Featured content

Microsoft’s keyboard redesign — a dedicated Copilot key sitting where the right Ctrl/Menu key used to be — kicked off an unexpectedly fierce debate about habit, productivity, and control. Now a tiny open‑source utility called NoCopilotKey promises to restore the familiar right Ctrl behavior on affected machines, giving power users an escape hatch from a hardware‑level change they never asked for. This feature story walks through how NoCopilotKey works, why it exists, what Microsoft has and...

Amazon’s cloud story reached a clear milestone this week: Amazon S3 turned 20, and AWS used the moment to highlight both the service’s extraordinary scale and a string of practical feature additions — most notably account regional namespaces for S3 general purpose buckets — while also moving another security-and-networking building block out of preview: Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver is now generally available. These updates are small changes and tectonic shifts at once: they make daily...

The way you download and create installation media for Windows 11 Pro matters more now than it did a year ago — Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool (MCT) has quietly shifted how it packages images, and that change, together with persistent hardware checks, licensing quirks and third‑party utilities like Rufus, affects whether your install ends up fast, secure and activatable — or slow, unsupported and headache‑prone. (londondaily.news) Background / Overview Windows 11 is distributed in three...

A growing wave of Windows 11 machines has been rendered all but unusable after a routine security servicing: users report the chilling dialog “C:\ is not accessible — Access denied,” applications fail to launch, administrative elevation is blocked, and important desktop functionality is interrupted. Microsoft has acknowledged the reports and is investigating the failure in coordination with Samsung, while early evidence points to a problematic interaction between recent updates and a...

Microsoft is preparing an “intelligent summaries” capability for the Copilot Dashboard that administrators and knowledge workers will start seeing this April — a move that promises to surface concise, AI‑generated overviews of meetings, documents and organizational signals directly inside the Microsoft 365 Copilot reporting surface. This change is part of a broader push to consolidate analytics and AI insights into the Copilot Dashboard and Advanced Insights reporting, and Microsoft’s...

By January 2026 the consumer app landscape had quietly reoriented around artificial intelligence: conversational assistants sit alongside purpose-built photo and video editors, translation tools, and education helpers, and together they attract hundreds of millions of monthly users—with a handful of platforms commanding the lion’s share of attention. Sensor Tower’s mobile measurements for January 2026, distilled and republished across industry roundups, place OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the top of...

Microsoft’s Planetary Computer has quietly moved from a research playground into a production-ready scaffold for enterprise geospatial AI — and the change matters because it alters how organizations access, process, and operationalize multi-petabyte Earth-observation datasets at global scale. Background Microsoft’s curiosity about mapping, scaling and serving geospatial data is not new. Two decades ago the TerraServer experiment proved the viability of serving large tile-based imagery from...

What started as a modest progress log in a TechPowerUp forum — a nervous but determined move from Windows 10 Pro to Linux Mint by a self-described noob — reads today like a compact blueprint for anyone weighing the same leap: test from USB, expect hiccups, plan backups, and be ready to learn. The thread’s early troubleshooting episodes — failed installs, frozen installers, a last‑minute rescue by an older ISO, and finally a stable Mint installation — mirror the experience of many newcomers...

UniGetUI’s newest release and the stewardship shift announced in March 2026 mark a decisive moment for a tool millions of Windows users rely on to discover, install, and update software without touching the command line. What began as a one‑developer project has just entered an organizational phase: Devolutions announced it has acquired UniGetUI and rolled out the 2026.1.x releases that rework how updates are distributed and verified, while promising to keep the project open under the MIT...

Microsoft’s PC Manager arrives with a satisfyingly simple promise: a single, big blue Boost button that looks like it might finally deliver the instant performance fix desktop users have been sold by optimizer tools for decades. After hands‑on testing by reviewers and a cross‑check of Microsoft’s own documentation, the reality is more measured. PC Manager is a tidy, first‑party dashboard that consolidates Windows maintenance tasks, offers modest but useful cleanups, and — crucially — does...

