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ZDNET’s hands‑on with the GEEKOM IT15 Mini PC shows a clear, practical win for power users willing to swap Windows 11 for Linux: the tiny system punches well above its weight for everyday workflows, but its AI and graphics claims need careful interpretation before you buy. Background The GEEKOM IT15 is one of the newest entrants in the high‑performance mini PC category, built around Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 platform. Vendors position the IT15 as a compact desktop replacement with modern...

Your student laptop should be an enabler, not a compromise — a lightweight workhorse that keeps pace with back-to-back lectures, group work, and late-night deadlines without tethering you to an outlet or turning your backpack into dead weight. Overview Students are sold on flashy specs and glossy ads, but the everyday wins come from a focused set of features that actually matter when you're moving between classes, libraries, and study sessions. A sensible checklist includes portability, a...

Microsoft’s latest move to blunt the impact of laptop failures and cyber incidents is pragmatic, bluntly honest, and engineered to sell a comfort-level businesses didn’t know they needed: a short-term, managed Cloud PC that employees can be switched onto when their physical machines fail, are lost, or are taken offline for security remediation. The offering—Windows 365 Reserve—arrives as a gated public preview that hands each licensed user up to 10 days of pre‑configured Cloud PC access per...

Microsoft has moved Universal Print beyond preview with the general availability of Universal Print anywhere — a cloud-native pull print capability that lets employees send print jobs to a universal queue and only release them at a physical device after authenticating there, reducing unattended sensitive printouts, simplifying printer selection, and lowering waste across mixed OS fleets. Background Universal Print started as Microsoft’s cloud-first replacement for traditional print servers...

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday closed a dangerous mix of high‑impact remote code execution (RCE) flaws and a publicly disclosed Kerberos elevation‑of‑privilege (EoP) vulnerability that together raise the operational urgency for domain controllers, document‑processing servers, and any service that decodes images or metafiles. Background Patch Tuesday remains the single most important predictable security event for Windows administrators; Microsoft’s August 12, 2025 monthly rollup shipped...

File Explorer in Windows 11 is powerful, but out of the box it includes modern context-menu cruft, pinned pages, and automatic folder sniffing that can slow and clutter everyday navigation — the eight Registry tweaks below strip away the noise, speed up browsing, and restore classic behaviors for people who prefer control over convenience. Overview Windows 11’s File Explorer blends new touches (a compact modern context menu, a Gallery view, tight OneDrive integration) with legacy behaviors...

You’ve just powered on a Copilot+ PC and that first blink of the Windows logo feels like a reveal: this isn’t just another laptop—it’s a handset for a new generation of on-device AI, marketed to be faster, smarter, and longer-lived than the machines many of us replaced. Microsoft’s “Copilot+” push bundles specialized AI hardware (NPUs), brand-new system features such as Recall, Click to Do, and Cocreator in Paint, and bold performance and battery claims—up to 58% faster than a MacBook Air...

Microsoft has set a firm deadline: Windows 11, version 23H2 (Home and Pro) will stop receiving security and quality updates on November 11, 2025, forcing millions of consumer PCs to move to a supported release or face growing security, compliance, and operational risk. Background Windows 11 uses a cadence of annual feature updates and a “Modern Lifecycle” servicing model that gives Home and Pro editions 24 months of servicing per feature release, while Enterprise and Education editions...

Microsoft’s latest hiring playbook has moved from raises and restricted stock to what looks like an all-out bidding war: internal documents obtained by reporters show the company is actively targeting engineers and researchers at Meta with multimillion- and—at times—near–multibillion-dollar compensation packages as it races to secure talent for its expanding AI efforts. Background Microsoft’s public-facing strategy over the past two years has been to embed large language models and...

Microsoft’s mobile Outlook is set for another interface tweak — but the exact scope and timing reported in one headline require scrutiny. A recent item circulating in the tech press claims Microsoft will relocate the Send button from the bottom compose toolbar to the top header of the Compose view on Outlook for iOS and Android in September 2025. That change, if true, would be presented as a usability fix designed to reduce accidental sends on touch devices. Public, official Microsoft...

