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If your Windows 11 PC has started to feel sluggish, the good news is that most slowdowns are fixable without a full reinstall or expensive upgrades — and a concise, prioritized plan will get you back to a responsive machine in an afternoon. Background / Overview Windows grows more feature-rich with every update, and richer software means more background activity, services, and user-facing helpers that can chew CPU, memory, and disk cycles. The practical checklist PCMag and other community...

Microsoft’s Copilot Studio has added xAI’s Grok 4.1 Fast to its model picker, making a high‑speed, large‑context, tool‑capable text model available in preview for United States‑based builders — but only after organization administrators explicitly opt in. The move expands Copilot Studio’s multi‑model lineup and gives enterprises a new performance‑oriented option for agentic workflows, while underscoring a recurring trade‑off: more model choice means more governance, contractual complexity...

Microsoft hasn’t formally announced a product called “Windows 12,” but the industry signals are strong enough that we can move beyond rumor stage and produce a reasoned forecast of what the next major Windows milestone will emphasize: an AI‑first desktop experience tightly coupled to new hardware tiers, a modularized and more secure OS core, and a deployment model that favors faster, componentized feature delivery over monolithic version jumps. The short version: expect Copilot embedded...

People often treat ChatGPT and its peers like private assistants — but when you type, upload, or speak sensitive material into a chatbot, you may be handing away control of that information in ways most users don’t expect. The short list published by mainstream outlets — identity documents, medical results, bank and investment details, login credentials, and proprietary corporate material — is accurate as a starting point, but the full picture is more complex. This feature unpacks the five...

Australian small businesses have moved quickly from curiosity to routine use of generative AI: a fresh survey by Small Business Loans Australia (SBLA) finds four in five firms now use AI tools, and many report large reductions in labour time. Background The snapshot behind the headlines is straightforward: SBLA surveyed 200 Australian business owners and decision-makers about current AI use, estimated time savings, and expectations for future profitability if AI were “perfected” across core...

Microsoft’s Copilot Chat quietly summarized emails labeled “Confidential,” bypassing the data‑loss protections administrators relied on and forcing a hard assessment of how AI features must be governed inside Microsoft 365. ([bleepingcomputer.cingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-says-bug-causes-copilot-to-summarize-confidential-emails/) Background Microsoft 365 Copilot is now a default productivity layer inside Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that uses generative AI to...

Microsoft opened TechEd North America 2012 in Orlando with a clear message: the company was no longer merely tolerating the cloud — it intended to own the platform narrative. Satya Nadella used the keynote to place Windows at the center of that strategy by dubbing it the Cloud OS, while Microsoft pushed a combined story around Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure, System Center and new management tools that promised a unified path for enterprises moving toward hybrid and public-cloud models...

Cloud sovereignty is only as strong as the thinnest, most ambiguous stream of data that crosses a border — and for many sovereign-cloud promises that stream is metadata. The recent conversations around the AWS European Sovereign Cloud and Microsoft’s EU Data Boundary have exposed a stubborn, uncomfortable truth: keeping files and application data physically inside a jurisdiction is necessary but not sufficient. Operational traces, telemetry, audit logs, routing records, billing details and...

Microsoft’s latest Insider flights deliver a quiet but consequential round of polish to Windows 11: context menus that are shorter, smarter, and developer-friendly; refreshed “spec cards” surfaced on the Settings home so you can see CPU, RAM, GPU and storage at a glance; and a handful of reliability and UI fixes that together make everyday interactions feel less fragile. These changes are rolling out in recent Dev and Beta builds and are being delivered as gradual, telemetry‑backed...

Microsoft Paint is shedding one of its most persistent limitations: you can now save your work as an editable project file that preserves layers and edit state, and the app finally adds per-tool opacity controls for Pencil and Brush — changes already rolling out to Windows Insiders as part of a coordinated update to Paint, Snipping Tool and Notepad. (https://windowsreport.com/paint-app-gets-project-files-and-opacity-controls-in-v11-2508-361-0/?utm_source=openai)) Background For decades...

