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PC hardware has never been better — faster GPUs, affordable high‑core CPUs, NVMe SSDs everywhere — and yet Windows increasingly feels like a friction point between those improvements and the experience on the desktop. The contradiction is real: while silicon and components are surging, Windows 11’s recent product cadence, strict hardware baseline and uneven updates have left a large share of users describing the OS as slower, more brittle, or simply less predictable than it used to be...

The federal bureaucracy’s latest round of postings and transfers — headlined across news feeds as “Bureaucracy undergoes major reshuffle” — has reorganized several Grade‑22 and senior Grade‑21 officers across ministries and key operational wings, producing immediate ripples for public‑sector program continuity, procurement timelines and the digital projects that underpin modern government services. The notifications, circulated in late December 2025 and amplified in aggregated feeds in...

Valve’s Steam Deck remains the most balanced handheld for most players in 2026, but the market has widened into a clear hardware-versus-software split where Windows-first pocket PCs like the ROG Ally X chase raw frames and dockability while premium SteamOS alternatives — most notably Lenovo’s newly announced Legion Go 2 SteamOS edition — push console-like polish and better battery endurance. eld PC gaming is no longer a niche experiment: it’s a full product category with distinct design...

Craig Guildford, the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, has retired with immediate effect after sustained political and public pressure over the force’s advice to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from an Aston Villa Europa League match — a decision later found to have been supported in part by flawed intelligence that included an AI‑generated, non‑existent fixture citation. Overview The departure of West Midlands’ most senior policing official closes a fraught chapter that combined...

The Environmental Protection Agency has moved decisively to close a regulatory gap that community groups say allowed Elon Musk’s xAI to run dozens of methane-powered turbines at its Colossus AI data center in South Memphis without the air permits federal law requires, and that move has immediate legal, technical, and political consequences for xAI and the wider data‑center industry. Background and immediate development On January 15, 2026, the EPA finalized a long‑anticipated revision to the...

Bojidar Bozhanov has raised a red flag: the Bulgarian government is preparing to open a public procurement and sign a new, large-scale contracting arrangement with Microsoft to cover core software and cloud services for the state administration — a move he says carries long-term risks for national security and digital sovereignty. Background Bojidar Bozhanov, a technologist-turned-politician who formerly served as Bulgaria’s Minister of Electronic Governance and today holds a senior role in...

Microsoft has publicly and unequivocally said it will not deliver a packaged “Windows 8.1 Update 2,” choosing instead to continue delivering improvements through its regular monthly servicing cadence. Background / Overview Windows 8.1 launched as Microsoft’s response to early criticism of Windows 8’s interface and workflow choices. Over the following months Microsoft released a significant cumulative update—commonly referred to as Windows 8.1 Update—and that update reignited discussion...

British telecom giant BT will begin offering Microsoft Azure services to its customers, packaging Azure into BT’s managed-cloud portfolio so customers can buy Azure alongside BT cloud services with a single commercial wrapper and a single bill. Background / Overview BT’s announcement — first reported in industry press and reflected in its long-running partnership statements with Microsoft — is an extension of a multi-year collaboration that covers networking, connectivity, managed cloud and...

Microsoft’s recent messaging about a “free Windows update” for 2026 needs translation: what landed in January is not a mass feature upgrade but a time‑boxed security lifeline for eligible Windows 10 devices — delivered through the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, seeded platform maintenance (notably Secure Boot certificate refreshes), and a targeted January cumulative (KB5073724) that patches a large set of vulnerabilities for ESU‑enrolled systems. This combination has been...

Microsoft Edge's Collections feature is being retired in preview builds, and the abrupt migration choices Microsoft provides are leaving many users scrambling to preserve thumbnails, clipped images, and inline notes that will not survive the conversion to Favorites or the CSV export option. Background / Overview Collections arrived in Chromium‑based Microsoft Edge as a visual, research‑friendly workspace — a place to clip web pages, save images, write quick notes, and export organized boards...

