Featured content

Microsoft has added a first‑class Excel function named COPILOT — an equals‑sign‑style formula that lets users call Copilot directly from the grid, pass natural‑language prompts and ranges as context, and surface AI‑generated arrays and single‑cell results that recalculate with the workbook. The new function turns Copilot from a sidebar/chat helper into a native spreadsheet primitive, but it also brings quotas, edge‑case bugs, and governance questions that IT teams and power users must treat...

Microsoft has put a generative AI assistant where most knowledge workers spend the bulk of their time: directly into Excel’s grid with a new COPILOT function that lets Microsoft 365 Copilot run natural-language prompts inside individual cells and return multi-cell arrays, categories, summaries, and structured data that update automatically as the sheet changes. Background Excel is the one productivity app that survived every major shift in office tooling because it serves as both spreadsheet...

Microsoft's renewed push to bridge mobile and desktop briefly returned Android apps to the Windows 11 conversation this week as testing activity resurfaced in U.S. preview channels — a development that resurrects familiar promises and fresh questions about the future of Android-on-Windows after years of engineering experiments and a formal deprecation notice from Microsoft. Background Since the Windows 11 launch cycle, Microsoft has pursued multiple strategies to bring mobile apps to the PC...

Microsoft has begun surfacing a 60‑day warning to hundreds of millions of Windows 10 users: the operating system’s mainstream support ends on October 14, 2025, and anyone who wants continued security patches after that date must either upgrade to Windows 11 (if their PC is eligible), replace the device, or enroll in Microsoft’s consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for a limited, one‑year safety net. Background Microsoft set an unambiguous lifecycle cutoff for Windows 10: after...

Microsoft’s upgrade machinery is currently offering Windows 11 24H2 to machines that, on paper, fail the company’s minimum security requirements — including systems with TPM 2.0 disabled — and multiple independent reports suggest this is happening to both consumer and enterprise devices, creating a practical and policy gap between what Microsoft says is required and what some users are actually seeing. Background / Overview When Windows 11 launched, Microsoft set a clear minimum baseline...

Microsoft 365 Copilot is reshaping how knowledge workers draft emails, summarize meetings, and automate tasks—but for regulated industries the productivity upside comes with a non‑negotiable requirement: auditable, defensible recordkeeping and governance. Enterprise compliance teams now face a new operational reality where AI interactions themselves can become regulated records, and vendors such as Smarsh are racing to plug the gap by capturing Copilot prompts, outputs, and the supporting...

A cluster of malicious npm packages — cataloged by researchers as a targeted infostealer campaign dubbed “Solana‑Scan” — has been used to lure Solana ecosystem developers into installing backdoored SDKs that harvest wallet credentials, local keyfiles and a broad sweep of developer artifacts, then expose those stolen assets through an easily accessible command‑and‑control portal. The discovery, disclosed in mid‑August by supply‑chain researchers, shows a focused attack profile, heavy...

Microsoft has selected Marvell’s LiquidSecurity family of hardware security modules (HSMs) to power Azure Cloud HSM, extending an existing Marvell–Azure relationship and bringing PCIe‑attached, FIPS 140‑3 Level 3‑validated HSM technology into Microsoft’s single‑tenant cloud HSM clusters for regulated and high‑assurance workloads. Background Azure Cloud HSM is Microsoft’s customer‑owned, highly available, single‑tenant HSM service that gives tenants full administrative control of...

Microsoft has issued an explicit, high‑urgency notice to Windows 10 users: free mainstream support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025, and the company is pushing a narrow set of pathways — upgrade to Windows 11, enroll in a time‑limited Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, or accept growing security risk — as the clock counts down. Background Since its 2015 debut, Windows 10 has been a dominant desktop platform, but Microsoft’s product lifecycle timelines are fixed: when a version...

Windows 11 includes a built-in Reserved Storage feature that can quietly hold back several gigabytes of your system drive for updates and system caches — and, if you urgently need every last byte, you can temporarily disable it to reclaim that space. Background: what Reserved Storage is and why it exists Microsoft introduced Reserved Storage to address a long-standing Windows problem: updates failing because the system ran out of free space during download or installation. The feature...

