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Microsoft has confirmed that a limited, consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10 is rolling out now — an emergency, one‑year safety net that will be available to eligible Windows 10 PCs before the platform’s support cutoff on October 14, 2025. The ESU enrollment appears as an “Enroll now” option in Settings → Windows Update, and Microsoft says the consumer ESU will be delivered in waves and be available to all qualifying devices by the October 14 deadline. Background...

Active Directory disaster recovery is no longer an optional checkbox; it is a strategic, cross-team program that must protect identity as the foundational dependency for every application, service, and user in your environment. Background / Overview Active Directory (AD) sits at the heart of most Windows-based enterprises. When AD fails — whether because of accidental changes, corruption, hardware loss, or a deliberate attack — the blast radius is massive: authentication, Group Policy, DNS...

Microsoft's decision to retire the Mobile Plans app for Windows marks the end of a small but strategic piece of the company's push to make cellular connectivity a first-class feature on PCs, and it raises immediate questions for users of eSIM-enabled laptops, OEMs, and mobile operators about migration, privacy, and the future of PC cellular provisioning. Background / Overview The Mobile Plans app has been the Windows-side conduit that let users discover, purchase, and activate cellular data...

Microsoft is rolling a change that will alter the first minutes of life for new Windows 11 devices in many organizations: starting with the September 2025 security update, eligible enterprise and education PCs will check for and install the latest Windows quality updates during the Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) so the device reaches the desktop already patched and up to date. Background / Overview For years IT teams have wrestled with a predictable pain point: freshly imaged or factory‑fresh...

The Wplace “500 Internal Server Error” is an HTTP server error that prevents the canvas from loading and blocks actions like placing pixels or signing in; while it usually means something failed on Wplace’s servers, a short, methodical troubleshooting run on the client side will tell you whether this is a global outage, a temporary hiccup, or an issue you can fix locally. Background The HTTP 500 status is a generic “internal server error” returned when a web server encounters an unexpected...

Borderless CS’s launch of IT Hardening Expert Services arrives at a moment when simple misconfigurations and unmaintained defaults are repeatedly exposed as the weakest links in enterprise security, and the firm is pitching a pragmatic, standards-aligned program to shrink attack surfaces across Windows, Linux, macOS, cloud, IoT and edge estates. Background Borderless CS, an Australian cyber‑security provider that advertises CREST recognition and ISO 27001:2022 certification, has published a...

Microsoft has quietly removed one of Bluetooth’s longest‑running compromises on Windows PCs: with recent Windows 11 updates the OS now exposes Bluetooth LE Audio and a super‑wideband stereo path so compatible headsets can keep high‑fidelity stereo playback while their microphones are active. Background / Overview Bluetooth audio on PCs has, for years, forced an unhappy trade‑off: either enjoy stereo, high‑fidelity playback (A2DP) or use the headset microphone — but not both at once. Classic...

Ohio University’s yearlong pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivered a pragmatic, measured verdict: the tool can help with routine drafting and information retrieval, especially for communication-heavy administrative work, but the headline productivity payoff is modest and highly role-dependent — and realizing meaningful ROI will require focused training, governance, and careful measurement. Overview Ohio University (OHIO) ran a structured pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot from May 2024 through...

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Alibaba’s latest AI push reads like a two-act drama: a crescendo of product releases and developer traction on one side, and an equally loud chorus of pricing pressure, competition, and heavy-capex obligations on the other. In the past year the company has rolled out its Qwen3 model family and pushed AI features across cloud and commerce while pledging an unprecedented RMB 380 billion ($~53 billion) of spending on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. Those moves have...

Microsoft has quietly turned one of Word’s most useful safety nets into the new default: AutoSave will now save newly created Word documents to the cloud automatically, starting with Word for Windows Version 2509 (Build 19221.20000) for Microsoft 365 Insiders. The change flips the long-standing local-first behavior on its head: when you start typing a new document it will receive a cloud-backed identity immediately, AutoSave will be toggled on, and the file will be placed in the default...

HP’s latest quarter did more than steady investor nerves — it refocused the market’s narrative from a collapsing PC cycle to a disciplined recovery powered by AI-capable PCs, strategic supply‑chain moves and a tightly managed printing business that, for now, is holding margins within targeted ranges. The company reported fiscal Q3 net revenue of roughly $13.9 billion with Personal Systems at about $9.9 billion and Printing at roughly $4.0 billion, matched consensus EPS of $0.75, and kept...

Benzinga’s automated snapshot of Microsoft’s standing inside the software sector delivers a clear headline: Microsoft appears both richly priced on revenue and comparatively inexpensive on earnings and book value versus a mixed peer group — but a closer inspection reveals timing, definitional, and scale problems that materially change the investment picture. The snapshot’s directional narrative (scale + cloud/AI momentum + conservative balance sheet) is sound, yet several of the numerical...

Microsoft’s new Windows Backup for Organizations arrives as a focused, cloud‑native lifeline for IT teams wrestling with mass device refreshes and the ongoing Windows 10 → Windows 11 migration — but it’s important to understand exactly what it does, what it doesn’t, and how to deploy it safely at scale. Background / Overview Windows Backup for Organizations is a tenant‑scoped backup and restore capability built to preserve a curated set of Windows settings and a manifest of Microsoft Store...

Windows 11’s Bluetooth audio stack has taken a major step toward fixing a problem that has driven gamers, remote workers, and audiophiles to wired headsets for years: with the latest updates Microsoft now supports super wideband stereo over Bluetooth LE Audio, enabling stereo playback while a headset microphone is active and raising the microphone sampling rate from telephony-grade narrowband to much higher “super wideband” fidelity. This change is not just a marketing tweak — it...

Chrome Canary’s overlay scrollbars will now flash selectively — only when a scrollbar first appears in view or when the mouse actually hovers over it — reducing the distracting, page‑wide flicker users have complained about for years. This behavior is exposed in Canary behind a new experimental flag named Flash Overlay Scrollbars When Mouse Enter, which requires the existing Overlay Scrollbars feature to be enabled. The change aims to preserve the visual affordance of overlay scrollbars...

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...