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Windows 11 Home is still the pragmatic choice for the majority of users: it delivers the full modern Windows experience, solid built‑in security, and no‑friction maintenance at a fraction of the cost and complexity of Windows 11 Pro—while Pro remains indispensable for power users, small businesses, and anyone who needs enterprise-grade device control, encryption management, or native virtualization. Background / Overview Windows 11’s edition split is not a performance split; it’s a...

Mustafa Suleyman’s short chatbot interactionslip — a blunt, optimistic forecast that “in five years, everybody will have their own AI companion” — landed like a provocation and a promise at once, and it crystallizes a central tension in consumer AI today: the simultaneous rush to make assistants feel personal and the urgent need to prevent those feelings from becoming dangerous illusions. Background: Suleyman’s prediction and Microsoft’s product push Mustafa Suleyman, the executive now...

Australians and New Zealanders are taking AI home—and they want their workplaces to catch up, but only on their terms: more transparency, stronger controls, and clear security rules before generative tools become decision‑grade at work. Background / Overview Salesforce this week published findings from a YouGov survey of 2,132 knowledge workers across Australia and New Zealand that show rapid consumer adoption of AI is reshaping worker expectations for enterprise tools. The headline numbers...

Mastercard’s push to define how AI agents buy things on our behalf marks a decisive turn: the payments network is not merely enabling “agentic commerce,” it is trying to set the rules that will govern who can act, how purchases are authorized, and which parties carry the risk when software — not a human — clicks “buy.” Background / Overview Agentic commerce describes a simple but profound shift: software agents — from personal assistants in search boxes to autonomous procurement bots in...

Microsoft’s latest lifecycle moves have quietly — and in some cases not so quietly — tightened the noose on on‑premises SQL tooling and monitoring, forcing many organizations to rethink long‑standing architectures and operational contracts. Two separate but complementary actions define the moment: Microsoft’s retirement of Azure Data Studio (ADS) and its deprecation of key SCOM Management Packs for SQL Server reporting and analytics workloads, each nudging (and in places compelling)...

For anyone wrestling with a GeForce GT 240M on a modern Windows 10 system, the compatibility puzzle is solvable — but it requires discipline, verified downloads, and a clear rollback plan to avoid the common pitfalls that still trip up users in 2026. Overview The GeForce GT 240M is a legacy mobile GPU from NVIDIA’s GeForce 200M family that can still be made to work under Windows 10, provided you use the correct, vendor‑signed legacy driver and follow a conservative installation workflow...

You can learn a surprising amount of Windows power in the space of a single afternoon — and the set of keyboard shortcuts below is the one I now use instinctively, even on older machines where new features aren’t available. These are not trivia: they are workflow levers that cut micro‑latency, keep your hands on the keyboard, and make multi‑window, multi‑monitor work genuinely faster. This article distills a practical 50+ shortcut cheat sheet, verifies the important technical limits you need...

PC shigheripments surged into the AI era: Gartner’s preliminary data shows global shipments reached 71.5 million units in Q4 2025, a 9.3% year‑over‑year increase, and totalled just over 270 million units for the full year—marking a decisive recovery for the PC market after several down years and signaling a market shaped by Windows refresh cycles, vendor AI positioning, and looming component price volatility. Background The global PC market reversed course in 2025, emerging from two years of...

Windows 11’s two main consumer editions — Home and Pro — deliver the same modern desktop, Snap layouts, Widgets, Copilot integration, and gaming features, but they diverge sharply on security controls, management tools, virtualization, and update control; this comparison explains exactly what you get in each edition, verifies the important technical limits and costs, and gives clear, practical advice for which edition is right for specific PCs and workflows. Background / Overview Windows 11...

Microsoft’s PowerToys just leveled up: version 0.97 delivers a focused, user‑facing rethink of the Command Palette, adds a clever new mouse utility called CursorWrap, expands command‑line control across several modules, and folds more UI personalization and extension power into an already versatile toolkit. The release mixes cosmetic freedom (background images, tinting, theme controls) with real productivity wins (fallback ranking, Peek previews, and a built‑in PowerToys extension for the...