Microsoft’s Copilot branding has quietly become the connective tissue for a new generation of imagined and real-world AI hardware — and the latest speculative designs show how familiar form factors (earbuds, pins, pendants) might finally fulfill the original promise of Google Glass without a visible heads‑up display. Braz de Pina’s recent Copilot wearable concepts — including the ear‑worn Copilot Veja with stereo cameras and tactile Copilot controls — illustrate a decisive shift in thinking...

Microsoft’s August 2025 hotfixes for Skype for Business Server introduce a security-first change that will force organizations with hybrid deployments to act quickly: a new, customer-managed Dedicated Hybrid Application model replaces the long-standing Microsoft-managed shared service principal for Exchange Online integration, and failure to adopt it will degrade or disable hybrid features — with a hard functional cutoff looming in mid-October 2025 that also affects the Skype Meetings...

Microsoft is rolling a generative AI function directly into Excel’s calculation engine — a native formula called COPILOT that lets users pass natural‑language prompts and optional grid ranges to a cloud AI model and receive live, recalculating outputs inside cells, a capability that closely mirrors Google Sheets’ AI function introduced months earlier. Background Spreadsheets have long been the lingua franca of business operations, analytics, and ad‑hoc automation. Recent advances in large...

Microsoft's Azure Cloud HSM service will now run on Marvell’s LiquidSecurity hardware security modules (HSMs), a move that extends an existing Marvell–Azure relationship and brings PCIe‑based, FIPS 140‑3 Level 3‑certified, high‑density cryptographic hardware into Microsoft’s single‑tenant HSM clusters. Background Azure Cloud HSM is Microsoft’s single‑tenant, highly available HSM offering that gives customers administrative control over cryptographic keys and operations while Microsoft...

Microsoft’s August cumulative for Windows 11 (KB5063878) is at the center of a growing, technically consistent set of community reports: after installing the update, some users say NVMe SSDs can “vanish” during large, sustained file writes — sometimes leaving files corrupted, SMART/controller telemetry unreadable, and in a small number of reports drives that do not return to service without vendor intervention. These incidents appear reproducible under a narrow workload profile (long...

Microsoft has quietly begun repairing one of Windows 11’s most persistent cosmetic and usability fractures: several long-neglected file‑operation dialogs are now receiving a proper dark theme in Insider preview builds, a change that reduces the jarring white “flash” users have complained about for years and signals a pragmatic, staged effort to finish the platform’s Dark Mode story. Background Windows introduced a user‑selectable dark theme back in 2016, but the implementation across the...

Microsoft’s early public messaging around Windows 10 for phones promised a sweeping upgrade path for existing Windows Phone 8 devices, but the reality that followed was more complicated: the company did state that the majority of Lumia phones could be upgraded to Windows 10 while limiting the initial preview to a small, supported subset of devices to stabilize the platform. Background Microsoft announced Windows 10 with a bold cross-device vision: one core operating system across PCs...

Microsoft's brief on the hardware floor for running Android apps on Windows 11 boils down to a simple, pragmatic message: you need a modern PC — preferably with an SSD, virtualization enabled, and at least 8 GB of RAM (16 GB recommended) — and even then the practical value of that capability is now constrained by Microsoft's decision to end support for the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) and the Amazon Appstore on Windows in 2025. Background When Microsoft shipped the Windows Subsystem...

Microsoft’s long‑running dark‑mode problem has finally stopped being a perpetually unfinished promise: recent Windows Insider preview builds now show several legacy file‑operation dialogs obeying the system Dark theme instead of popping up as blinding white interruptions. The change — visible in builds shipped as Windows 11 Build 26100.5061 (KB5064081) and follow‑on test flights — is being enabled progressively via staged server‑side flags, and it represents the first concrete, broadly...

Microsoft has begun quietly testing Copilot-related recommendations inside the Windows 11 Start menu’s Recommended area — a move that places Microsoft’s AI assistant directly at the moment users choose what to do next and that, in practice, functions like a promotional surface for both the consumer Copilot app and the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot tier. The test, discovered in Insider builds and reported across the tech press, inserts actionable prompts such as “Ask Copilot,” “Write a first...