Celebrating 9 years of WindowsLatest.com

2024-12-08
WL new look

I’m thrilled to announce that Windows Latest turns 9 years old today (December 5). I never imagined that something I started in a small room at my house in a small town in India would grow big enough to be featured by major media companies and help millions of people.

“Time flies” doesn’t quite capture the journey of Windows Latest—at least not for me—because I’ve grown up alongside this publication. I started Windows Latest when I was just a kid who got a chance to try Windows Phone. The site was launched with the simple idea of sharing my thoughts with strangers on the internet.

At that time, I was too young to understand many things. But as Windows Latest and I grew, I learned a lot. Running this publication has changed me as a person and helped me make new friends.

In the beginning, the site was focused entirely on covering all things Windows Phone. Over time, Windows Latest pivoted to PC news, started diving deeper into enterprise topics, and began rigorously testing every app, software, and Windows Update before writing about it.

Over the past nine years, thousands of people have reached out to me via email to thank me over the years. Today, we continue to test everything and share reviews with the world. We’ve also extended our support to help smaller businesses solve their problems.

The best part? Windows Latest is 9 years old and still remains independent—completely under my control.

I have refused every offer to sell this site to corporations. I’ve also turned down opportunities for sponsored posts, invasive ads, and those “content recommendation” ads. Honestly, running Windows Latest independently isn’t easy, but in an era where corporations run almost everything, I believe it’s important for publications to stay independent.

This is why you do not see affiliate content, game content, ads, deals and other posts on the site. It’s not because we’re getting offers.

I’m excited to announce the next era of Windows Latest today. I also promise that Windows Latest will remain independent as long as it remains supported by all of you.

This is Phase One of a three-phase rollout of WL 3.0. For now, you’ll see about 30% of the work we’ve done behind the scenes, with more changes set to roll out in December 2024 and January 2025.

These changes are not live just yet. They’ll begin showing up in the coming hours as we purge them across our CDNs.

Special thanks to my friend Abhishek Kumar, who helped me work on the redesign.

Quick News

WL Quick News

I like covering everything in detail at Windows Latest. We generally skip news that does not add any value or where we are unable to add more details. We also do not want to keep dragging a topic, which is why I’m introducing “Quick News”.

The idea is quite simple.

We’re going to post short news directly on the homepage of Windows Latest.

You can simply slide through the quick/short news. For some topics, we’re going to do dedicated articles, and we’ll link it in the Quick News. We’re also going to archive the Quick News on forums.windowslatest.com, so you can go there and read the quick news, and also share your opinion.

Quick News is still very basic, but I promise the experience will be upgraded, and it will be much more engaging.

Windows Update tracker

We’ve also built the Windows Update tracker from scratch. It will be updated instantly now and have more details about each update. You no longer need to go to any website for that matter. We’ve got everything that truly matters to each one of you.

Windows Update tracker allows you to track updates for both: Windows 11 and Windows 10.

An advanced version of the Windows Update tracker is also in the works. It will ship later this month.

Interact with your preferred AI model

WL model picker

AI is going to kill us someday, which is why we decided to add ChatGPT Chat Bot directly to the site, offering free access to the paid models. Quite a lot of people loved using AI on the website.

Today, we’re updating the experience, allowing you to choose your preferred model for free. It’s completely free, private (we cannot see what you share with the AI), and AI models are not trained on your conversation because we’re using APIs from every AI company.

This is still very early in development and will get really useful in the coming months, as we intend to bring it on par with the full-fledged ChatGPT experience.

We’re also training AI on our content to build something super useful for Windows users.

Push Notifications

If you like, you can now subscribe to Push notifications. We’re using Google Firebase for this experience. You’ll receive alerts for every article we publish on the website.

Also, we’re STILL working on the newsletter. I know it’s a shame that we do not have a newsletter, but like I mentioned, Windows Latest is independent, and I take care of everything, from the server to the daily operations, and I do not get enough time to work on the newsletter.

Our newsletter would be very different and interesting for different audiences. I’ve got some good ideas, and I hope newsletters will be live in a few days.

Donations

Windows Latest doesn’t make a lot of money because I refuse to adapt to the change (affiliate, deals posts, more and more ads). I refuse invasive ads or sponsored posts.

If you like us and want to support independent publications, feel free to donate:

  • Ko-Fi.
  • Patreon.

I’m against the idea of paywall or premium content, so we’ve got nothing to offer to our subscribers for now.

Thank you

Thank you very much for supporting Windows Latest. Thank you for making a dream of a kid from India come true, but we’ve a long way to go, and my original idea/dream is still far away.

I love what I do, and I really hope I can keep running Windows Latest in a new AI-driven world. Windows Latest content is still completely written by humans. AI is not involved in any way.

If you’ve any ideas or feedback, do let me know at my email mayank@WindowsLatest.com

Windows Latest is far from perfect, but we’ll never stop hustling.

Once again, thank you for reading this little blog <3