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Microsoft removed the bypassnro.cmd helper from Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26200.5516, released to the Dev Channel on March 28, 2025, making the familiar local-account setup shortcut unavailable in that preview build. But the more consequential detail omitted by NeoTeo’s headline is that Microsoft removed a script, not the underlying setup behavior, and the change initially applied to an Insider branch—not immediately to every retail Windows 11 installation. Microsoft documented the...

HP says AI PCs reached 44% of its total compute shipments in its fiscal second quarter, up from more than 35% in the prior quarter. The figure, highlighted again this week by HP Southern and Central Africa managing director Yesh Surjoodeen in an interview with ITWeb TV, is real—but it does not establish that nearly half of HP customers are running meaningful AI workloads on their laptops. The more useful reading is that HP’s product mix is changing quickly as manufacturers use neural...

Oracle’s expansion of its AI-branded database services on AWS is already a deployable product change, not merely a partnership promise: Oracle Autonomous AI Database Serverless is available through Oracle Database@AWS, with a public AWS Marketplace purchase option that removes the previous requirement to negotiate a private offer first. That is the concrete development behind the August 14 Zacks item, “Oracle Expands AI Database Offerings Through AWS Cloud: What’s Ahead?” But the timing...

The European Commission’s newly released cloud and AI infrastructure study puts numbers and causes behind a problem that European IT buyers have been living with for years: capacity is scarce, unevenly distributed, and increasingly controlled by companies headquartered outside the EU. As reported by INSIGHT EU MONITORING, the Technopolis-led research now underpins the impact assessment for the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act, or CADA, which the Commission presented on June 3, 2026. For...

Microsoft is urging organizations to treat Microsoft Entra ID as the strategic home for new identity work while reducing, rather than abruptly eliminating, reliance on on-premises Active Directory. Neowin’s August 14 report frames the guidance around five warning signs that an organization has outgrown its traditional identity stack, but Microsoft’s own technical documentation makes the more consequential point: this is a multi-year application and device modernization program, not a...

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 adds a p2p topology command for Intel Arc Pro systems, giving administrators a direct way to see which installed GPUs can communicate with one another and through which paths. The practical value is highest on multi-GPU workstations and servers running inference, rendering, virtualization, or other jobs where GPU-to-GPU traffic can make or break scaling. Intel’s GitHub release notes detail the new command, while Phoronix and VideoCardz reported the release this week...

PowerShell 7.6.5 is a servicing, security, and release-engineering update rather than a feature release. Microsoft published it on August 14, 2026, less than four weeks after 7.6.4. The official comparison spans 28 commits from 11 contributors and changes 57 files, while the curated release notes reduce that work to ten named pull requests: one engine fix, one CI change, and eight build or packaging changes. For most administrators, the recommendation is straightforward: PowerShell 7.6.5 is...

Scythe’s $42.99 Magoroku dual-tower air cooler is a compelling memory cooler in Tom’s Hardware’s latest testing, but it is a poor fit for an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D running Precision Boost Overdrive. The important finding is not simply that its CPU results lagged: moving the Magoroku’s front fan away from the DIMM slots improved CPU cooling while preserving full RAM clearance, yet the cooler still finished at or near the bottom of Tom’s Hardware’s AM5 thermal charts. That makes the Magoroku a...

InfoWorld’s August 14 assessment of neocloud operations gets the central operational point right: an enterprise that moves AI training or inference onto CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe Cloud, or a similar GPU specialist is acquiring a different operating contract, not merely a lower-priced alternative to Azure GPU virtual machines. The change is most visible when an AI workload leaves a broad Azure estate for a dedicated GPU cluster. Identity, logging, storage, network segmentation, scheduling...

Windows 11 Build 28000.2796, released as KB5120996 to the Release Preview Channel on August 14, gives version 26H1 a broad set of shell, accessibility, power-management, networking, and remote-work fixes — but the Start menu changes highlighted by WindowsReport are only part of a gradual rollout. Even among Release Preview participants, Microsoft says feature availability can vary by device and market. The more important practical limit is who can run this branch at all. Microsoft’s 26H1...

