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Microsoft Advertising has begun making AI Max for Search campaigns available across advertiser accounts worldwide, according to PPC Land, which traced the rollout to a LinkedIn announcement from Microsoft Ads Liaison Navah Hopkins. The switch combines expanded query matching, automatically customized text assets, and final URL expansion inside an existing Search campaign—three changes that can affect what searches trigger an ad, what the ad says, and which page receives the click. For...

Windows 11’s Windows 10-era right-click menu is not being removed. Microsoft is instead turning it into a compatibility path for older File Explorer extensions while rebuilding the primary context menu around speed, customization, and a stricter extension model. That distinction is more important than the new menu’s visual changes: organizations with older shell-integrated tools will retain an escape hatch, but software vendors are being pushed to modernize or risk becoming a second-click...

Asus’s 2026 Zenbook 14 UM3406GA puts AMD’s Ryzen AI 7 445 in a familiar 1.2 kg OLED ultraportable, but buyers should treat the new processor as a cost-focused configuration change rather than a performance upgrade. Ultrabookreview’s longer-term testing finds the refreshed model is a capable Windows 11 machine for office work, web use, video, and ordinary multitasking, yet it is materially slower in sustained CPU and graphics workloads than the 2025 Zenbook 14 UM3406KA it replaces. The...

Minisforum’s 895D7 turns the company’s existing Ryzen 9 8945HX desktop motherboard into an 8.47-liter prebuilt gaming PC with a low-profile Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB or GeForce RTX 5060. The important detail for small-form-factor builders is that the machine does include a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, but its unusually shallow 93 mm chassis means the slot does not amount to blanket compatibility with ordinary desktop graphics cards. XiaomiToday reported the 895D7 with a $495 barebones starting price and...

Thermal Grizzly has added AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition to its pre-delidded CPU catalogue, offering enthusiasts a processor with its integrated heat spreader already removed and a replacement warranty supplied by Thermal Grizzly. Club386, KitGuru, and TweakTown each reported the addition this week after the German cooling specialist updated its store listing. The catch is that buyers are purchasing a direct-die cooling project, not a conventional drop-in AM5 CPU. Thermal Grizzly’s own...

Microsoft says it plans to bring richer explanations, reasoning traces, cited knowledge sources, larger test datasets and configurable test generation to Copilot Studio agent evaluations in September 2026, giving makers more evidence to diagnose why an agent passed or failed a test rather than leaving them with a top-line score. The Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry, ID 569607, was published August 19 and is marked in development for general availability in Copilot Studio’s web experience for...

Microsoft 365’s Copilot button has moved from the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint ribbon into the document canvas, where it now appears as a floating Copilot Dynamic Action Button in the lower-right corner. The change is already rolling out worldwide for eligible users on Windows, Mac, the web, and mobile, despite Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 533043 carrying a “Launched” date of December 2025 and receiving another update on August 19, 2026. For users, this is an interface relocation rather than an...

Microsoft Teams’ revised download manager is now marked Launched on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, giving desktop and Mac users a persistent way to watch file transfers without leaving an active chat or channel. Roadmap item 560815 says the manager can be opened from Teams’ title bar or with a keyboard shortcut, and that its status view no longer blocks the conversation workspace. Microsoft had already described the change in its June 2026 What’s New in Microsoft Teams roundup, where it...

Microsoft is planning to add inline Code Blocks to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat in September 2026, moving previews of generated code, charts, diagrams, and similar structured output from a separate code canvas into the conversation itself. Roadmap item 569429 is marked In development, which means the feature is not available yet despite its General Availability label and September target. The change is modest on paper, but it addresses a real workflow break for people using Copilot Chat to...

Microsoft has marked Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 559019 as Launched, bringing programmatic access to first-party and tenant-defined declarative agents through its Work IQ APIs. The change means a custom application can invoke a specialized Microsoft 365 Copilot agent as part of a broader workflow, rather than requiring a user to manually select that agent in Copilot Chat. The roadmap says preview availability began in April 2026 and general availability followed in June 2026 for worldwide...

