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Paul Thurrott’s latest Windows Weekly episode—titled “Backing Up the Intel Truck”—is a compact but consequential briefing on where Microsoft’s Windows strategy is headed, and it reads like a roadmap: AI-first user experiences, multimodal interactions that make voice and vision first-class inputs, significant progress for Windows on Arm (especially around Xbox integration), and a fast-moving ecosystem of third‑party AI services reacting in real time. The episode’s themes are echoed across...

Microsoft and ASUS have set a firm retail date for their jointly developed handhelds — the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X — and they arrive not as simple third‑party devices but as the first mainstream proof that Microsoft intends to use Windows 11 as the foundation for a console‑like, controller‑first handheld gaming experience. The devices will be on shelves on October 16, 2025, booting into an Xbox‑style full‑screen home layered on top of Windows 11, featuring an Xbox‑centric Game Bar...

Microsoft’s latest Visual Studio update tames one of the most common frustrations with GitHub Copilot by giving developers far more control over when and how suggestions appear, while preserving the assistant’s productivity benefits for those who want them. Background GitHub Copilot transformed editor productivity by offering inline code completions and contextual edits at a keystroke’s notice. That immediacy helped many developers write boilerplate, finish repetitive lines, and discover...

Windows Weekly’s latest episode landed like a speedboat through the shallow end of Microsoft’s current strategy pool — equal parts product update, platform pivot, and cultural commentary — and its most consequential thread is simple: Microsoft is barreling hard into on‑device AI, multimodal Windows experiences, and tighter platform consolidation, and the ripples are already hitting everything from Notepad menus to Xbox downloads. Background / Overview The hosts of Windows Weekly unpacked a...

Microsoft’s Copilot now speaks file-finding: the Copilot app can search your recent local files and images using natural language, and a staged Windows Insider rollout has begun that puts semantic file search and a redesigned Copilot home in front of testers and early adopters. Background Windows search has long been a pain point for users who can’t remember exact filenames or where they saved attachments. The new Copilot file-search capability aims to remove that friction by letting you...

A wave of reproducible reports and a parallel burst of misinformation have combined to create one of the more consequential Patch Tuesday headaches in recent memory: Microsoft’s August 12, 2025 cumulative for Windows 11 (KB5063878) has been linked to SSDs disappearing under sustained, heavy write workloads, and Phison — a major SSD controller designer — has publicly acknowledged industry‑wide effects while simultaneously denouncing a circulated falsified advisory and saying it is pursuing...

ZDNET’s compact “five apps I always install first” playbook is an efficient, pragmatic shortcut for getting a fresh Windows PC productive in minutes: install Everything for instant local search, Google Chrome for cross‑device browsing and extensions, VLC Media Player for near‑universal media playback, 7‑Zip for robust compression and AES‑protected archives, and Discord for lightweight, persistent communication — a small toolkit that addresses day‑one gaps Windows leaves open and delivers...

Microsoft pushed an out-of-band emergency update on August 19–20, 2025 to repair a Windows recovery regression caused by its August Patch Tuesday rollup, restoring core recovery features such as Reset this PC, cloud reimaging via Fix problems using Windows Update, and certain MDM remote-wipe operations that were failing for affected Windows 10 and Windows 11 builds. Background The August 2025 Patch Tuesday (released August 12, 2025) delivered fixes for well over a hundred vulnerabilities...

LightBeam’s Summer 2025 release brings targeted AI security and governance controls specifically for Microsoft Copilot, promising real-time protection against AI-driven data exposure, insider threats, and mass-encryption ransomware events — a response to rapid Copilot adoption and the emergence of unauthorized “shadow AI” agents that can inherit broad permissions and move or delete sensitive data. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Copilot family — from Microsoft 365 Copilot to Security...

Microsoft’s Azure Local is a clear signal that hybrid cloud is no longer a stopgap—it's an operational imperative for many enterprises, and Microsoft has repackaged and extended its Azure Stack HCI lineage into a unified, Azure-native platform designed to run cloud-managed services inside customer-controlled environments while preserving on-premises control and compliance. Background / Overview Microsoft announced the rebranding and expansion of Azure Stack HCI into Azure Local at Ignite...

