90 Fun Facts About Microsoft Windows

Which Friends actor joined Jennifer Aniston in the "cyber sitcom" video guide Microsoft released for Windows 95?

Matthew Perry's sitcom tour was one piece of a launch blitz for which Microsoft also paid millions to use the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' as its theme song.

What is the name of Windows XP's default wallpaper, a photo of green hills under a blue sky in California?

Bliss was shot on film one January, after winter rain had turned an unplanted hillside green; the slope has since been covered in vines, and the view is now barely recognisable.

Which ambient musician composed "The Microsoft Sound", the six-second start-up chime of Windows 95?

Brian Eno later admitted on BBC Radio 4 that he composed the Windows chime on a rival machine: "I wrote it on a Mac."

Which New York landmark was lit up in the colours of the Windows logo to celebrate the Windows 95 launch?

The Empire State Building was one stunt among many: in London, Microsoft paid for the entire 1.5 million print run of The Times and gave the paper away free.

Which Microsoft operating system of October 2012 was the first public release since 1995 to ship without a Start button?

Windows 8 treated the desktop as just another app, and the complaints were loud enough that Windows 8.1 put the Start button back a year later.

Which version number did Microsoft skip entirely when it named its 2015 release of Windows?

Windows 9 was passed over because, in Terry Myerson's words, "it wouldn't be right to call it Windows 9" given how different the product was.

Windows 3.0 bundled Solitaire in 1990 partly to teach nervous new users which mouse technique?

Drag and drop was the lesson, and the teacher was an intern: Wes Cherry wrote Solitaire and gave it a boss key to hide the game on screen, which Microsoft made him remove.

Which puzzle game joined the standard Windows 3.1 install in 1992 after debuting in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack?

Minesweeper hooked its own boss: Bill Gates was so addicted he used to sneak into a colleague's office after work to play.

The two-letter suffix of Windows XP, unveiled under that name in February 2001, was short for which word?

Experience was the marketing gloss; underneath, XP moved home users off the Windows 95 line and onto the NT core built for business, uniting the two families.

Which Microsoft assistant took its name from an AI character in the company's Halo games?

Cortana was only meant to be an internal codename, but leaks and a fan petition persuaded Microsoft to keep the name for the finished assistant.

On which day of the week does Microsoft ship its monthly batch of Windows security fixes, a routine formalised in 2003?

Patch Tuesday falls on the second Tuesday of each month and was introduced in October 2003 to cut the cost of patching after the Blaster worm.

What did Windows 95 call its holding area for deleted files, a feature Apple's Macintosh had long known as the Trash?

The Recycle Bin arrived just after Apple's long lawsuit over lookalike desktops, which Apple lost on almost every point except a ruling that a rival's trash-can icon copied its own.

Which browser debuted as the new default in Windows 10 in 2015, pushing Internet Explorer into maintenance mode?

Microsoft Edge was later torn down and rebuilt on Chromium, the engine project behind Google's rival Chrome, abandoning Microsoft's own EdgeHTML.

Which US city served as Microsoft's codename for Windows 95 while the 32-bit system was in development?

Chicago ran in parallel with "Cairo", a planned Windows NT-based successor with an object-based file system that never shipped as such.

Windows 11's taskbar moved the Start button and app icons to which position by default?

The centre layout was salvaged from Windows 10X, a version of Windows planned for dual-screen devices that Microsoft cancelled before it ever shipped.

Windows 10's revived Start menu bolted which feature of the previous version's Start screen onto the classic list of programs?

Live tiles sat beside a Windows 7-style list as a compromise first shown in 2014, then vanished altogether when Windows 11 replaced them with a grid of plain icons.

What did the 2012 redesign of the blue screen of death add above its newly simplified error message?

A sad-face emoticon was joined in 2016 by a QR code linking to a troubleshooting page, but the blue itself was on borrowed time: in 2025 Microsoft announced the crash screen would turn black.

Which browser lost the 1995–2001 "first browser war" once Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows?

Netscape Navigator had dominated the mid-1990s, but free bundling let Internet Explorer reach a peak of about 95% usage share by 2003.