Microsoft has marked Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 547829 as launched, bringing a revised room-booking interface to the Microsoft Places app that aligns visually and procedurally with its desk-booking experience. The change applies to the Places app on desktop and the web in both Targeted Release and General Availability tenants, according to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The practical effect is narrower than the wording may initially suggest: this is an interface and workflow-consistency update...

TechPowerUp reports that CachyOS in its “performance mode” led a fresh Linux-versus-Windows workstation comparison on HP’s Z4 G6i, finishing 14.9% ahead of Windows 11 Pro in the benchmark suite’s geometric mean. AlmaLinux 10.2 also finished ahead of Windows in the reported results. But the headline result is a useful warning for workstation buyers rather than a blanket reason to replace Windows: the suite includes several workloads where Windows 11 was faster, and the report as published...

Exclaimer has launched MSP Connect, a partner programme and management layer aimed at managed service providers that sell and administer email-signature services across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace customer tenants. The practical change is less about a new signature editor than about the operating model around it: a central MSP portal, usage-based billing, and promised hooks into ConnectWise, Kaseya, and Microsoft Marketplace resale. IT Brief Asia reported the August 19 launch as a...

Mattel’s new 3,509-piece replica of the original Xbox turns Microsoft’s first console into a $329.99 display build, complete with a brick-built “Duke” controller that activates lights and game audio. The attraction is less the shell itself than what Mattel has placed inside it: removable dioramas for Halo: Combat Evolved, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and Psychonauts, plus 12 NanoWorld-scale figures. The announcement, republished by TechPowerUp from Mattel’s release, arrives nearly three...

The National Cybersecurity Alliance’s new guidance on social-media account takeovers gets the central distinction right: a stolen account and a cloned profile are different incidents, but both can turn a familiar name into a delivery system for fraud. For Windows users and IT administrators, the practical lesson is broader than social media: an attacker does not need to compromise a PC to exploit a trusted identity, yet a compromised PC can make an account recovery effort fail before it...

University of California San Diego and Oberlin College researchers have demonstrated a hardware implant that can seize the data path between key Boeing 737 flight-management components after roughly a minute of physical access on the ground. The important result is not a remote takeover of an airliner: it is evidence that a briefly accessible maintenance connection can turn a conventional physical-security lapse into a cyber-physical attack path. The peer-reviewed research, presented at the...

The White House is preparing to change how federal agencies report the maturity and risk posture of their cybersecurity supply-chain programs, a move that could turn scattered compliance attestations into a more consequential pre-award procurement control. Federal News Network reported August 18 that the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer is reviewing governmentwide alignment with NIST’s Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management guidance and expects a revamped data collection...

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26340.9212 is testing a configurable File Explorer context menu that lets users decide which commands and third-party extensions remain at the top level—a substantial reversal from Windows 11’s original, aggressively simplified right-click design. The change is part of an August 17 preview wave spanning five builds and several Insider tracks, according to Windows Central’s roundup of the August releases. For users, the headline is choice: “Send to,” Print...

Microsoft has put cross-legal-entity fulfillment optimization into preview for Dynamics 365 Commerce’s Distributed Order Management (DOM), allowing a retail order raised in one legal entity to be sourced and shipped from inventory owned by another. The practical change is not merely broader inventory lookup: when DOM selects another entity’s warehouse or store, it can automatically create and synchronize the intercompany documents required to carry the transaction through fulfillment...

Windows 11’s taskbar End task command is a useful shortcut for killing a frozen desktop application without opening Task Manager, but it is neither new nor universally “hidden.” Microsoft first exposed the feature to Windows Insiders in May 2023 and brought it to stable Windows 11 later that year. What has changed is where users are likely to find the switch: Microsoft now documents it under Settings > System > Advanced, a page previously called For developers. How-To Geek’s August 19 guide...