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Mercedes-AMG Petronas’ off-season announcement with Microsoft is not a simple logo swap — it is a deliberate, multi-year strategic commitment to place cloud computing and enterprise AI at the center of how a world-class Formula 1 team designs, simulates and races its car in the new 2026 technical era. The formal partnership, unveiled alongside the W17 reveal, promises to deepen Mercedes’ use of Microsoft Azure, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), GitHub and Microsoft 365 in factory and paddock...

Microsoft's choice to bundle and publish the bulk of Windows security updates on a single weekday — the now‑famous "Patchch Tuesday" — is the product of two decades of operational learning, security pressure, and the practical needs of IT teams. The pattern isn't arbitrary: Microsoft formalized a monthly release cadence in October 2003 to make patching predictable and more manageable for administrators, and Tuesday emerged as the optimal weekday because it balances operational realities...

A tiny, tray-resident Windows app called Trdo — free, open-source, and built with modern Windows UI frameworks — has quietly reminded many of why internet radio still matters: simplicity, serendipity, and one-click listening that lets someone else do the curation while you get on with your day. Background For more than a decade streaming services have reshaped how people discover and consume music. On-demand platforms offer unparalleled control, libraries that dwarf FM playlists, and...

Fourteen years after the idea was first teased, Nex Computer’s NexPhone has moved from concept to preorder — a rugged, midrange Android handset that legally and technically promises three distinct operating environments in a single pocket device: a clean Android 16 daily phone, a GPU‑accelerated Debian Linux desktop that runs inside Android, and an optional, separately bootable Windows 11 on Arm installation for full desktop compatibility. Background / Overview The NexPhone is the latest...

Windows 11’s new Start Menu can be reshaped into a near‑perfect replica of an Android app drawer — and with a few deliberate toggles and a little patience you can achieve a fast, alphabetical, one‑page app launcher that feels more like a phone than a relic of the 1990s GUI era. Background When Microsoft first shipped the Start Menu in 1995 it solved a core usability problem: quickly find and launch applications. Over three decades the Start Menu has evolved, sometimes dramatically, but its...

Microsoft’s explanation for missing Windows 11 features cuts to the heart of a long-running tension: modernize the shell and ship a polished experience, or preserve decades of customization and power-user affordances. The short version is simple — Microsoft rebuilt major parts of the Windows shell, made engineering trade-offs, and used telemetry and prioritization to decide which legacy features to restore. The resulting decisions explain why some familiar behaviors (notably moving the...

Microsoft’s January platform update flips a long-standing constraint for Windows on Arm: the Xbox app is now available on all Arm-based Windows 11 PCs, enabling players to download, install and play a large portion of the Xbox PC catalog locally while preserving Xbox Cloud Gaming as a seamless fallback. Background Arm-powered Windows PCs have long promised excellent battery life, thin-and-light designs, and always‑connected connectivity. For years, however, modern PC gaming remained a major...

Microsoft has quietly rolled out a new developer tool that aims to remove much of the friction that has kept many cross‑platform teams from building first‑class Windows apps: the Windows App Development CLI — known in preview as winapp — an open‑source, opinionated command‑line utility that centralizes project bootstrapping, manifest and certificate management, identity injection for debugging, and MSIX packaging, and is being distributed both as a WinGet package and as an npm module for...

NVIDIA’s GeForce Game Ready Driver 376.33 for Windows 10 64‑bit returned to the conversation this week as users hunt archived packages and “clearance” downloads, but what looks like a convenient solution for legacy systems or specific software compatibility is a mixed bag: the driver is a genuine WHQL release from December 14, 2016, and it delivered important game‑ready optimizations at the time, yet it also predates years of security fixes and Windows platform changes — making careful...

Microsoft’s internal experiments with AI coding tools have quietly revealed a pragmatic truth: the company that loudly promotes GitHub Copilot to customers is also road‑testing competitors inside its own walls — and in some teams, Anthropic’s Claude is being used side‑by‑side with Copilot to do real coding work. Background Microsoft has spent the last three years embedding AI into Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, and developer workflows under the Copilot banner. That public push is only part...

