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Microsoft’s August Windows 11 cumulative update has ignited a fraught, still‑unresolved investigation after community testers and some independent labs reported that sustained heavy write operations could cause certain NVMe SSDs to disappear from Windows — and, in a minority of cases, become inaccessible or suffer data corruption — while controller vendor Phison says its lab work could not reproduce the fault after thousands of hours of testing. Background / Overview The incident began after...

Microsoft’s AI team has quietly crossed an important threshold: the group announced two first-party foundation models — MAI‑Voice‑1 (a speech generation model) and MAI‑1‑preview (an end‑to‑end trained, mixture‑of‑experts foundation model) — signaling a deliberate shift from Microsoft’s heavy reliance on external model providers toward owning more of the stack itself. The move is framed as pragmatic and strategic: specialized models for particular scenarios, tighter product integration with...

Microsoft Teams is rolling out two platform-level protections meant to stop weaponized files and scammy links from arriving in users’ chats and channels, a change that shifts the battleground for collaboration security from reactive investigation to proactive blocking. Background Microsoft’s communication stack has become a primary vector for modern phishing and malware campaigns. As organizations moved key workflows—and sensitive data—into Teams, threat actors adapted by delivering...

Microsoft’s Copilot has slipped off the PC and into the living room: beginning August 27, 2025, Microsoft and Samsung rolled out a built‑in, voice‑first Copilot experience on select Samsung 2025 TVs and Smart Monitors, turning the largest screen in many homes into a social, animated AI companion for content discovery, spoiler‑safe recaps, translation, smart‑home control and light productivity. Background Samsung’s 2025 product messaging centers on Samsung Vision AI, an umbrella platform that...

Microsoft has warned that the cryptographic roots underpinning UEFI Secure Boot on Windows devices will begin to expire in June 2026, forcing a global certificate update that every IT team and many end users must plan for now to avoid boot-level insecurities and loss of updateability. Background / Overview Secure Boot is the firmware-level trust anchor that helps ensure a PC boots only with code signed by a trusted authority. For more than a decade, Windows systems shipped with a set of...

Windows 11’s August servicing wave briefly looked like a potential storage disaster: users and hobbyist labs reported NVMe SSDs vanishing during large, sustained writes after installing the 24H2 cumulative update tracked as KB5063878 (and the related preview KB5062660), but Phison — the largest single-name target in the discussion — says its extended lab campaign could not reproduce a bricking behavior and found no evidence the update universally “bricks” SSDs. est surfaced within days of...

Microsoft has quietly begun rolling out a native Android-to-PC handoff in Windows 11 — a Cross‑Device Resume capability that lets a user pick up an activity on their Android phone and continue it on a Windows PC, starting with Spotify playback in the current Windows Insider Dev and Beta preview builds. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Cross‑Device Resume is the clearest public sign yet of a strategic pivot away from running Android runtimes on Windows and toward a lightweight...

Samsung and Microsoft have moved one of the most visible consumer AI experiences out of the PC and into the living room: Microsoft Copilot is now built into select 2025 Samsung TVs and Smart Monitors, turning large screens into voice‑first, conversational companions that speak, show glanceable visual cards, and appear as a friendly on‑screen persona optimized for group viewing. Background: what Samsung and Microsoft announced Samsung’s official announcement makes the partnership plain...

Microsoft’s Redmond campus erupted this week after a small group of protesters — including two current employees — forced their way into the executive suite and briefly occupied the office of company vice chair and president Brad Smith, an escalation that ended in arrests and immediate terminations and has amplified a months‑long ethics crisis over alleged uses of Microsoft Azure by Israeli military units. Background The confrontation is the latest flare in a broader dispute that began...

Windows already does most of what “optimizer” and “cleaner” apps promise — and in many cases it does it more safely. Background / Overview For decades a cottage industry of “PC optimizers,” “tune‑up suites,” and “registry cleaners” has promised faster boot times, reduced RAM usage, and a longer‑lived machine. Those tools still occupy prominent places in download directories and commercial bundling offers, pitched as quick ways to fix sluggish Windows PCs. The common pitch is simple: run the...

