Featured content

Microsoft’s summer push for the Windows Store — the “Ready, Set, Summer” collection — landed as a cross‑category sales campaign that bundled more than a hundred deals across apps, games, music and movies, and it included some high‑profile name brands such as Minecraft and Radiohead’s OK Computer. The promotion ran in late May through early June 2016 and was positioned as a seasonal discovery play aimed at driving Windows Store traffic and Windows 10 adoption, but the initial rollout also...

Scorchy Sky Trials has surfaced in achievement aggregators and community threads as a Windows 10 title with a compact achievements roster — but the metadata remains fragmented across third‑party trackers, leaving completionists and completion‑curious players with a familiar mix of opportunity and verification work before they chase any Gamerscore. Background / Overview Scorchy Sky Trials is being discussed in the same context as numerous small Windows releases that publish Xbox achievements...

Microsoft has confirmed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update will begin rolling out on August 2, and the release is being positioned as a broad, feature‑rich milestone that brings Windows Ink, deeper Cortana integration, major Microsoft Edge improvements, expanded Windows Hello support, and enterprise security investments — while Microsoft also opens up the Feedback Hub to all users, launches the Windows Insider MVP program, and continues to grapple with a staggered, sometimes delayed Windows...

Microsoft’s latest push to frame Windows 10 and Surface as not just one-off purchases but as ongoing experiences reached two clear touchpoints: a set of tightly produced promotional videos that put Windows 10, the Surface Book, and the Surface Pro 4 in everyday workflows, and a formal announcement that Microsoft will offer subscription-style options for Windows 10 Enterprise and Surface hardware aimed squarely at businesses. Background Microsoft’s Surface hardware and Windows 10 have moved...

Microsoft’s Paint — the tiny bitmap editor that taught generations to click, drag and “paint” — is no longer just a nostalgic museum piece; it’s become a strategic testbed for Microsoft’s approach to democratized creativity, generative AI and the stewardship of legacy software. ]) Background Microsoft Paint first shipped with Windows 1.0 and for decades served as the canonical, low‑friction image tool: instant to open, trivial to luseful for screenshots, annotations and simple pixel art...

Jeff Bezos’s blunt advice to Generation Z — “finish college, don’t assume dropping out is your shortcut to success” — landed at Italian Tech Week as more than a generational lecture; it was a marker of how powerful CEOs are reframing career advice as artificial intelligence reshapes entry-level opportunities and the way organizations hire, train, and promote people. Background AI is accelerating changes in the labor market that were already underway: routine, pattern-based tasks are being...

Microsoft’s blunt, if quiet, acknowledgment that OneDrive’s background syncing can dent system responsiveness has suddenly put a familiar nuisance back in the spotlight: the default cloud integration that ships with Windows 11 can be a material source of slowdown for some users, and Microsoft itself now lists pausing OneDrive as a recommended diagnostic step when a PC feels sluggish. Background / Overview Windows has been migrating core user workflows into the cloud for years. OneDrive is...

Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday has generated a sharply focused but consequential regression: the cumulative update for Windows 11, version 23H2 (KB5073455, OS Build 22631.6491), can cause some Secure Launch–enabled systems to restart instead of shutting down or entering hibernation, and Microsoft’s only immediate, documented mitigation for a guaranteed power‑off is a forced, command‑line shutdown until a corrective update ships. Background The January 13, 2026, Patch Tuesday wave...

A high‑profile online clash that began as a heated argument about policing and football has escalated into a reputational and regulatory headache for a practising barrister, after the exchange produced an abusive slur that was deleted but widely shared — an incident reported exclusively by RollOnFriday and now folded into a much larger conversation about AI, public trust and professional conduct. Background The row started on X (formerly Twitter) during a debate over West Midlands Police’s...

When AI meets reality, the lessons are rarely theoretical — they are operational, often costly, and always unforgiving; recent events and product pivots in app delivery show that the industry’s rush to add generative intelligence onto existing stacks has exposed sharp gaps in engineering discipline, governance, and deployment playbooks that every IT leader must address today. erview Over the past 18 months, two parallel stories have collided: high‑profile AI failures that turned public...