OpenPete, an unofficial Windows port of the original 1998 Spyro the Dragon, is now publicly available in version 0.1.3, giving PC players a way to run the PlayStation-era game as a native host application rather than inside a conventional emulator. The release brings configurable higher frame rates, genuine widescreen output, extended draw distances, and replacement texture and music assets, according to the project’s site and reporting by Time Extension. For Windows players, the important...

A Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an MSI PRO X870-P WIFI motherboard reportedly failed together after roughly three months of use, leaving visible scorching around the AM5 contact area and a bulged processor package. The owner says the board was on its latest available BIOS, CPU settings were left alone, and AMD EXPO was the only BIOS option enabled—but the available evidence cannot show whether a voltage-control failure, a socket or installation problem, a defective component, or another electrical...

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is being positioned to retrieve text from scanned PDFs and from images embedded in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files—a useful expansion for organizations whose records are full of screenshots, photographed whiteboards, and legacy paper documents. But the practical message for IT teams is narrower than the promotional framing suggests: this is a search-retrieval improvement, not proof that Copilot has become a dependable OCR archive or a substitute for checking the...

Copilot governance on a managed Windows PC now starts with a less glamorous task than choosing an AI policy: determining which Copilot experience is actually installed, which identity is using it, and which data boundary applies. TechTarget’s assessment of the expanding Copilot risk surface is directionally right, but it collapses several products into “Copilot in Windows” when they are administered through different controls. For Windows administrators, the immediate consequence is that...

Copilot+ PCs are worth buying for a defined slice of Windows users—mobile employees, people who spend their days in video calls, and teams that have a real plan for on-device AI—but they are not a blanket replacement for every Windows 11 PC. The important buying decision is not whether a laptop carries Microsoft’s Copilot+ badge. It is whether the user will actually use the Windows features gated behind its 40-TOPS neural processing unit, or whether the organization is prepared to build and...

WatchGuard FireCloud Total Access gives remote Windows users a managed path to internal resources without exposing a traditional full-network VPN, but IT Pro’s hands-on review also exposes the deployment detail administrators should test before treating it as a simple VPN retirement project: FireCloud and WatchGuard Endpoint Security currently share the same endpoint agent framework. The product’s core design is sound. FireCloud routes a connected user’s traffic through a nearby WatchGuard...

Microsoft Purview’s Advanced Review Set Explorer is already documented as a public preview for eDiscovery review sets, even though Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 484086 still labels the feature “In development” and assigns its preview date to February 2026. For compliance teams, the practical reading is clear: test it as a preview now if it appears in your tenant, but do not treat the December 2026 general-availability date as a completed rollout. The new tool puts a Kusto Query Language, or...

Microsoft says its app-centric management model for Microsoft Teams will reach GCC High tenants in September 2026, giving administrators a per-app way to decide whether every user, selected users and groups, or nobody can install a Teams app. The Microsoft 365 Roadmap entry, ID 569433, describes the feature as still in development, so government customers should treat the September date as a target rather than a completed rollout. The practical change is a move away from building and...

Microsoft Purview’s Data Loss Prevention notifications can now put remediation controls inside an end user’s email for OneDrive and SharePoint policy matches, letting recipients remove sharing links, delete a file, apply a label, request an override, or report a false positive without first working through the Purview portal. But administrators should treat the feature as a preview deployment, despite the Microsoft 365 Roadmap listing it as “Launched” with general availability dated December...

Microsoft has cancelled Roadmap ID 361914, the long-standing Exchange Online item that promised inbound SMTP DANE with DNSSEC for GCC High and Department of Defense tenants. The important point for government-cloud administrators is that this is a roadmap correction, not a confirmed removal of SMTP DANE from Exchange Online—but Microsoft has not yet supplied the replacement roadmap item, rollout status, or tenant-specific documentation that would settle what GCC High and DoD customers can...