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If your Windows 11 PC feels sluggish, you’re not imagining it — but the fix is rarely a single magic switch. The 14 quick fixes PCMag laid out provide a practical starting point, and they map well to Windows’ built‑in tools and a handful of safe hardware upgrades; this article expands those tips into a step‑by‑step playbook, verifies the technical claims against vendor documentation, and highlights the trade‑offs and risks you should know before you change anything. ows has grown more...

Microsoft has quietly begun turning on a dramatically redesigned Start menu for Windows 11 as part of the 25H2/24H2 servicing wave — a single, vertically scrollable launcher that promotes the full All apps list to the main surface, adds Category/Grid/List views for app discovery, and surfaces a Phone Link mobile panel directly inside Start — and Microsoft is delivering it via phased enablement so some machines will see the change before others. Background / Overview For most of Windows 11’s...

Microsoft has quietly flipped a major switch in Windows 11’s print ecosystem: beginning in mid‑January 2026 Microsoft stopped accepting and automatically publishing new legacy V3 and V4 printer drivers through Windows Update, and is steering Windows toward the Microsoft IPP inbox class driver and Print Support Apps as the preferred printing path. Background / Overview Windows has historically supported a variety of print driver models. V3 and V4 printer drivers — sometimes called legacy...

Hilltop Studios’ announcement of Curse of Resthaven is a deliberate and unsettling pivot: the Toronto indie behind the warmly comic, award-winning Lil’ Guardsman has revealed a hand‑drawn, narrative‑heavy roguelite that trades Saturday‑morning-cartoon cheer for gothic, eldritch dread — and the change looks intentional, ambitious, and risky in equal measure. Background / Overview Hilltop Studios made a lot of players and critics sit up with their debut, Lil’ Guardsman — a narrative deduction...

Microsoft Excel hasn’t gone away — it’s been remixed. In 2026 the spreadsheet remains the lingua franca of finance, operations, and analytics, and the year’s most useful training lists mix classical workbook skills with new requirements: Power Query, Power Pivot/DAX, Copilot-aware workflows, and safe Python integration. A recent roundup of “Top 7” Excel programs — aimed at building practical spreadsheet and data-analysis skills for U.S. professionals — reflects that blend, but the devil is...

Dropbox’s latest AI push, embodied in Dash for Business, is the company’s most explicit effort yet to reposition itself from a file‑sync vendor into a content‑intelligence provider — but investors and many enterprise buyers should treat this moment as a leap fraught with both technical promise and acute competitive risk. Morningstar’s recent stance — excerpted by the user as recommending to “sit out on Dropbox” — captures a wider skepticism: another midsize software firm attempting to build...

Microsoft’s latest push folds Copilot from a helpful sidebar into the connective tissue of Windows 11 — the taskbar and File Explorer — turning the OS’s search box into a conversational command center, surface-level AI agents into persistent background workers you can monitor from the taskbar, and File Explorer into a contextual document assistant that answers questions without opening files. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily repositioning Copilot from an optional helper to a...

Dubai’s latest executive roundtable at Microsoft’s Dubai Internet City was less about incremental upgrades and more about an existential question for customer service teams: what happens when generative, agentic AI stops being a helpful sidekick and becomes the default handler for routine customer interactions? The gathering, hosted by IT Max Global and Microsoft UAE on February 18, laid out a vision of contact centres recast as intelligent experience engines—systems where autonomous AI...

AvePoint’s evolution from a Microsoft‑centric migration and protection vendor into an AI‑aware data governance platform makes it an obvious candidate for attention in 2026 — and not just because short‑term market dynamics favor growthy SaaS names. Recent product moves that put AI adoption metrics, agent lifecycle visibility, and cloud protection at the center of its stack combine with solid fiscal traction to create a credible investment thesis: AvePoint is positioning itself as a vendor...

PhonePe’s newest update brings conversational AI into the heart of everyday payments, letting users speak or type natural-language commands to make transfers, check balances, and manage routine financial tasks — a move that turns the app’s search bar into a smart payments assistant and signals a meaningful shift in how fintech interfaces will be built in India going forward...

