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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...

Microsoft quietly—then not so quietly—took a major step to collapse an awkward transition period: Windows 10 machines running the aging Edge Legacy (EdgeHTML) browser were slated to have that app removed and replaced by the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge via a Windows cumulative update released on April 13, 2021, turning what had been a passive recommendation into an automatic migration for most consumer devices. Background Microsoft first shipped Edge Legacy with Windows 10 as the default...

NVIDIA’s latest GeForce driver rollout — reported as version 581.15 WHQL in third‑party coverage — promises targeted stability fixes and expanded game support, but the release is surrounded by mixed signals and verification gaps that make cautious upgrading the prudent choice for gamers and creators alike. The package, as circulated in the community, claims Windows 10/11 64‑bit Desktop and Notebook installers, official support for recent AAA titles (notably Indiana Jones and the Great...

The countdown to October 14, 2025 is no longer a distant calendar note — it is a board‑level deadline that should be driving procurement, security and migration decisions across every business that still runs Windows 10. Recent regional reporting urging organisations to move from planning into action captures the moment: Microsoft will stop issuing feature and security updates for Windows 10 on that date, and the practical consequences for security, compliance and operations are immediate...

Microsoft has finally closed one of the most persistent UX gaps in PC audio: on supported Windows 11 systems, Bluetooth headsets can now deliver full stereo media audio while simultaneously using their built‑in microphone at super‑wideband quality, instead of collapsing to low‑fidelity, mono “telephone” audio the moment a voice chat or call begins. Background / Overview Bluetooth audio on PCs long lived with an ugly trade‑off: legacy Bluetooth Classic split playback and voice into two...

Phison’s terse lab update — that its engineers “could not reproduce” the NVMe disappearances reported after a recent Windows 11 cumulative update — has shifted an alarmed headlines cycle into a cautious, technical debate about reproducibility, telemetry, and how the modern storage stack fails under extreme conditions. rview Windows 11’s mid‑August cumulative servicing (commonly tracked in community reporting as KB5063878, with a related preview KB5062660) triggered multiple independent...

Samsung’s 2025 TV and monitor lineup now plays host to Microsoft’s Copilot AI, turning living-room screens into interactive, voice‑driven companions that can summarize shows, recommend content, control smart‑home devices, and even perform light productivity tasks on supported monitors. (microsoft.com, news.samsung.com) Background Samsung and Microsoft announced a partnership to embed Microsoft Copilot into Samsung’s 2025 smart TVs and Smart Monitors as part of Samsung’s broader Vision AI...

Life Without Barriers’ recent security refresh shows how human‑services organisations can use integrated Microsoft tooling to both reduce risk and free frontline staff for the work that matters. Background / Overview Life Without Barriers (LWB), one of Australia’s largest human‑services nonprofits, has moved from a fragmented, legacy IT estate toward a unified security and data‑governance posture built on Microsoft technologies. The organisation — which Microsoft and LWB materials state...

Asus and Microsoft have taken the wraps off the ROG Xbox Ally family — two Windows 11 handhelds that marry ASUS’ ROG hardware design with an Xbox‑layered, controller‑first Windows experience — and they arrive on store shelves on October 16, 2025, positioning themselves as direct rivals to Nintendo’s Switch family and Valve’s Steam Deck. Background The handheld market that once seemed niche has been remade over the past three years by Valve’s Steam Deck and a wave of Windows‑based handhelds...