What did the "Me" in Windows Me, the last release built on the Windows 9x line, officially stand for?

Millennium Edition was dubbed the 'Mistake Edition' by PC World, which ranked it fourth among the worst tech products of all time after users struggled to install it, run it or even shut it down.

Which Windows 7 feature maximises a window dragged to the top of the screen, or docks it to half when dragged sideways?

Aero Snap came from Microsoft's finding that lining up two windows side by side took a fiddly run of clicks, moves and resizing; Snap cut that to one easy motion per window.

Which ability, missing from Windows 1.0, did application windows gain when Windows 2.0 arrived in 1987?

Overlap one another: Windows 1.0 could only tile its windows side by side, and the overlapping look of 2.0 prompted Apple's 1988 copyright lawsuit, which Microsoft won.

Plugging which device into a Windows 98 demo PC at COMDEX 1998 crashed it to a blue screen before Bill Gates?

A scanner was meant to show off Plug and Play; Gates's reply to the crowd's applause was "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet."

Which Windows Vista security feature dims the whole screen and asks permission before an app may alter core settings?

User Account Control nagged by design: a Microsoft manager admitted it was built to 'annoy users' so that software makers would write safer programs, and Windows 7 toned the prompts down.

What was the name of Windows XP's default blue-and-green visual theme, which some users dismissed as childish?

Luna's bright colours got Windows XP mocked at launch as a 'Fisher-Price' or 'Teletubby' system, years before it became the Windows that users refused to give up.

Internet Explorer 1.0 went on sale in 1995 as part of which add-on pack, sold separately from Windows 95 itself?

Microsoft Plus! carried a browser built on code licensed from Spyglass; the two fell out over how much Microsoft owed in royalties, and Microsoft paid $8 million in 1997 to settle.

Which band's music video was included among the "Fun Stuff" on the Windows 95 CD-ROM?

Weezer were not told that 'Buddy Holly' would be on the disc: their label made the deal with Microsoft without them, and drummer Pat Wilson recalled being furious about it.

Which board game shipped with Windows 1.0 in 1985 after plans for Chess and a puzzle title were scrapped?

Reversi arrived in a Windows that was itself overdue: Microsoft announced it in 1983, then took two more years of repeated delays to get it out of the door.

Which scalable font format, developed by Apple, did Windows 3.1 adopt in 1992 as a rival to Adobe Type Manager?

TrueType reached Windows through a swap: Apple, wary of paying Adobe royalties, licensed it to Microsoft in return for a PostScript clone called TrueImage, which Apple never put in a product.

Which roll-back feature made its debut in Windows Me?

System Restore shipped with a date bug: checkpoints created after September 8, 2001 would not restore the computer until Microsoft issued a fix.

Windows 11 ran Android apps through a partnership with which company's app store, starting in the United States in 2022?

Amazon's Appstore reached US users in February 2022, but the experiment was short-lived: Microsoft announced two years later that Android apps on Windows would lose support on 5 March 2025.

Which Microsoft leader wrote the text of Windows 3.1's Ctrl+Alt+Del screen, often mistaken for a crash screen?

Steve Ballmer's screen was a rudimentary task manager, not a crash, as Raymond Chen pointed out when the press credited him with writing the blue screen of death.

Which pinball table, built by Cinematronics, came free with Windows from NT 4.0 through XP?

Space Cadet was dropped from an early 64-bit Windows, engineer Raymond Chen recalled, because the ball passed straight through objects and nobody could find the fault in time.

Windows RT, sold only preloaded on tablets such as the first Surface, was built for which processor architecture?

ARM's power efficiency promised thinner devices and longer battery life, but Windows RT could not run ordinary desktop programs, a limit that even Microsoft's own store staff sometimes explained wrongly.

Which Microsoft console's November 2015 system update swapped its original core for one built on Windows 10?

Xbox One gained more than a new engine: the same update let it play Xbox 360 games, and Polygon wrote that Xbox chief Phil Spencer was 'obliterating the distinction between Xbox and PC'.

Which icon-grid shell fronted Windows 3.x until the Start menu, desktop and taskbar took over in 1995?