Microsoft is quietly testing a substantial redesign of the Windows 11 Start menu across Insider and preview builds — a change that blends the familiar pinned apps surface with an expanded, scrollable “All apps” area, adds multiple app-list views and tighter Copilot/Phone Link integrations, and is being rolled out slowly to users while Microsoft continues to tweak performance, compatibility, and discoverability. Background / Overview When Windows 11 launched, Microsoft moved the Start menu to...

Microsoft’s decades‑old Notepad is quietly changing shape: recent Insider builds and promotional “What’s new” panels now show an Insert image control in Notepad’s toolbar, signaling that Microsoft is preparing to let users place inline pictures inside Notepad documents as part of the app’s broader Markdown and lightweight formatting push. What began as small formatting upgrades — headings, bold/italic, inline links and tables — has matured into a richer authoring surface that may soon...

Microsoft’s latest wave of updates to Microsoft 365 Copilot shifts the product from a helpful assistant toward a more conversational, action-capable colleague — one you can talk to, ask to schedule your calendar, and hand off routine work to — but it also raises fresh questions about accuracy, control, and enterprise readiness that IT teams must address before flipping the switch across the organization. Overview The 2026 updates bring several practical, productivity-focused features to...

Microsoft’s transition away from Cortana toward the Copilot family of assistants is now more than a product pivot — it’s a measurable market shift, with concrete customer counts, capital investments, and adoption gaps that tell a clear story about where Microsoft’s AI strategy has landed in 2026. Over the past two years Microsoft disclosed hard numbers that reveal both rapid early monetization of AI features and a long runway for growth: Microsoft 365 counts more than 450 million commercial...

Microsoft and Samsung are jointly investigating a crippling Windows 11 problem that has left some users unable to access their C: system volume after recent cumulative updates, producing the alarming message “C:\ is not accessible — Access denied” and blocking everyday apps such as Outlook, Office, and web browsers on affected machines. ([support.microsoft.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/february-10-2026-kb5077181-os-builds-26200-7840-and-26100-7840-f0fa9e54-a22a-4a06-96b6-bf5b2aded506) Background...

Microsoft’s recent controversies — from the slow, combustible rollout of Recall and the relentless expansion of Copilot across Windows, to an Xbox that’s quietly reshaping itself away from console-first ambitions — are less a series of isolated missteps than a pattern: a company that talks change loudly but delivers it in ways that often preserve the strategic status quo while shifting costs, defaults, and control onto users. Background / Overview Microsoft’s relationship with user trust has...

NVIDIA’s Dynamo has crossed a new milestone: according to multiple vendor and press summaries, the project has reached what NVIDIA calls a production milestone with a 1.0 designation and is being promoted as a purpose-built operating system for inference at data‑center scale—an open source inference stack that promises to radically increase requests-per-GPU for large reasoning models. The boldest headline from vendor and partner briefings: Dynamo can multiply inference throughput on...

Microsoft’s PC Manager arrives with a big blue promise: a single click labeled Boost that suggests a quick, almost magical cure for slow Windows PCs. After hands‑on testing, side‑by‑side comparisons with built‑in Windows tools, and reading the early reviews, the reality is steadier and more useful than sensational — PC Manager mostly repackages existing Windows maintenance features into a clean, first‑party dashboard and delivers modest, situational gains rather than transformative...

Several thousand Microsoft Outlook users were left scrambling on the morning of July 10, 2025, after a sudden authentication-related service incident blocked mailbox access across Outlook’s web, desktop, and mobile surfaces — an outage Microsoft traced to a recent configuration change and addressed through targeted configuration updates and an expedited deployment plan. Background The outage first produced visible symptoms late on Wednesday, July 9, 2025, and complaint volumes peaked the...

Microsoft has quietly rolled out an out‑of‑band hotpatch identified in community reports as KB5084897 to hotpatch‑enabled Windows 11 devices (versions 25H2 and 24H2) in an attempt to repair a recent Bluetooth regression that left connected devices invisible in Settings and Quick Settings and, in some cases, prevented new pairings from appearing. rview Windows servicing in 2025–2026 has evolved: Microsoft now ships targeted, small‑footprint updates outside the monthly Patch Tuesday window...