Terms of Use

What this site is

Windows Now is an independent website. It publishes free how-to guides for Windows, macOS and Linux, and it hosts a faithfully restored archive of the original windows-now.com community blog (2003–2010). Reading it costs nothing and needs no account. There is no paywall, no advertising and no third-party tracking — our privacy page sets out exactly what the site does and does not collect.

Information, not a guarantee

Everything here is published for general guidance. We check our guides against primary sources and correct them when they turn out to be wrong — our editorial standards explain how — but no article can account for every edition, hardware combination, policy setting or future update. The content is offered as it is, with no warranty or guarantee that it is complete, current, or right for your particular machine or situation, and it is not professional, legal or commercial advice.

You follow technical steps at your own risk

Many guides here change real settings on real machines: registry keys, Group Policy, partitions, drivers, firmware, file permissions and system files. You decide what to run on your own equipment, and you carry the consequences. Before you start:

• Back up first. Take a current backup of anything you cannot afford to lose, and check that you can actually restore from it, before you change anything.
• Read the whole guide before you begin, including any warnings, so nothing in the middle of the procedure comes as a surprise.
• Check that it applies to you. Edition, version and management policy all matter; a step written for one of them may not exist or may behave differently on another.
• Stop if the screen does not match. If a menu, dialog or command output does not look like the description, do not force it — ask us or go to the vendor’s own documentation.

We cannot recover your data, repair a device or rebuild a configuration for you.

Trademarks and independence

Windows Now is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Microsoft, Apple, or any Linux distribution or vendor. Microsoft, Windows and Windows Server are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation; Apple, Mac and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc.; all other product, project and company names belong to their respective owners. They are used here for identification, description and commentary only.

The archive: copyright and attribution

Posts in the archive were written by the original windows-now.com contributors and remain the copyright of their original authors. They are reproduced here for historical and reference value, recovered from public web archives, with the original author and original publication date credited and a visible banner marking each one as a restored historical post. We do not rewrite archived text, we do not present it as newly authored, and we never attach a living author’s name to words they did not write. The full restoration policy is on the About & restoration page.

If you wrote one of those posts — or you hold the rights to something reproduced here — you can ask for it to be credited differently, amended or taken down, and we will act on it. Author requests are prioritised.

Our own content

The modern guides, the site design and the code behind it are our own work. Quoting a short passage with attribution and a link back is welcome; republishing whole guides is not.

Reporting an error or asking for a change

If something here is wrong, out of date, or should not be on the site, tell us and we will fix it. Write to us using our contact details and include the URL of the page and what is wrong with it. Factual, safety and attribution problems go to the front of the queue.

Links to other sites

We link out to official documentation and other external pages so you can check a step at its source. Those sites are outside our control: their content, their availability and their own terms and privacy practices are theirs, not ours. A link is a pointer for reference, not an endorsement, and not a promise that the page still says what it said when we linked to it.

Changes to this page

This page describes how the site works today. If the way it works changes, this page changes with it, and the version published here is always the current one.