Program Manager left a fossil behind: moricons.dll, a 12 KB file of spare icons for old DOS programs, was still shipping inside Windows 11 in 2025.

Which card game, obscure until Windows 95 bundled it, had all but one of its 32,000 numbered deals proven winnable?

FreeCell deal #11982 was the lone holdout after more than 100 online volunteers, recruited in 1994 for the Internet FreeCell Project, shared out all 32,000 deals and tried to solve each one.

Which engineer, hired away from Digital Equipment Corporation in 1988, led the team that built Windows NT?

Dave Cutler is often said to have picked WNT by moving each letter of VMS, his old DEC system, one step on, but colleagues say NT came from N10, the chip it was first written for.

Windows 10 was developed under which codename, borrowed from a planet in Microsoft's Halo games?

Threshold was first reported as more than one release: Mary Jo Foley, who broke the story in 2013, described a wave of updates meant to pull Windows on PCs, phones and the Xbox closer together.

Which progressive-rock guitarist recorded the Windows Vista start-up sound at Microsoft's own studios?

Robert Fripp, the founder of King Crimson, supplied the melody for a four-second clip built on four chords, one for each colour of the Windows flag.

Which graphic designer turned the waving Windows flag into a flat, four-pane window for the 2012 logo redesign?

Paula Scher of Pentagram began the job with one question for Microsoft, 'Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?', and drew the logo back into a plain window in a single colour.

Windows calls its main hard drive C: because the letters A and B were reserved for which older devices?

Floppy drives took A: and B: on early PCs, which often had two of them and no hard disk at all. The first hard disk was given C: and has kept it ever since.

Which band's 1981 single "Start Me Up" fronted the Windows 95 launch adverts, a nod to the new Start button?

The Rolling Stones soundtracked a launch that spared no expense: in Toronto, a 300-foot Windows 95 banner was hung down the side of the CN Tower.

Windows 10's 2016 to 2018 updates were codenamed Redstone, after a material in which Microsoft-owned video game?

Minecraft players wire redstone into circuits and machines. Microsoft had bought the game's Swedish maker, Mojang, in 2014, only months before the codename surfaced.

Which Windows drawing program, bundled since 1985, was marked for removal in 2017 but kept after users protested?

Paint began as a licensed adaptation of ZSoft's PC Paintbrush for the very first Windows. In the end Microsoft retired its intended 3D replacement instead.

Which playful typeface was drawn for the cartoon speech bubbles of Microsoft Bob but finished too late to be used?

Comic Sans copied the lettering of the comic books in designer Vincent Connare's office, among them Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

Which Windows utility, opened directly with Ctrl+Shift+Esc, lists running apps and lets users end a frozen program?

Task Manager started as a side project that developer Dave Plummer wrote at home, then donated to Microsoft in 1995 so it could ship with Windows.

Which phone maker's handset business did Microsoft buy in 2014, taking over the Lumia range of Windows Phones?

Nokia sold its phone division in a deal worth over $7 billion. Just over a year later Microsoft wrote off about $7.6 billion on the purchase and cut thousands of jobs.

Which company's Palo Alto lab pioneered the mouse-driven interface that Bill Gates says influenced Windows?

Xerox built its Alto computer in 1973 with windows, icons and a mouse, a decade before such machines reached the mass market, yet never made it a hit product.

Which Windows accessibility feature, turned on by tapping Shift five times, lets shortcuts be typed one key at a time?

Sticky Keys holds a modifier such as Ctrl or Alt until the next key is pressed, for people who cannot press two keys at once.

Which AI assistant did Microsoft build into the Windows 11 taskbar in 2023, later giving it a dedicated keyboard key?

Copilot got its own key on new PC keyboards in 2024, taking the place of the menu key. It was billed as the biggest change to the Windows keyboard in about thirty years.

Which Windows 10 sign-in feature replaces passwords with a fingerprint, an iris scan or face recognition?

Windows Hello needs a camera with infrared illumination before it will recognise a face or an iris, much as the Kinect motion sensor did.

Which Windows 10 feature shows every open window at once and spreads work across several virtual desktops?

Task View was among the very first new features shown for Windows 10, and it also keeps track of windows spread across more than one monitor.