Beginning in September Microsoft wrapped a clear, deliberate push to make Copilot the connective tissue of Microsoft 365: Teams’ calendar and task surfaces are moving to the new integrated Microsoft 365 calendar, the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app becomes a preview‑and‑chat surface for Office files while Word/Excel/PowerPoint return to being the canonical editors on iOS, Microsoft Lens is retired in favor of Copilot’s built‑in scanning, SharePoint gains a centralized Template Gallery for...

Microsoft’s push to fold OpenAI’s latest models into Windows and Office has hardened an uncomfortable choice for many users: do you pick the deeply integrated productivity assistant (Microsoft Copilot) that lives inside Word, Excel, Outlook and the Windows taskbar, or the more general-purpose conversational engine (ChatGPT) from OpenAI that runs across web, mobile and macOS? This feature compares the two in plain terms—capabilities, pricing, privacy, real-world limits, enterprise controls...

Microsoft’s Redmond campus erupted this week when a small group of protesters — including two current employees — broke into the office of company president Brad Smith and staged a sit‑in that culminated in arrests and immediate terminations, intensifying an already fraught, months‑long dispute over Microsoft’s alleged ties to Israeli military surveillance and the downstream uses of Azure cloud services. Background / Overview The incident on August 26, 2025, is the latest escalation in a...

Typepad’s abrupt shutdown notice is a hard wake-up call for long-form bloggers: after more than two decades online the service will be deactivated on September 30, 2025, and users have been given a short window to export and preserve their content before access and export capability are permanently removed. The service’s terse announcement — “We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad” — leaves many questions unanswered, but the operational facts now facing Typepad users are...

Microsoft's hard deadline for Windows 10 support — October 14, 2025 — has shifted the conversation for IT leaders from “if” to how fast and how wisely to move, and the time for planning alone has passed: organisations must now execute migration plans that protect security, preserve productivity, and control cost. Background Microsoft’s lifecycle timetable for Windows 10 is definitive: after October 14, 2025 the company will stop shipping feature updates, quality fixes, and routine security...

Honor’s new MagicBook Art 14 arrives as a slender, style-first Windows 11 laptop that tries to marry aerospace-grade materials with the latest Intel “Core Ultra” AI silicon, a dazzling 14.6‑inch OLED panel, and a removable magnetic webcam — but the headline-grabbing specs hide real-world trade-offs worth examining before you buy. Background The MagicBook Art 14 was unveiled alongside Honor’s Magic V5 foldable at a high‑profile event and immediately positioned as a premium lightweight...

Microsoft is adding a native, system-wide keyboard shortcut for the en dash and em dash—Win + Minus for an en dash (–) and Win + Shift + Minus for an em dash (—)—delivered as part of recent Insider builds and being rolled out gradually to Windows 11 users. Background Writers, editors, and anyone who uses punctuation regularly have long contended with Windows’ clumsy options for inserting typographic dashes. Historically, Windows users have relied on a handful of workarounds: Alt codes: hold...

Phison’s terse lab summary — that it “was unable to reproduce” the reports that a mid‑August Windows 11 update could “brick” SSDs after more than 4,500 cumulative test hours — changed the tone of a fast‑moving controversy, but it did not close the book on a worrying, reproducible symptom set described by community testers and specialist outlets. Background In the wake of Patch Tuesday on August 12, 2025, Windows 11’s combined servicing update for 24H2 — commonly tracked as KB5063878, with a...

The last Windows Weekly episode landed like a mixtape of outrage, optimism, and technical quibbling — a brisk tour through Microsoft’s week that touched on a campus lockdown, Windows 11 change-management headaches, Microsoft 365 and OneNote transitions, a sweep of AI news, several developer-facing adjustments, and a notable flurry of Xbox and gaming updates. The episode’s tone was familiar: sharp skepticism toward bungled product rollouts, cautious praise for incremental wins, and a steady...

Samsung’s Copilot has crossed the PC and phone divide and landed on living‑room screens: beginning with select 2025 Samsung TVs and Smart Monitors, Microsoft’s conversational AI is now built into the display experience as part of Samsung’s Vision AI initiative, promising voice‑first content discovery, spoiler‑safe recaps, SmartThings control, and light productivity features — free to use on supported models with optional Microsoft account personalization. ecrosoft announced the integration...