Microsoft has quietly begun rolling out a cluster of Windows 11 improvements that are already surfacing for UK users — small, practical tweaks to the Start menu and taskbar, expanded file‑sharing with Android phones, accessibility updates, and several behind‑the‑scenes security hardenings — delivered through recent cumulative previews and servicing updates rather than one big feature pack. Background Microsoft’s servicing model for Windows 11 has shifted in recent years toward smaller...

Microsoft has confirmed that the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5073455, OS Build 22631.6491) introduced a configuration‑dependent regression: on systems with System Guard Secure Launch enabled, selecting Shut down or attempting Hibernate can cause the machine to restart or return to the sign‑in screen instead of powering off. Microsoft documents a single, manual interim remedy — run the command shutdown /s /t 0 to force an immediate shutdown — and warns there is...

The rhetorical blast from a recent opinion headline — that using AI chatbots to follow the news is like “injecting severe poison directly into your brain” — captures a real anxiety, but it also obscures what’s provably wrong, what’s still speculative, and what we must fix now if conversational AI is to be a useful news conduit rather than a vector for confusion. Recent journalist‑led audits, medical case reports, and independent studies show systemic problems in how popular assistants...

The AI assistants that matter in 2026 no longer fit a single mold: they split along task lines — research assistants, code copilots, and presentation builders — and the smartest choice for any user or team is the one that matches the job, the governance requirements, and the budget. This feature synthesizes recent reporting and product documentation, verifies major product claims where possible, and maps practical recommendations for Windows-centric readers who need reliable research...

Microsoft Edge is quietly retiring its long‑standing Collections feature, and a raft of users — from casual shoppers and students to research teams and managed IT environments — have been caught scrambling to export and preserve data that until now lived comfortably inside the browser. The deprecation first surfaced in Edge preview channels as an in‑product prompt that bluntly states “Collections is being retired,” and it forces a binary choice: move pages to Favorites (losing images and...

NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang stirred the industry with a starkly phrased thought experiment — a single, all‑knowing “God AI” might be possible someday, but it’s so far off that he framed it in “biblical” or “galactic” timescales — and his remarks have refocused attention on the practical realities of the current AI arms race: massive datacenter buildouts, costly GPU roadmaps, and immediate governance choices that enterprises and Windows users must face now. Background The comment that launched...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s January 15, 2026 final rule clarifying how the New Source Performance Standards treat combustion and gas turbines has closed a long‑criticized “nonroad” loophole — and in doing so has put xAI’s Colossus data‑center operations in Memphis squarely under a legal microscope for using large, truck‑sized methane turbines without the permitting and pollution controls typically required of stationary power plants. Background / Overview The EPA’s final rule...

Microsoft has opened the public preview of Windows Azure Mobile Services, a hosted backend platform designed to give app developers a cloud-ready, code-light way to add data, authentication, and push notifications to mobile and Windows Store applications in minutes. Background Windows Azure Mobile Services (announced August 28, 2012) arrived at a time when mobile apps were rapidly shifting from single-device experiences to cloud‑connected services. The offering positioned Microsoft to...

Adblock Plus’s arrival in Microsoft Edge marked a pivotal moment for Windows 10 users: ad-blocking — long a reason many people stayed with Chrome or Firefox — finally came to Microsoft’s newest browser via the Windows Store, shipped with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and rolled out to consumers in August 2016. This release made Adblock Plus available to hundreds of millions of Windows 10 devices, offered a quick on-ramp for users craving cleaner browsing, and exposed important trade-offs...

Microsoft’s early‑2026 Windows update rollout has a careful framing: it is not a sweeping, feature‑rich new edition of Windows being handed out for free, but a combination of time‑boxed security coverage, platform maintenance, and certificate refreshes that together look like a “free update” only when read through the right lens. What Microsoft actually announced and shipped in late 2025 and January 2026 is a pragmatic mix of consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) enrollment options —...