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TweakNow has quietly entered the automatic theme arena with AutoDark 1.0, a free, Windows 11–focused utility that promises one thing and one thing only: reliably switch Windows between light and dark mode on a schedule, optionally sync wallpapers, and avoid interrupting full‑screen apps or games. Background Windows has supported a light and a dark theme for several releases, but native scheduling for theme changes has long been limited or awkward to configure. Enthusiast and open‑source...

Microsoft appears to be adding hover-activated quick-action buttons to File Explorer in Windows 11, putting commonly used commands — including Open file location, Ask Copilot, and a More actions (three-dot) menu — one mouse movement away on the Home page and in Recent/Favorites/Shared lists, a change first spotted in a tip and preview screenshot shared by a longtime Windows watcher. Background File Explorer has undergone a steady stream of incremental updates across recent Windows 11 builds...

The UK government has announced a national programme to trial agentic AI across public services, inviting frontier AI labs to work with Whitehall teams to build prototypes that could automate routine “life admin” — from filling forms and booking appointments to tailored careers and apprenticeship advice — with a potential nationwide rollout by late 2027 if pilots prove safe and effective. This initiative, set out in the AI Opportunities Action Plan and reflected across government playbooks...

Indian‑origin Microsoft engineer Ritvika Nagula’s account of earning four promotions in five years has become a practical primer for career acceleration inside big tech: explicit goals, frequent manager check‑ins, mapping to internal role rubrics, and volunteering for end‑to‑end projects — a repeatable playbook she credits for rapid advancement at Microsoft Azure. Background Ritvika Nagula joined Microsoft’s Azure division in April 2019 as a fresh graduate and—after a first year spent...

Microsoft’s latest Insider preview activity finally delivers a visible step toward the system‑wide dark theme Windows users have been asking for: file operation dialogs — the long‑standing “flashbang” offenders that forced bright white popups in Dark Mode — are now rendering in dark palettes in the newest preview build, but the work is partial, staged, and still needs significant polish before it can be called complete. (blogs.windows.com, windowscentral.com) Background Windows added a...

I’ve been a Windows user for decades, certified and salaried in its administration, and I still find myself reluctantly staying on the platform while privately resenting much of what it has become. The piece forwarded here — a veteran Windows writer admitting he’s “staying on Windows, but I’m not happy about it” — is honest and blunt: long familiarity and productivity keep him tethered, but repeated breakage, mediocre built-in apps, slow or flaky file search and file management, and...

Microsoft has quietly begun to fix one of Windows 11’s most persistent frictions: the sudden, blinding white dialogs that have long broken the illusion of a system-wide Dark Mode. Recent Insider preview builds include dark-themed file-operation dialogs — copy/move progress windows, delete confirmations and access-denied prompts — a cosmetic but meaningful change that reduces the “flashbang” effect users have complained about for years. Background Windows first offered a user-selectable dark...

Microsoft has quietly changed the Microsoft Store’s update model: the long-standing, user-facing toggle to permanently disable automatic app updates now appears to be replaced on many consumer devices by a limited pause-only option that forces automatic updates to resume after a fixed interval (commonly one through five weeks). Background / Overview For years, Windows users who installed apps from the Microsoft Store relied on a simple Settings toggle — Update apps automatically — to keep...

A serious storage regression tied to Microsoft’s August cumulative update for Windows 11 — KB5063878 (OS Build 26100.4946) — has surfaced in the wild: users and independent testers report that sustained, large file writes can cause some NVMe SSDs to stop responding, disappear from Windows, and in a subset of reports leave written files corrupted or partitions inaccessible. The problem is being discussed across specialist outlets and community channels, and the early evidence points to a...

Microsoft has formally reiterated that Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025 — and with that deadline now just weeks away, a fresh privacy and security calculus has landed in millions of users’ laps. Microsoft’s August updates closed out more than 100 security flaws and pushed a registration path for the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program into Windows Update, giving home users a limited set of options to keep receiving security patches past the October...