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday is a heavyweight release: Redmond shipped fixes for more than a hundred security flaws, closed a clutch of high‑severity remote code execution and privilege‑escalation defects, and bundled new Windows 11 quality and AI‑adjacent features that will change how some organizations manage recovery and device AI capabilities. The refresh also carries near‑term operational deadlines—most notably a limited six‑month Extended Security Update (ESU) option for...

Microsoft has opened public preview of Azure Storage Discovery, a fully managed service that gives organizations a centralized, tenant‑wide view of their Azure Blob Storage estate and pairs that visibility with AI‑driven, natural‑language interrogation via Azure Copilot to speed cost, security, and operational decisions. Overview Azure Storage Discovery is presented as a “single pane of glass” for Blob Storage: it aggregates capacity, activity, error and configuration telemetry across...

Microsoft has pushed out the August 12, 2025 cumulative update KB5063709 for supported Windows 10 channels, raising affected machines to OS Builds 19044.6216 and 19045.6216 and delivering a mix of security hardening, bug fixes and a handful of platform-level changes that matter to both consumers and enterprises. Background Windows 10 continues to receive monthly cumulative updates as Microsoft winds down mainstream servicing ahead of the announced end-of-support date. The KB5063709 release...

Across two years of reporting for the Windows Intelligence column I followed a single, sometimes messy, but always consequential story: Windows ceases to be just an operating system and becomes an AI‑first platform—and that shift matters for every user, buyer, and IT pro who touches a PC. Background / Overview The Windows Intelligence newsletter documented a period of rapid change inside Microsoft and across the PC ecosystem: the arrival and maturation of Copilot, the practical and...

Microsoft appears to be testing an AI-driven companion that surfaces directly on the Windows 11 Taskbar — a small, persistent entry point for what Microsoft and code trackers are referring to as “agentic companions” — and the traces spotted in preview builds suggest it could proactively suggest actions, surface context-aware info, and even automate multi-step tasks, but the full capabilities, privacy model, and rollout plan remain speculative at this stage. Background / Overview Windows has...

Microsoft is quietly shipping three compact Microsoft 365 “companion” apps — Calendar, File Search, and People — that live in the Windows 11 taskbar to give knowledge workers one‑click access to meetings, documents, and colleagues without opening full Office or Teams windows. et previewed the companion app concept during its Ignite and Insider channel previews as part of a broader push to fuse Microsoft 365 services more tightly into the Windows 11 shell. The apps are intentionally small...

Microsoft has begun rolling out GPT-5 inside Visual Studio via GitHub Copilot, bringing OpenAI’s newest coding model to paid Copilot users and promising faster responses, stronger reasoning on large problems, and clearer, more maintainable code suggestions that can handle end-to-end engineering tasks with minimal prompting. (devblogs.microsoft.com, github.blog) Background The integration of GPT-5 into Visual Studio is part of a broader rollout of the model across GitHub Copilot’s ecosystem —...

Microsoft Edge’s Copilot in Canary has started showing a new Smart (GPT‑5) option, and early sightings suggest Microsoft is quietly testing a model‑routing feature that automatically chooses when to give a short answer and when to escalate to GPT‑5’s deeper reasoning pathway. Early hands‑on reports show the Smart mode appearing in the Copilot mode selector in the New Tab and the Copilot button in the address bar, letting users start a Smart (GPT‑5) session from several entry points inside...

Windows still includes a built‑in backup utility that many users overlook, and while it’s not the slick, cloud‑first tool Microsoft pushes today, it remains a practical way to create scheduled local backups and full system images—if you understand its limits and use it carefully. ows historically shipped multiple overlapping backup systems designed for different problems: continuous file versioning, cloud profile sync, and full disk imaging for bare‑metal recovery. Today those pieces include...

Microsoft pushed its August Patch Tuesday cumulative updates on August 12–13, 2025, delivering the monthly security rollups that fix a broad range of vulnerabilities across Windows client and server platforms—most notably a publicly disclosed privilege‑escalation bug in Windows Kerberos (CVE‑2025‑53779) and several high‑severity remote code execution flaws that carry CVSS scores up to 9.8. The release is packaged as combined Servicing Stack Updates (SSU) plus Latest Cumulative Updates (LCU)...