Zorin OS’s recent surge into headlines is no accident: the distribution’s vision for making a Windows-to-Linux switch feel familiar, functional, and—critically—low-risk has been deliberately engineered into Zorin OS 18. The release ships a set of features and workflow conveniences that target the three main barriers that keep mainstream users tied to Windows: muscle-memory UI, access to cloud-hosted documents and services, and the ability to run familiar Windows applications. Taken together...

Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday has produced a narrowly scoped but disruptive regression: after installing the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 (published as KB5073455), some devices that have System Guard Secure Launch enabled may restart instead of shutting down or entering hibernation — and Microsoft’s only short-term workaround is a manual, command-line shutdown until a fix ships. Background / Overview The January 2026 servicing wave shipped on January 13, 2026, as...

The January Patch Tuesday cumulative rollup for Windows 11 has produced a configuration‑dependent regression that, in some environments, prevents affected machines from powering off or entering hibernation — instead they immediately restart. The regression is tied to the January 13, 2026 security update distributed as KB5073455 for Windows 11, version 23H2, and is narrowly scoped to Enterprise and IoT SKUs that have System Guard Secure Launch (Secure Launch) enabled. Administrators and...

Microsoft’s first scheduled Windows 11 cumulative update of 2026 began rolling out on January 13, 2026 as KB5074109, advancing consumer installs to OS Build 26200.7623 (25H2) and 26100.7623 (24H2) while delivering a mix of security patches, reliability fixes and a handful of operational changes that deserve immediate attention from both home users and IT teams. The package fixes a measurable battery‑drain regression affecting devices with on‑board Neural Processing Units (NPUs), removes...

Enterprise access decisions are quietly shifting from the back end to the moment a user opens a browser, taps a mobile app, or completes a hiring workflow—and that timing shift is changing how security teams must think about identity, policy and governance. Background Organizations have long treated access as a runtime event: authenticate, then evaluate policies, then grant or deny. That chain still exists, but the places where authentication and first-line authorization occur are...

CU Anschutz researchers are moving from proof‑of‑concept to practical deployment, delivering a set of validated, clinician‑centered tools designed to make Large Language Models (LLMs) and other health A.I. safer, auditable and useful at the bedside—efforts that combine peer‑reviewed measurement instruments, clinician‑facing prompt tooling, and infrastructure work that together lower the barrier to responsible clinical adoption. Background The last two years have seen generative A.I. –...

Microsoft has finally shipped a supported way for administrators to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but it’s intentionally narrow, gated by several technical checks, and designed as a one-time cleanup rather than a fleet‑wide kill switch. Admins finally get the power to uninstall Microsoft Copilot on Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and EDU versions — devices must meet specific conditions to allow the removal of the AI app) Background and overview...

Microsoft’s long-standing prescription that users should routinely change their Windows passwords has finally been exposed for what security researchers and standards bodies have long argued: a low-value, usability-damaging relic that produces more problems than protection. The change in Microsoft’s guidance — removing periodic password-expiration from the Windows security baselines — formalizes a shift already present in modern authentication thinking and aligns Windows advice with NIST and...

Win10 Spy Disabler is a tiny, no-frills portable utility that promises to “shut down Windows 10 telemetry” with a handful of clicks — and for many users in 2015–2019 it offered a fast, convenient route to privacy tweaks that would otherwise require hunting through Services, Scheduled Tasks and the Registry. The program still appears on download portals and review sites, but its age, the changing telemetry architecture in Windows, and the fact that Windows 10 reached end-of-support in October...

Microsoft has pushed the first Extended Security Updates (ESU) package for 2026 and confirmed what many administrators feared and some hoped for: a mandatory, high‑priority security rollout that fixes a large number of vulnerabilities and begins the phased replacement of Secure Boot certificates that begin expiring later this year. The update — included in the January cumulative servicing for supported Windows 10 builds — carries urgent changes that range from driver removals to firmware...