AMD Adrenaline theraithes on Windows 10 have a surprisingly consistent playbook: messy installs, OS/driver timing mismatches, and aggressive power‑management features. This article lays out a tested, low‑risk workflow to stop crashes, recover a broken display stack, and choose the best long‑term path for stability — with clear step‑by‑step instructions, technical checks, and a frank assessment of residual risks. Overview Windows 10 users reporting frequent driver crashes with AMD Adrenalin...

Microsoft’s Xbox PC app is now available on Arm-based Windows 11 devices, and the rollout is more than a storefront change — it’s the visible result of months of platform work that expands local Game Pass installs, adds richer compatibility signals, and leans on a significantly upgraded Prism translation layer to make many x86/x64 titles runnable on Snapdragon-powered hardware...

Microsoft’s new PC Manager proves useful as a one‑pane maintenance assistant, delivering modest, measurable wins on a well‑kept Windows 11 laptop while remaining deliberately conservative about invasive “fixes” — a practical firmst‑party alternative to third‑party one‑click cleanfiles that’s best treated as a monthly maintenance pass rather than a cure‑all. . Background / Overview Microsoft PC Manager is a free, Store‑distributed utility that bundles cleanup, startup/process control, a...

Microsoft’s January cumulative update for Windows—published as KB5074109 on January 13, 2026—has put many users and IT teams in an untenable position: accept a security patch that breaks the classic (Win32) Outlook client for a subset of users, or remove critical protections that close more than a hundred vulnerabilities. The problem is real, Microsoft has acknowledged it, and its interim guidance effectively forces a choice between email access (or migration to webmail) and system security...

Microsoft’s Exchange Online team has published clear, actionable guidance that demystifies how retention and recovery behave for Exchange Online public folders — and why administrators should treat public-folder retention differently from mailbox retention policies to avoid surprise data loss, compliance gaps, and quota-driven service interruptions. Background / Overview Public folders remain a live part of many organizations’ collaboration and compliance surfaces, even as other groups...

PayPal’sales agreement to acquire Cymbio marks a decisive bet on “agentic commerce” — the fast-emerging market where AI assistants discover, compare and complete purchases on behalf of consumers — and accelerates PayPal’s effort to make millions of merchants discoverable and transactable across AI platforms. Background Agentic commerce describes a shift from human-led shopping journeys to interactions where autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents execute parts of the shopping workflow...

Microsoft has pushed back the rollout of a contentious Microsoft Teams feature that would automatically set employees’ reported work location when their device connects to a corporate Wi‑Fi network or mapped desk peripherals, moving the general availability window to early March 2026 with completion expected by mid‑March 2026. Background Microsoft’s Message Center entry for the change (Message ID MC1081568) describes a tenant‑controlled, opt‑in capability that maps Wi‑Fi SSIDs/BSSIDs and...

Microsoft’s Maia is the company’s first-generation, in‑house AI accelerator family — a purpose‑built silicon and systems play that seeks to give Azure direct control over the performance, cost and scaling of large‑language-model training and high‑volume inference workloads. Launched publicly with the Maia 100 design, Microsoft pairs the chip with custom server boards, liquid‑cooling racks and a software stack tuned for Azure workloads, aiming to reduce dependence on third‑party GPUs while...

Microsoft is rolling out a new, client‑side shield inside Microsoft Teams that will warn users when an inbound VoIP call appears to be impersonating a trusted brand—a move that extends the collaboration platform’s recent anti‑phishing controls into the calling channel and aims to blunt the rising threat of vishing and brand‑spoof social engineering. Background Microsoft has progressively hardened Teams over the past year by adding message and file protections that scan for malicious URLs...

Hackers are now combining sophisticated, customizable phishing kits with phone-based social engineering to pull off real-time, MFA-defeating attacks against single sign-on (SSO) systems used by Google, Microsoft, Okta and major cryptocurrency providers. Security teams are seeing the emergence of purpose-built “vishing kits” — phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) offerings that let an attacker orchestrate the browser UI while speaking to the victim on the phone, dynamically changing the fake...