Amazon’s recent clearance of a palm‑sized Ryzen mini PC has turned a tidy corner of the bargain market into one of the buzziest shopping opportunities this week, but the real story is less about headline discounts and more about what you’re actually buying: a compact, upgradeable Windows 11 Pro machine built around the AMD Ryzen 7 7730U, loaded with 32GB RAM and a 1TB M.2 SSD, and marketed as a portable mini gaming/workstation. The spec sheet looks compelling for the money, yet several of...

Microsoft pushed an emergency, out‑of‑band update after its January Patch Tuesday rollup caused a surprising power‑state regression on a narrow subset of Windows 11 devices: some systems running Windows 11, version 23H2 with System Guard Secure Launch enabled were restarting instead of shutting down (and in some cases failing to hibernate), and Microsoft issued a targeted fix — KB5077797 — to restore normal power behavior and address related Remote Desktop sign‑in problems. Background The...

The PC market’s 2025 rebound arrived not on the back of flashy on-device generative AI, but because corporate IT finally had no choice: aging fleets, a hard deadline for Windows 10 support, and looming component cost pressures pushed businesses to refresh hardware en masse. Gartner’s preliminary numbers show a clear, conservative recovery — a channel-led PC refresh driven by compliance and lifecycle management rather than a consumer-led “AI PC” spending spree. Background What the numbers...

Microsofft’s January patch cycle for Windows produced an unexpectedly disruptive outcome: updates released on January 13, 2026 introduced at least two distinct regressions that left some Windows 11 systems unable to shut down or hibernate and caused Remote Desktop/Cloud PC sign‑in failures, prompting Microsoft to issue emergency, out‑of‑band fixes on January 17, 2026 — while a third problem affecting classic Outlook POP profiles remains under investigation. Background / Overview The regular...

Peter Girnus’s one‑liner about a Copilot rollout that “couldn’t even bridge Gmail to Outlook” landed as a sharp—if comic—rebuke to the kind of executive optimism that treats AI as a turnkey productivity miracle, and the reaction it provoked is more revealing than the joke itself. The tweet’s viral spread crystallizes a pattern: large, public AI commitments; earnest executive narratives about agentic operating systems; and day‑to‑day product realities that frequently fall short of the...

ASUS’s latest firmware and Armoury Crate SE roll‑out for the ROG Xbox Ally family gives owners a practical opt‑out from Microsoft’s in‑game Copilot assistant while delivering several stability and usability fixes that matter for everyday handheld play. Background: why this update matters now The ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X exist at the intersection of PC openness and Xbox-first handheld UX: Windows 11 as the platform, ASUS for hardware tuning and device management, and Microsoft...

Microsofticrosoft pushed emergency out‑of‑band (OOB) cumulative updates on January 17, 2026 after its January 13 Patch Tuesday rollup introduced two separate but high‑impact regressions: a Remote Desktop authentication failure that blocked access to Microsoft 365 Cloud PCs, Azure Virtual Desktop sessions and other RDP‑based workflows, and a configuration‑dependent power‑state regression where some Windows 11 devices with System Guard Secure Launch enabled restarted instead of shutting down...

Microsoft’s tie-up with Nakuru-born health‑tech startup Zendawa to roll out an AI‑powered pharmacy platform in Kenya signals a practical, immediate application of cloud AI to frontline healthcare retail — one that promises to shrink expiry‑driven losses, speed everyday inventory work, and create verifiable finance pathways for owner‑run pharmacies while also raising urgent governance, data‑residency and dependency questions that require fast, concrete answers. Background Independent...

Windows 10 users reporting that their Mpow (or similar discount-brand) Bluetooth headphones appear as “connected” but profilesduce no audio are encountering a familiar — and fixable — class of Bluetooth problems that usually trace back to driver, profile, power-management, or routing mismatches rather than a dead headset. This feature explains why the “connected-but-silent” symptom happens, gives a prioritized, step‑by‑step repair plan you can run in minutes to hours, highlights important...

Acer’s new Veriton RA100 AI Mini Workstation lands as a compact, Windows 11 Copilot+ PC built around AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU, promising on‑device AI acceleration, an integrated RDNA‑class GPU, a 50 TOPS NPU block, and an unusually high memory ceiling for a mini workstation aimed at prosumers, creators, and small studios. Background / Overview The PC market is in the middle of a shift from cloud‑first AI workflows toward hybrid models where meaningful inference can run locally on the...