Which Windows 10 feature lets two-in-one devices shift between a mouse-driven desktop and a touch-first tablet layout?

Continuum lets Windows prompt the user, or switch by itself, when a keyboard is plugged into a tablet or a two-in-one is folded back into a laptop.

Which Windows 10 sidebar gathered app notifications and quick toggles, having debuted a year earlier on Windows Phone?

Action Center in this form did not survive into Windows 11, which split it into separate Quick Settings and Notification Center panels.

Which Microsoft programme, launched in 2014, lets volunteers test unfinished builds of its operating system?

Windows Insider had drawn more than seven million testers by September 2015, and Microsoft kept it running after launch to trial every later update.

Which executive, who became Microsoft's chief in 2014, led the company through the launch of Windows 10?

Satya Nadella had run Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group before taking the top job, and he steered the whole company towards cloud computing.

Windows 10's 2016 Anniversary Update added a subsystem for running the command-line tools of which rival system?

Linux support began in beta with a single distribution, Ubuntu, and its Bash shell, which earned the feature the nickname Bash on Windows.

Which locked-down setting on some Windows 10 PCs only allows apps installed through the Microsoft Store?

S mode grew out of a short-lived edition called Windows 10 S, and a leaked Microsoft document confirmed it was meant to compete with ChromeOS.

Which Windows 10 overlay, summoned with the Windows key plus G, records video clips and takes screenshots?

Game Bar gave Windows a built-in recorder for games, so saving a clip of a great moment no longer needed separate capture software.

Which augmented-reality headset did Microsoft unveil at its January 2015 Windows 10 event?

HoloLens first reached developers in March 2016 at a list price of $3,000, and it ran Windows 10 on the headset itself.

Which keyboard shortcut, part of Windows since version 1.0, flips between open apps in order of most recent use?

Alt+Tab sorts windows by how recently they were used, so one quick tap always jumps back to the previous app and a second tap returns.

Which Windows shortcut closes the active window, or offers to shut the PC down when nothing is open?

Alt+F4 closes a whole app, whereas its cousin Ctrl+F4 shuts only the current document or tab and leaves the program running.

Which Windows tool for browsing drives and folders opens with the Windows key plus E and also draws the desktop?

File Explorer does two jobs at once: the same process that shows folders also displays the desktop icons and the taskbar. It arrived with Windows 95.

Which Windows hub of system options, present since version 1.0, was meant to be replaced by the Settings app from 2012?

Control Panel was still part of Windows more than a decade after Settings arrived, because the newer app began with only a small share of its functions.

Which bare-bones Windows text editor began in 1983 as a mouse-driven program written by Richard Brodie?

Notepad was first shown at a computer expo in Atlanta as Multi-Tool Notepad, a stripped-down sibling of the program that became Microsoft Word.

Which keyboard key, a leftover from text-only computing, copies a picture of the whole Windows desktop to the clipboard?

Print Screen once did exactly what its name says, sending whatever text was on the display to the printer port. Today it grabs a screenshot instead.

Which central Windows database of settings, born in Windows 3.1, took over from a sprawl of separate INI text files?

The Registry lets each user of a PC keep separate settings, something the old INI files, often parked in one shared folder, could not manage.

Which file system replaced FAT as the Windows default, adding file permissions, encryption and journaling?

NTFS arrived in 1993 and keeps a journal of pending changes, so a crash or power cut is far less likely to scramble a disk than it was under FAT.

Which stripped-down way of starting Windows loads only essential drivers and was long reached by pressing F8 at boot?

Safe Mode switches off extras such as audio and networking, so that a faulty driver or program can be tracked down and removed.

Which file extension do Windows programs such as Calculator and Setup carry, marking a file that runs when opened?

An .exe file traditionally begins with the two letters MZ, the initials of Mark Zbikowski, an early Microsoft engineer who helped design the format.

Windows 1.0 was not a full operating system but a graphical shell running on top of which Microsoft product?

MS-DOS programs kept working too: Windows 1.0 could launch existing text-based software alongside the new graphical apps written for it.