Microsoft’s Azure platform has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud‑Native Application Platforms, a recognition Microsoft highlights as validation of its developer‑focused platform strategy and AI‑centric roadmap. The company says it was placed furthest to the right on Completeness of Vision and emphasizes investments across Azure App Service, Azure Container Apps, Azure Functions, and the new Azure AI Foundry to support AI‑native, agentic, serverless, and...

Microsoft is imposing a hard limit on outgoing email from free “.onmicrosoft.com” (MOERA) tenant domains to combat widespread abuse and protect delivery for legitimate Microsoft 365 customers, and the change — which takes effect in staged waves starting October 15, 2025 for trials — restricts MOERA-hosted tenants to 100 external recipients per 24‑hour rolling window, with internal mail flows unaffected. Background / Overview Microsoft 365 historically supplies every new tenant with a free...

Microsoft’s August 2025 Intune update materially expands the platform’s security controls and enrollment ergonomics, delivering four headline features—granular App Control targeting, automatic patching during device setup, near‑real‑time Apple software update visibility via Declarative Device Management (DDM), and multi‑administrator approval workflows—that together tighten Zero Trust posture while smoothing first‑day device reliability for end users. Background Organizations have been...

Pac‑Man’s 45th anniversary is getting a proper party: Bandai Namco’s year‑long “Make imPACt” campaign has been joined this weekend by an Xbox Free Play Days spotlight that lets Game Pass members jump into three Pac‑Man titles for free while limited‑time discounts make ownership tempting. (bandainamcoent.com, purexbox.com) Background / Overview Bandai Namco has rolled out a wide, cross‑industry celebration for PAC‑MAN’s 45th anniversary, positioning the character as a multi‑generation...

Microsoft’s Xbox handheld arriving as a Windows-powered device is less an endgame than the first real, public proof that Microsoft intends to use Windows itself as the foundation of a next-generation, cross-device Xbox experience. Background / Overview Microsoft and ASUS announced the ROG Xbox Ally family — a base ROG Xbox Ally and the higher-end ROG Xbox Ally X — as Windows 11 handhelds that boot into a console-like, full-screen Xbox experience layered on top of Windows. The handhelds are...

Microsoft’s refreshed Copilot app for Windows 11 moves beyond a simple chat box and into a genuine productivity hub, with a redesigned home surface, semantic file and image search, app‑specific Copilot Vision sessions, and modular widgets that make the assistant feel like a native part of the OS rather than an add‑on. The staged Insider rollout — delivered via the Microsoft Store in Copilot app builds beginning with version 1.25082.132.0 and higher — shows Microsoft is leaning hard on...

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday delivered a surprise that quickly escalated from a support thread to a cross-industry incident: the Windows 11 cumulative update KB5063878 has been linked by multiple users to SSD and HDD failures, data corruption, and drives “vanishing” during heavy write activity, particularly on systems running Windows 11 24H2. Reports describe drives dropping out mid-transfer, corruption appearing after sustained writes when the drive is more than ~60% full, and in some...

The NFL has moved from hardware sponsorship to an explicit “AI‑first” operational phase with Microsoft, refreshing the league’s Sideline Viewing System and rolling Microsoft Copilot, Azure OpenAI services, and a fleet of Surface Copilot+ devices into sideline workflows, scouting and Combine tools, stadium operations, and club business functions—an extension the league and Microsoft describe as assistance rather than automation. NFL’s visible association with Microsoft began as a Surface...

Microsoft’s August cumulative (KB5063878) for Windows 11 24H2 has been linked by multiple independent testers and industry observers to a storage regression that can make some NVMe SSDs disappear during heavy writes — sometimes temporarily, sometimes with irrecoverable damage — and the safest path for now is conservative: back up, avoid large sequential writes, pause or delay the update on vulnerable systems, and follow vendor guidance until Microsoft and SSD makers publish coordinated...

Microsoft has quietly changed one of Excel’s oldest conventions: now you can call an AI assistant from inside a worksheet cell the same way you call SUM or VLOOKUP — with a new COPILOT function that accepts plain‑language prompts, references ranges and tables, and returns dynamic, spillable outputs directly into the grid. (techcommunity.microsoft.com, windowscentral.com) Background Microsoft’s Copilot initiative has already been stitched into Office apps and Windows, but the COPILOT function...