Microsoft has quietly given IT administrators a better tool to catch Group Policy problems before they cascade through an environment: Event ID 1096 — long associated with registry-based Group Policy failures — now surfaces far more actionable diagnostic detail in recent Windows 11 servicing updates, turning a cryptic error into a practical early‑warning signal for corrupted or inaccessible policy cache files...

I stopped treating my charger like a trusted accessory the day a small, open-source utility quietly forced Windows to stop wasting power on idle apps — and my laptop’s battery life, in real-world use, felt like it doubled overnight. That’s the experience reported in a recent hands-on piece that walks through Energy Star X, a WinUI 3 GUI wrapper around Windows’ EcoQoS/Efficiency Mode APIs that automatically reclaims battery-wasting background work so you don’t have to. view Windows has long...

Microsoft’s humble Notepad — the tiny app most of us open for quick notes, editing config files, or pasting a snippet of text — is quietly being stretched into something larger: Insider builds now show an image button in Notepad’s toolbar, and multiple reports say Microsoft is testing image support as part of Notepad’s expanded Markdown and formatting layer. Background Notepad’s transformation has been incremental but unmistakable over the last two years. Once an icon of minimalism, Notepad...

Shopify’s insistence that “LLMs do not bypass Shopify’s checkout” was not a throwaway line; it was the framing of an argument that the company is trying to win as AI turns conversational interfaces into a mainstream shopping surface. On its Q4 2025 earnings call, Shopify executives described the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), Agentic Storefronts, and an “Agentic” plan as a coordinated strategy to keep Shopify’s checkout, payments, fulfillment, and merchant logic at the center of...

Microsoft appears to be preparing to add image support to Notepad on Windows 11 — a small toolbar icon has been spotted in Insider builds and multiple outlets report the change is tied to the app’s newer Markdown/“lightweight formatting” layer. This isn’t a fully shipped feature yet — the image button is currently non‑functional in some test flights — but the appearance of the control, combined with Microsoft’s ongoing push to turn Notepad into a Markdown-aware editor, makes image rendering...

Singapore’s personal care makers face a turning point in 2026: soaring consumer demand for clean, sustainable formulations and hyper-fast social-media-driven trends are colliding with stricter regulation and persistent supply‑chain disruption, and the result is a hard requirement for ERP systems that do more than bookkeeping — they must be formulation engines, traceability masters, and agile manufacturing platforms all at once. Background / Overview Since the early 2010s Singapore has...

Enterprise AI’s most consequential lesson in 2026 is surprisingly old-school: start small, stitch carefully, and govern deliberately. Background / Overview Enterprises are not failing to adopt artificial intelligence because the technology is immature; they’re choosing restraint because the operational world around AI is messy, regulated, and heterogeneous. The pattern is consistent across industries: organisations are embedding narrowly scoped AI into existing systems and workflows rather...

Microsoft's recent jump in the Benzinga Edge quality score — from 79.51 to 90.08 in a single week — has refocused a familiar market debate: can operational discipline and cash‑flow resilience outpace the headline noise around hyperscaler AI spending? The short answer is: for now, the narrative leans toward efficiency paying off, but the picture is complex, time‑sensitive, and full of trade‑offs investors and IT leaders must understand. Background / Overview Microsoft’s quality‑score move...

When a Windows feature update last made me feel genuinely excited it was the Windows 10 Creators Update (version 1703) in April 2017 — an update that bundled fresh, visible features (Paint 3D, Game Mode, an improved Game Bar and a built‑in Night Light) into the OS and felt like a meaningful step forward rather than incremental housekeeping. What the XDA writer who recently switched to Linux discovered — and what too many Windows users quietly suspect — is that the emotional cadence of an...

Notepad’s quietly aggressive evolution continues: what started as a bare‑bones text scratchpad has been steadily rebuilt into a full‑featured Markdown writer, and recent insider sightings suggest Microsoft is preparing to add image support — a change that finally positions Notepad as a direct competitor to built‑in note apps like Apple Notes and Google Keep. The move is logical from a product perspective, but it’s also consequential: image rendering changes how files behave, how they’re...