Under which working title was Windows developed before marketing chief Rowland Hanson persuaded Bill Gates to rename it?

Interface Manager was dropped before launch, and the renamed Windows 1.0 reached the shops in November 1985, two years after it was first shown to the public.

Which operating system did Microsoft build jointly with IBM until the partnership unravelled in 1990?

OS/2 was intended as the successor to the text-based system PCs then ran. After the split IBM carried on with it alone, while Microsoft put its weight behind Windows.

Microsoft's early publicity expanded the "NT" in Windows NT, its 1993 system for workstations, into which two words?

New Technology was the meaning given in a 1991 Microsoft video, though some of the system's engineers trace the letters to N10, the chip it was first written for.

Which Canadian ski resort, popular with Microsoft staff, gave Windows XP its development codename?

Whistler emerged in January 2000, when Microsoft shelved two separate projects, Neptune and Odyssey, in favour of one system for homes and offices alike.

Which codename, taken from a bar at a ski resort, did Windows Vista carry through its long development?

Longhorn was envisioned as a minor follow-up to XP, then swallowed features meant for a later release and became a drawn-out project unprecedented for Microsoft.

Which Microsoft release for businesses was the first built on NT to drop those two letters from its name?

Windows 2000 kept the old letters only in a small tagline on its box and boot screen, and its server editions introduced Active Directory.

Which Windows 95 feature promised to detect and configure newly added hardware automatically?

Plug and Play replaced an era of setting jumpers and switches by hand on every expansion card, though Windows 95 could still fall back to manual settings.

Which Microsoft set of gaming APIs was created in 1995 to persuade wary game developers to write for Windows 95?

DirectX was built under the codename Manhattan Project, because its creators hoped PCs running it would displace Japanese-made games consoles.

Which Sega console of the late 1990s carried a Windows CE logo, letting studios port PC games with Microsoft tools?

Dreamcast developers were offered a custom version of Windows CE to make porting easier, though most ended up preferring Sega's own tools.

Which 2017 ransomware outbreak hit unpatched Windows PCs and forced NHS hospitals in Britain to turn patients away?

WannaCry spread by means of EternalBlue, a Windows exploit developed by the US National Security Agency and leaked online a month before the attack.

Which sitcom star was paid $10 million to appear beside Bill Gates in Microsoft's 2008 adverts for Windows?

Jerry Seinfeld's adverts were pulled from television within weeks, then lived on as longer films on Microsoft's website.

Which built-in Windows security tool grew out of GIANT AntiSpyware, a program made by another software company?

Defender's first public beta, released in January 2005 as Microsoft AntiSpyware, was little more than the acquired program under a new label.

Which bundled Windows program did the European Union order Microsoft to strip out in 2004, creating the "N" editions?

Media Player's removal was ordered alongside a fine of 497 million euros, at the time the largest penalty the EU had ever handed out.

Which designer of the original Macintosh icons later drew the card deck for the Solitaire game in Windows 3.0?

Susan Kare also drew a baroque wallpaper and many of the icons for Windows 3.0, working in just 16 dithered colours.

Which former National Geographic photographer took the green-hill photo used as Windows XP's default wallpaper?

Charles O'Rear shot the hill in January 1996 near the Napa–Sonoma county line, where a vine pest had forced the vineyards to be cleared years before.

Which IBM engineer devised the Ctrl+Alt+Delete key combination that Windows later adopted for its security screen?

David Bradley meant the combination for programmers who needed to restart without powering down, and later joked that Bill Gates was the one who made it famous.

Which household object sometimes appears among the tubes of the classic Windows "Pipes" screensaver, as an in-joke?

A teapot modelled at the University of Utah in 1975 became a standard test object for 3D graphics, and programmers have been hiding it in their work ever since.

Which British newspaper did Microsoft pay to give away free for a day to mark the launch of Windows 95?

The Times printed 1.5 million copies for the stunt, twice its usual daily circulation, and Microsoft footed the entire bill.

Under which fake codename did a 2008 Microsoft ad campaign show Windows Vista to sceptics as if it were brand new?

Mojave's participants had mostly rated Vista poorly beforehand, and were told only after the demonstration which system they had really been shown.