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Microsoft pushed an emergency out‑of‑band update late last week to repair a regression introduced by its January security rollup that left Outlook and other programs unable to open or save files stored in cloud‑backed folders such as OneDrive and Dropbox. The fix — delivered as KB5078127 for Windows 11 24H2/25H2 (with parallel KBs for other Windows and Server branches) — is cumulative and consolidates the January 13 security updates plus earlier emergency patches, and Microsoft is urging...

A familiar slice of Windows nostalgia has been resurrected by a community modder, but what looks like a fun time machine comes with a heavy dose of modern reality: vendor support for these operating systems is gone, and the security calculus has shifted dramatically. Enthusiast releases of ready‑to‑install, pre‑patched Windows 7 and Windows Vista ISOs from a contributor known as Bob Pony promise years of update work baked into single images, easing installation on contemporary hardware — yet...

Microsoft has confirmed that its January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5074109) is tied to a serious, if currently limited, regression that can leave physical PCs unbootable with the stop code UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME — a black-screen failure that requires manual recovery through WinRE or, in worst cases, a clean install. Background / Overview Microsoft shipped its January 13, 2026 Patch Tuesday cumulative update (tracked as KB5074109, OS builds 26200.7623 and 26100.7623) to...

Microsoft has pushed another out‑of‑band Windows 11 update after January’s Patch Tuesday introduced new regressions that left some systems failing to shut down, broke Remote Desktop sign‑ins and caused cloud‑storage related apps (including Outlook in some configurations) to hang. Microsoft’s immediate, focused fixes — first on January 17 and again on January 24 — restored the most acute behaviors, but the episode exposes persistent quality and servicing‑pipeline challenges that both home...

I ran a single PowerShell script and, within minutes, the noisy pieces of Windows 11 that had nagged me for months—telemetry pings, pinned promotional apps, taskbar widgets and search that insisted on web results—were pared back to a clean, usable desktop that felt like mine again. Background / Overview Windows 11 ships in 2024–2026 with a modern shell and a raft of built-in services and consumer-focused apps. For many users a fresh install is fast and stable, but the out-of-the-box...

Microsoft’s January cumulative for Windows 11 has turned a routine Patch Tuesday into a multi‑front support incident: a January 13, 2026 security rollup introduced a cluster of regressions that forced Microsoft to issue emergency, out‑of‑band (OOB) fixes within days and to keep engineers working on lingering boot‑failure reports and cloud‑file I/O crashes. Background / Overview Microsoft shipped its regular January 2026 cumulative updates on January 13, delivering combined Servicing Stack...

Microsoft rushed a second emergency out‑of‑band Windows 11 update in late January to fix a regression that left Outlook and other apps freezing, hanging, or losing mail items when they accessed files stored in cloud‑synced folders such as OneDrive and Dropbox. Background In Microsoft’s normal Patch Tuesday cadence, the January 2026 cumulative security update (commonly tracked under KB5074109 for several Windows 11 branches) was released on January 13 and intended to deliver routine security...

Microsoft's January 2026 Windows 11 update cycle has turned into a textbook case of update risk: a standard Patch Tuesday release on January 13 triggered a cascade of regressions that forced two out‑of‑band (OOB) emergency patches and left a limited but severe set of physical machines unable to boot with the stop code UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. IT teams and home users alike are now juggling urgent recovery work, rapid deployment decisions, and the classic trade‑off between applying security...

Pharmaceutical companies are quietly rolling out AI where it actually moves the needle: behind the lab bench, inside the paperwork, and across the administrative processes that previously swallowed months of calendar time and millions in budget. What the headlines call “AI drug discovery” is still aspirational in many corners; the concrete returns are happening today in trial site selection, patient outreach and retention, medical writing, and regulatory dossier assembly — the unglamorous...

GWI’s new Agent Spark embeds the company’s survey-backed audience data directly into major conversational AI platforms — including ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft Copilot — promising analyst‑grade audience answers from first‑party sources inside the chat tools that marketing, product and insights teams already use. Background GWI (formerly GlobalWebIndex) has spent more than a decade building a global, survey‑based consumer dataset and a taxonomy of audience profiling points used...