Microsoft’s quietly ambitious push to turn Notepad into a modern Markdown-first editor has taken another step: image handling is being tested inside Windows 11 Notepad, and while Microsoft’s internal tests reportedly show minimal performance impact, security experts and power users are warning that every convenience added to what was once the simplest app in Windows increases the attack surface and the complexity of secure deployments...

Microsoft’s flagship workplace assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, briefly read and summarized email messages that organizations had explicitly labeled Confidential, a logic error the company logged internally as service advisory CW1226324 and that has forced a re‑examination of how embedded generative AI interacts with long‑standing enterprise data controls. Background / Overview Microsoft 365 Copilot is sold as an AI productivity layer embedded across Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and...

Microsoft has quietly converted Windows 11 from a familiar desktop operating system into an actively evolving platform built around two interlocking pillars: system-level AI and next-generation connectivity. Recent Insider builds, targeted feature drops, and hardware announcements show Microsoft is accelerating toward an AI-first, always-connected Windows that leans on on-device neural processing and richer network management to deliver faster, more private, and more resilient experiences...

Microsoft’s flagship workplace assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, mistakenly accessed and summarised some users’ confidential Outlook messages — a logic error the company first detected in late January and has since patched — raising fresh questions about how embedded AI interacts with long‑standing enterprise protections such as sensitivity labels and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 preview builds are quietly reshaping how conversational AI sits inside the operating system, replacing isolated assistants with a set of contextual, task-focused entry points — most notably a new “Ask Copilot” experience that can live directly in the taskbar and inside File Explorer. Background Microsoft has been iterating Copilot across Windows for more than a year, moving from a standalone Copilot app toward deeper surface-level integrations. Those experiments...

Google’s new flagship, Gemini 3.1 Pro, arrives as a clear statement of intent: ship a model tuned for complex, multimodal reasoning and real-world project synthesis, and do it at scale. The release, published by Google DeepMind and summarized in Google’s product blog, positions 3.1 Pro as an incremental but meaningful step beyond the Gemini 3 family—one explicitly optimized for agentic workflows, long-context multimodality, and developer-first integrations across AI Studio, Vertex AI...

Virtualisation remains the quiet engine of enterprise IT in 2026: despite cloud and containers grabbing headlines, organisations still rely on hypervisors and VM platforms to deliver predictable performance, isolate workloads, and bridge the on‑premises / public cloud gap—and the latest ET CIO roundup of the Top 7 Virtualisation Software solutions captures that reality while also reflecting a market in transition. (cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Overview Enterprise IT in 2026 is defined...

Microsoft has quietly split the Windows Insider Canary Channel into two parallel development tracks — an opt‑in 29500‑series path for deep platform work and the existing 28000‑series feature preview path — a restructuring Microsoft says is intended to let engineers validate under‑the‑hood changes earlier without blocking user‑facing feature development. ([blogs.windows.com].com/windows-insider/2026/02/18/announcing-new-optional-windows-11-insider-preview-build-for-canary-channel-29531-1000/)...

Microsoft has started shipping an optional Windows 11 preview update — KB5077241 — to Insiders in the Release Preview Channel, and while the package is modest on headline-grabbing features it changes how the OS is serviced and surfaces several small, practical improvements that will matter to help desks, IT admins, and everyday users alike. ([blogs.windows.com].com/windows-insider/2026/02/17/releasing-windows-11-builds-26100-7918-and-26200-7918-to-the-release-preview-channel/) Background...

Microsoft’s long-running experiment with bringing the Xbox PC app to Arm-based Windows machines has moved out of the preview lab and into the hands of mainstream users, delivering a meaningful widening of the Windows gaming ecosystem that will reshape how gamers and OEMs approach Arm-powered PCs. Background The move to provide full Xbox app support on Arm-based Windows 11 devices completes a multi-stage rollout that began in earnest with Insider previews last year. Microsoft’s coordinated...