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Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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I test Windows Insider builds on more Virtual Machines than I’d like to admit, and many of them used to leave ghost PCs behind in my Link to Windows app. Even after deleting the VM and sometimes after removing it from my Microsoft Account also, the PC name would still be there in the Linked PCs list, appearing disconnected and impossible to get rid of from the app. To my relief (and many others I presume), that’s finally changing.
The Link to Windows Android app is rolling out a new Remove PC option that lets you delete a linked computer straight from your phone, no PC required. I’m running the beta version 1.26062.125.0-preprod, and the option showed up in Settings without much fanfare.
I hadn’t even gone looking for it until I saw Zac Bowden talk about it online, and once I checked my own device, I could confirm it’s live for at least some beta testers too.
Open Link to Windows, tap your profile picture in the top left corner, and go to Settings.
Under Linked PCs, you’ll see every PC that has been paired with your Microsoft account through Phone Link. Next to each PC’s name is a small gear icon, and tapping it opens a dedicated screen for that device with its connection status at the top.
The device screen has two options. Disconnect pauses the sync, and it’s reversible. Below it is Remove PC, and this deletes the entry for good.
Tap it, and a confirmation dialog reads “Remove [PC name]?” with a warning that removing the PC takes it off your account and your device list. There’s also a note that the PC might still show up on other mobile devices and Microsoft products, and if it does, you’ll need to remove it there too. Confirm, and the entry disappears from the Linked PCs list right away.
And in my testing, after removing the PC shown in the screenshot, I opened Devices on my Microsoft account and, sure enough, this PC wasn’t there anymore.
Turns out this wasn’t Microsoft dragging its feet on adding a simple UI. According to an Independent Advisor on Microsoft’s Q&A forum, an engineer confirmed that the Linked PCs list is stored in a backend database that isn’t publicly accessible, which explains why there was no way to delete individual entries from the app.
The advisor added that Microsoft was already working on it back in January, so this Remove PC button has apparently been months in the making.
One user from 2024 replaced a broken laptop and kept seeing the old device pop up every time they tried to send something from their phone, with no way to clear it out. Another asked a nearly identical question a year later and got no real fix either, just a workaround of signing out entirely and starting over.
Link to Windows and Phone Link are two of my favorite apps in the Windows and Android ecosystem. They take two operating systems that share nothing in common architecturally and make them talk to each other well enough that I can lock my PC, send files, sync my clipboard, and a lot more.
Cross-device resume now lets a Vivo browser tab or an M365 Copilot document jump straight to your PC’s taskbar, and the Android app looks nothing like the barren shortcut list it used to be.
The Phone Link team isn’t slowing down, either. Phone Link’s X account posted in March about MVP Summit and teased that more features are on the way to Phone Link and cross-device experiences. The handle isn’t exactly active on social media.
Months passed before this remove PC option was even shown in beta, so whatever was being hinted at back then is likely still working its way down the pipeline.
The option to remove PC from Link to Windows is limited to the preprod beta channel for now, so don’t be surprised if it takes a while to reach the stable app.
The post Microsoft’s Link to Windows removes ghost PCs from your Android phone ahead of its next big update appeared first on Windows Latest
In my last links post, I hinted that I may have some good news on the job front, and if you follow me on LinkedIn you already know that I've signed on to my next gig. Tomorrow morning I'll share on here (and on LI) details about the new gig, but I am beyond excited about this new job. With that out of the way, how about some happy links for what's going to be a really dang good week?
As one of the new proposals for JavaScript, the ShadowRealm API is pretty interesting. It allows for the creation of a realm, or in my mind, an environment, with JavaScript that is 100% disconnected from the main environment of your browser window. Mat Marquis gives a great introduction to this in Soon We Can Finally Banish JavaScript to the ShadowRealm over on CSS Tricks. (If for some reason you've never heard of css-tricks, you should absolutely bookmark it and make it part of your required reading.) Mat's introduction is a pretty fun read as well.
I'm a sucker for anything browser-storage related, and Brownies is a great example of that. Brownies is a library that wraps cookies, Web Storage, and IndexedDB, all in one. Here's an example from their docs:
Log in
import { cookies, local, db } from 'brownies';
cookies.token = 42; // Set it
let t = cookies.token; // Get it
delete cookies.token; // Eat it
local.token = 42; // Set it
let t = local.token; // Get it
delete local.token; // Del it
// db is ASYNC so read is different
db.token = 42; // Set it
let t = await db.token; // Get it
delete db.token; // Del it
This looks quite delicious. It's probably not fair to say it is a wrapper for IndexedDB as from what I can see, it's just doing a key/value store and not letting you specify custom object stores and such. In fact, the docs for db seem to be missing, and the repository doesn't have issues enabled so I'm going to have to find another way to leave that feedback, but check it out nonetheless. (I sent the author an email about this.)
My first two links were JavaScript related, so why not advise against JavaScript in my third link? While not an "anti" JavaScript resource, NoLoJS is a resource showing multiple different UX/UI components that can be built with no, or at least little, JavaScript. As I discovered last week, there's a lot you can do with CSS and removing JavaScript dependencies is just one benefit.
Yesterday was July 4th which means hot dogs and fireworks and that's all... right? Unsurprisingly, there's quite a few examples of fireworks being rendered in HTML. Here's one fun example that's pure CSS:
See the Pen Pure CSS Fireworks by Eddie Lin (@yshlin) on CodePen.
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 28, 2026.
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GeekWire spoke with several longtime Microsoft employees who are taking the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program, about why they decided to leave and what they’re doing next. … Read More
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David bought his MacBook Pro at the perfect time, then we discuss Siri AI, iOS 27 beta, and the cultural reception of AI.
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The Mac Power Users
Stephen Robles
David Sparks
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The Fixer
Kerry Provanzano
