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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.
Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter.
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
The group includes leaders from technology, aerospace, organized labor, higher education, tribal governments, ports and economic development organizations who will advise the governor on policies aimed at strengthening Washington’s economy. … Read More
“Microsoft Frontier Company” is a $2.5 billion initiative that will embed engineers inside customer organizations to build and run their AI systems. … Read More
Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who led its worldwide commercial sales business, is joining Nvidia as executive vice president of worldwide field operations, succeeding retiring sales chief Jay Puri. … Read More
Microsoft is preparing another round of layoffs, spanning Xbox, sales and consulting, as it holds down operating costs while pouring more than $100 billion into AI infrastructure. … Read More
Amazon Music names VP of product and tech; Microsoft’s corporate VP of Security, Compliance, Identity, Management & Privacy steps down while its Copilot platform undergoes a shakeup; Veeam appoints a chief marketing and customer AI officer; and Read More … Read More
Microsoft is pressing its Xbox business for growth and stronger profits after 25 years of losses and thin margins. … Read More
The company said it eventually envisions its Bellevue office growing into a core edge AI research and development center with more than 500 employees over the next decade. … Read More
The maker of the Claude AI model recently finalized a lease at Dexter Yard North in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, capping months of speculation about the company’s expansion plans in the region. … Read More
Common Room emerged from stealth in 2021 with $52 million in funding and was the 2022 GeekWire Awards Startup of the Year. … Read More
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
David bought his MacBook Pro at the perfect time, then we discuss Siri AI, iOS 27 beta, and the cultural reception of AI.
Sign up for the MPU email newsletter and join the MPU forums. You can watch the podcast over on YouTube.
The Mac Power Users
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Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!
Here is July! Nice and warm here although a bit too warm, it was 40Âş several days this week! Still I much prefer that over the cold.
This week I will be making a video with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski answering all your Steam questions. Do you have one? Write it in this post and I'll ask him!
Game Dev: Inventive Indie Merch ; Polish!
Tech: World Cup Controversial Ball Tech
Gaming: Sony kills physical disks
Merch is always fun, having a t-shirt with your favorite game's name on it is nice, but it's all pretty generic. Shirts, mugs, stickers, maybe a mousepad?
Well the developers behind Cairn did something extremely unique and original! The game is all about climbing a mountain through whatever path you can find. And once you reach the end of the game you can order a t-shirt showing the exact path you took to reach the summit! This is so cool!
You can only order it from inside the game after you reach the top, you can't fake your way to it (at least not without cheats) so if you see someone wearing this shirt you know they finished the game!
Could you do something like this for your game? Yet another inventive marketing technique!
 | I LOVE this idea! How come no one ever thought of it? At least I've never heard of such custom merch related to whatever you did inside the game. Now it makes me wonder how this idea might be applied to other games. Maybe a t-shirt with your sprawling Factorio factory? Maybe a wearable mask with your custom Skyrim character on it? Or maybe even a t-shirt with some electronics showing your realtime KD ratio in Call of Duty? The ideas are endless! |
The Unity Asset Store Summer Sale is live! As always this is one of the biggest sales of the year with thousands of the BEST assets on sale. As usual you got 50% off the top assets.
Check out everything on sale HERE!
Learn how to get more Wishlists and Sell more Copies with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski!
Like I mentioned at the top I’m going to be doing a video with him answering your questions, but you can already right now go watch the free videos I did with him last year to learn tons about marketing.
And if you want all that knowledge condensed into one single easy-to-follow place then check out his courses. He’s currently running a summer sale with a deep discount!
Get it HERE!
You might have heard me say many times how polish is what separates good games from GREAT games, and this developer posted a video on exactly how much of a difference it makes.
The main thing is naturally post processing effects, but also adding more lights, both point lights and directional lights, and adding tons of decals. Decals are especially one of the most awesome tools at your disposal to polish your games. If you take a bland floor texture and just add some decals of dirt or blood or papers, then it suddenly looks so much better. I have a lecture on Decals in my Ultimate Unity Overview course.
This is also an excellent example of how you can make something look really good even while using common Low Poly assets. Some people are afraid that if they use Synty assets their game will look like many other games, but this shows how you can make the exact same assets look really different.
| I always highly recommend you block out some time in your game dev calendar to just focus on polishing your game. Spending just one week focused on nothing but polish can be difference between making a 6/10 into a 9/10 game! |
Sony is officially ending physical disc production for new PlayStation games starting in January 2028!
They say this reflects consumer trends, and I get it, technically most games are bought digital nowadays. Personally I haven't bought anything physical in maybe a decade, I think the last physical thing I bought was a Tenet 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray just because I wanted to see how good it looked, beyond that I've been fully digital for ages.
But even though that's my preference I still think it sucks to see the end of physical. For a lot of players, physical discs mean ownership, collecting, lending games to friends, buying used copies, renting, libraries, preservation, and just having something real on a shelf. Going fully digital removes a lot of that and gives platform holders even more control over pricing, access, and availability, which of course can be exploited.
Everyone seems to be angry about this announcement, they even had to close some of their social media accounts temporarily (I feel for the poor intern managing those) but such a big change did not come lightly, so it seems doubtful they will reverse course.
Now the big question is what Xbox does. Do they follow Sony and kill discs too? Or do they keep physical games alive and win back some player goodwill at a time when Xbox definitely needs it?
| I really like the convenience of digital but I also really like seeing pictures of people with giant walls of game/movie collections, I'd love to build a collection like that one day, but sadly it seems I won't be able to. |
Here is a fascinating use of technology, and also a perfect example of why VAR will probably always be controversial.
In the recent Portugal vs Croatia World Cup match, Croatia thought they had scored a dramatic game tying goal! But it was cancelled after the connected ball sensor detected the slightest touch from a defender, which then made the scorer become offside. The crazy part is that the touch was basically impossible to see with human eyes, but the ball sensor picked it up.
That right there is a very interesting question: if the sensor says it happened, should that be enough? Or since the rules of the game were created 100+ years ago when no tech existed and it was all based on human eyes, should the goal have been valid?
Technically the tech did its job. The ball has sensors, the sensors detected contact, and according to the rules that touch made it offside.
But on the other hand, if the touch is so tiny that no human can see it and it barely affects the play, should it count? Is the goal of technology to enforce the rules with absolute precision, or to help referees make decisions that match the spirit of the game?
| I find this kind of tech fascinating, but I also understand why people are angry especially on such a high stakes moment. Either way what's happened happened and Portugal moved one step closer to the final! |
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How I Coded the Perks in my Roguelike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1cd1FhVAWY
Excellently edited video showcasing the power of inheritance
How Much Money my Indie Game Made (After 1 month)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7CUYUf4oAM
Numbers are always great to see, it's a very well made game and thankfully found a nice amount of success.
Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!
(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)
Thanks for reading!
Code Monkey