A subtle but dangerous bug in Windows Server 2025’s Schema Master FSMO role is causing duplicate schema entries that can break Active Directory replication and trigger schema-mismatch errors on older domain controllers — the issue is being discussed by administrators and reported in the field while a vendor fix is apparently in progress. Background / Overview Active Directory’s schema is the immutable blueprint for every object and attribute in a forest: it defines which object classes...

Microsoft’s push to make AI the backbone of enterprise contract automation has moved from proof-of-concept to platform play, blending massive infrastructure bets, partner-led solutions, and an explicit governance narrative — all while forcing painful trade-offs across its workforce and customers. In short: Microsoft is building the plumbing for contract automation at scale, investing heavily in Azure and Copilot integrations that promise measurable productivity gains, but the strategy comes...

A terse rumor out of a regional tech blog says Samsung may be reconsidering a return to Windows on smartphones — allegedly proposing a Windows 10 Mobile variant based on Galaxy S8-class hardware, possibly branded ATIV S8 and timed to appear around Microsoft’s early‑May education event. The report is unconfirmed and contains several inconsistencies with known facts, but it is notable because it touches a long-running thread: Samsung’s strategic relationship with Microsoft and the reality that...

Intel and Microsoft’s move to fold a dedicated Vision Processing Unit into Windows’ on-device ML story is not a product tweak — it is an architectural shift that changes where and how many Windows AI experiences will run, who will pay the power bill, and how developers will ship intelligent apps for constrained devices. Background / Overview In 2018 Microsoft introduced Windows Machine Learning (Windows ML) — a runtime and set of APIs that let developers run ONNX-format models locally on...

A mid‑August cumulative update for Windows 11 — KB5063878 (OS Build 26100.4946), released on August 12, 2025 — is being linked by multiple independent community tests and tech outlets to a storage regression that can render some SSDs inaccessible after sustained, large sequential writes, with affected drives reportedly disappearing from the OS and, in some cases, exposing file corruption and unreadable SMART data. Background / Overview Microsoft released KB5063878 on August 12, 2025 as the...

Microsoft’s Copilot 3D brings single‑click 2D→3D conversion to the browser: upload a clean JPG or PNG, wait seconds, and download a textured GLB that’s ready for preview, prototyping, or downstream editing. Background / Overview Copilot 3D is an experimental feature surfaced inside Copilot Labs that converts a single flat image into a textured 3D model (exported as a GLB file) with a few clicks. The flow is deliberately simple — sign in, open Labs, choose Copilot 3D, upload a PNG or JPG...

Last week’s headlines brought a stark reminder that identity is the new battlefield: a major US credit union disclosed a breach that exposed entire customer identity kits, researchers revealed Android malware weaponizing NFC to enable real-time payment fraud, UK regulators tightened the rules on facial recognition in fintech, and Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday closed a dangerous Kerberos privilege-escalation hole — together these events expose converging risks for banks, fintechs, and...

Microsoft has flipped a switch that changes how the company—and millions of its customers—will think about productivity, development, and cloud AI: OpenAI’s newly announced GPT‑5 family is being rolled out across Microsoft’s Copilot portfolio, GitHub, Visual Studio, and Azure AI Foundry in what the company describes as an ecosystem‑wide, day‑one deployment rather than a piecemeal model update. o GPT‑5 is not a simple model swap. The company has adopted a multi‑variant model family and an...

Microsoft quietly confirmed that after the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (version 1607) it planned two more major feature updates for 2017 — internally codenamed Redstone 2 and Redstone 3 — setting a cadence that would shape Windows 10’s “Windows as a Service” era and push new features through the Windows Insider Program before broad rollout. Background In mid‑2016 Microsoft shipped the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Windows 10, version 1607) and simultaneously published guidance for IT...

Microsoft’s August cumulative for Windows 11 (KB5063878, OS Build 26100.4946) has been tied in independent community testing and aggregation threads to a serious storage regression that can render certain NVMe SSDs inaccessible during large, sustained write operations — and administrators also faced a separate enterprise installation regression (error 0x80240069) that disrupted WSUS/SCCM rollouts. r on August 12, 2025 as a combined servicing stack and cumulative update for Windows 11 version...