Microsoft is quietly testing a personality selector inside Copilot that will let users choose how the assistant responds — a subtle but consequential shift in how Microsoft surfaces AI customization to everyday users. Early sightings show the new control living in a “Personality Studio” area of the Copilot chat interface, currently offering a very small set of styles (default and concise for many testers) and appearing alongside updated memory controls. The experiment signals Microsoft’s...

Pharmaceutical companies are reporting that artificial intelligence is already cutting measurable time from clinical trials and the heavy paperwork that surrounds regulatory submissions — not by inventing new drugs overnight, but by streamlining the “messy middle” of development: site selection, patient recruitment, document assembly and medical writing. Industry conversations at the recent JP Morgan Healthcare Conference and coverage syndicated around the world describe practical wins that...

Microsoft pushed out another out-of-band emergency update late this month to undo a painful regression that broke file I/O for cloud-backed locations — a bug that left Outlook hung, emails duplicated or missing, and administrators scrambling for fixes. Overview The sequence began with Microsoft’s January 13, 2026 security release (KB5074109), which was intended to deliver the usual mix of security hardening and quality fixes. Within days administrators and end users reported a range of...

Microsoft’s Q2 preview has moved from routine quarter-to-quarter analysis into what feels like the industry’s greatest pressure test since 2021 — not because the company is suddenly vulnerable, but because the scale, timing and economics of its AI bets are now both measurable and market-moving. The headline numbers are impressive: double-digit revenue growth, an AI business that company management says has crossed an annualized revenue run rate in the low double-digit billions, and capex...

Microsoft has confirmed that a limited number of Windows 11 systems that received January’s cumulative update (KB5074109) — and some of the subsequent out‑of‑band patches — are failing to complete startup and are showing the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME stop code, forcing manual recovery on affected physical devices. Background January’s Patch Tuesday (released January 13, 2026) delivered the monthly servicing bundle for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 as KB5074109 (OS builds 26100.7623 and...

Steve Downes — the gravel-voiced actor who has been Master Chief for more than two decades — has quietly reopened one of Halo’s thorniest conversations by confirming what many players suspected: the promotional campaign for Halo 5: Guardians painted a story the shipped game did not deliver, and recording those trailers put him in an uncomfortable position between studio direction and character fidelity. Background Halo began as the flagship first-person shooter for Microsoft’s Xbox in 2001...

Microsoft's January 2026 cumulative rollup for Windows 11 touched off a rare and expensive cascade: a Patch Tuesday release on January 13 produced multiple regressions that forced Microsoft to ship two emergency out‑of‑band (OOB) fixes within a single week, and left administrators scrambling to recover machines that would not shut down, lost cloud-file I/O, or in a small but serious number of cases failed to boot with UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME errors. The rapid sequence — initial security...

Microsoft has confirmed a new and potentially catastrophic side‑effect from its January 2026 Windows 11 security update: a limited but serious set of devices are failing to boot entirely after installing KB5074109, showing the stop code UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME and requiring manual recovery to restore functionality. Background Microsoft shipped the January 13, 2026 Patch Tuesday cumulative update for Windows 11 under KB5074109 (OS Builds 26200.7623 and 26100.7623). The package fixed more...

Microsoft pushed a second emergency, out‑of‑band Windows 11 cumulative update in late January to fix a regression that left Outlook — and other applications interacting with cloud‑synced files — hanging, crashing, or losing mail when saving or opening files stored in OneDrive, Dropbox and similar services. Background / Overview In mid‑January Microsoft shipped its regular Patch Tuesday cumulative updates (the January security baseline). Within days, telemetry and field reports flagged...

Pharmaceutical companies are quietly moving the clipboard — and, increasingly, whole chunks of clinical development — from manual, contractor-heavy workflows into AI-powered pipelines that promise to shave weeks to months off site selection, patient recruitment and the tedious document assembly that accompanies regulatory submissions. Background The math that drives the industry’s urgency is familiar: bringing a new medicine from discovery to market commonly takes a decade or more and costs...