operating system of all time? If you’re like us, you have…opinions. Even if you’re not the type to parse through all of the little details that separated Windows 98 ...

Thirty years ago today, Microsoft joined a competitive race with the introduction of Windows 1.0. Apple had already introduced its Mac OS and Microsoft was a year and a half late in shipping their ...

Reader's advisory: Wired News has been unable to confirm some sources for a number of stories written by this author. If you have any information about sources cited in this article, please send an ...

Reader Steve P. sends in this question: “I’m running Windows 2000 and want to upgrade my system BIOS. The instructions say to create a bootable disk with the format a:/s command. However, the /s doesn ...

Until Windows Me removed it Windows was just a shell of DOS. Windows XP onwards Windows was Windows NT with Windows 9.x compatibility added in. There is stuff for Windows XP days that works on Windows ...

It was 1989, and I was obsessed with the Mac. Apple's portable, 9-inch-screen computer was an exciting graphical leap, and I wanted to use it for everything. But I wasn't using it. Instead, I, like ...

As the forerunner to the graphical user interfaces in Microsoft’s Windows platform, MS-DOS helped set the stage for the company’s dominance in the PC software market. When MS-DOS was released in 1981, ...

On November 20th, 1985, a then not-so-big company called Microsoft announced that Windows was commercially available. Read the full story of the Microsoft operating system below. Windows 1 to 11: The ...