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If you found an empty C:\inetpub folder in the root of your Windows 11 install after applying recent cumulative updates, don’t panic — Microsoft put it there on purpose as a protective measure tied to a security patch, and deleting it can weaken your system’s defenses or even break future updates if misused. Background / Overview Windows users started reporting a mysterious, empty folder named inetpub appearing on the system drive after installing April 2025 cumulative updates (packages such...

Microsoft’s May 2022 cumulative update KB5013943 introduced a certificate-mapping change that briefly broke certificate-based authentication on domain controllers, disrupting Network Policy Server (NPS), RADIUS, RRAS, EAP/PEAP flows and leaving administrators scrambling for workarounds until Microsoft shipped out-of-band fixes days later. Background The May 10, 2022 Patch Tuesday roll included a set of cumulative updates intended to address a variety of stability and security issues across...

This week’s BetaNews roundup of new and updated Windows apps underscores two parallel trends: small, sharply focused utilities that squeeze everyday productivity gains out of narrow features, and established open-source tools adding quality-of-life improvements for power users — a pattern that exposes both the strengths and fragilities of the modern Windows app ecosystem. Background / Overview BetaNews’s weekly “Best Windows apps this week” column remains a fast, curated way to discover...

Windhawk’s new Taskbar Volume Control Per‑App mod turns a fiddly, multi‑click mixer into a one‑motion tweak: hover a cursor over any app’s taskbar button and scroll to change that app’s volume, Ctrl+click to mute, and read the current percentage in a tooltip — all without opening the Quick Settings panel. Background Windows 11's native audio controls have improved over past versions, but the workflow for adjusting an individual app’s volume still requires opening Quick Settings, expanding...

Apple’s iOS 17.3 arrives as a focused security and convenience update that changes how iPhones protect sensitive actions, lets travelers beam content to participating hotel TVs via AirPlay, restores collaborative playlists in Apple Music, and adds a handful of practical quality‑of‑life tweaks and crash‑detection improvements for recent iPhone models. The update’s headline innovation — Stolen Device Protection — is a clear attempt to close a long‑standing exploitation vector where thieves who...

Microsoft’s Copilot is often framed as “another AI assistant,” but its real claim to differentiation — as highlighted in a recent industry column — is that it’s not designed to sit beside your work; it’s designed to live inside it, pulling context from calendars, mail, files and meetings so generative AI becomes part of the flow of work rather than an add‑on. Background / Overview The idea that AI should be embedded in where people already work is the central thesis behind Microsoft 365...

Microsoft has confirmed that an August 2025 security update intended to close a Windows Installer privilege‑escalation hole instead changed MSI repair behavior in ways that produced unexpected User Account Control (UAC) prompts and silent repair failures for many non‑administrator users across a broad range of client and server Windows releases. Background Microsoft shipped a security hardening to the Windows Installer (msiexec/Installer service) in the August 2025 cumulative packages. The...

Mageia 9 arrives as a serious, polished desktop Linux that’s worth a hard look from anyone tired of Windows 11’s friction — and it arrives with modern kernels, refreshed tooling, and an installation/upgrade story that aims to remove the usual pain points for newcomers and upgraders alike. Background / Overview Mageia is a veteran community distribution that traces its lineage to Mandriva, and Mageia 9 is the project’s latest stable milestone. The release ships with the Linux 6.4 kernel and a...

This week’s roundup of notable Windows apps and platform moves centers on two headline changes: Brave Browser 1.63, which expands Brave’s built‑in AI assistant Leo to interact with PDFs and Google Drive content, and NVIDIA’s new unified NVIDIA app (beta), which consolidates the legacy NVIDIA Control Panel, GeForce Experience and RTX Experience into a single, modernized companion for GeForce PCs. Both entries deliver clear user-facing benefits — smarter in‑browser document assistance and a...

Microsoft’s September Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 arrives as a compact but consequential rollup: KB5030219 (OS Build 22621.2283) packages a mix of security fixes, several targeted reliability patches, and a handful of small user‑facing behavior changes — most notably removing a stray Sticky Keys menu entry and adding a new hover behavior to the taskbar search “gleam.” The release is one of those monthly cumulatives that most users will receive automatically via Windows Update, but it packs...

Microsoft’s May cumulative for Windows 11 — KB5013943 (OS Build 22000.675) — arrived as a corrective patch and a reassurance: it rolls back and repairs a handful of regressions introduced by earlier April updates, most notably the Safe Mode screen-flicker and certain .NET Framework app failures that left users and administrators scrambling for workarounds. Background Windows cumulative updates increasingly carry dual responsibilities: they must close security gaps while also maintaining...

Windows 11 quietly ships with a built‑in "efficiency" switch that can free up CPU cycles, reduce memory contention, and sometimes make a sluggish PC feel dramatically more responsive — and you can enable it for individual apps in seconds using Task Manager. Background / Overview Windows performance is increasingly under pressure. New AI features, heavier web pages, background sync services, and long-lived processes pile up memory and CPU demand on modern systems, especially laptops with 8 GB...

Gen Z’s comfort with AI at work isn’t a novelty—it’s a tectonic shift that’s already collapsing the old top-down knowledge hierarchy and rewriting how organizations must train, lead, and measure value. Background / Overview For years the workplace operated on a simple premise: experience equals authority. Seniority signified deep context, institutional memory, and a roadmap for decision-making. That equation is now being rewritten by a generation raised on always-on search, social...

LSEG’s move to surface licensed market data inside Microsoft Copilot Studio marks a clear inflection point: the heavy lifting of engineering integrations and bespoke data pipelines is being replaced by low-code agent orchestration that lets domain experts create working AI assistants in minutes rather than months. Background The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) has begun making large tranches of its licensed financial data available to customers inside Microsoft’s Copilot Studio...

Adesso’s new EasyTouch 1500 brings an unusual mix of ergonomics, mechanical switches, and a hardware-level AI shortcut to the desktop — a combination aimed squarely at creators, coders, and knowledge workers who want both wrist relief and instant access to generative assistants without interrupting their flow. Background Adesso has quietly expanded its EasyTouch family with an ergonomically split, mechanical model that includes a dedicated AI/CoPilot hotkey, per-key RGB, QMK/VIA...

Microsoft’s and Google’s collaboration stacks have crossed swords again, but the fight is less about which vendor is “better” and more about which trade‑offs match your organization’s workflows, governance needs, and budget. In practical terms, Microsoft Teams (as part of Microsoft 365) trades deeper desktop application fidelity, broad enterprise governance, and an extensive partner ecosystem for a slightly higher cost and more complex licensing; Google Workspace rewards organizations that...

Microsoft’s PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview marked a turning point for Windows automation: for the first time the platform shipped with a built‑in graphical scripting environment and a standards‑based remote management channel that together changed how administrators write, test, and operate automation at scale. The CTP revealed two of the most requested capabilities — an Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) and WS‑Management‑based remoting through WinRM — while adding...

Companies that still run critical workloads on systems designed for a slower, pre-cloud world are paying a hidden tax in agility, security and cash — and Microsoft Azure, together with Microsoft’s modern identity and security stack, is positioned as a practical path off that treadmill if organisations plan carefully and treat modernisation as a continuous business change rather than a one-off migration. Background / Overview Legacy applications and technical debt are no longer just IT...

Microsoft’s Azure Local brings the Azure management plane to customer-owned hardware, promising cloud-like APIs and services in your data center — but it’s not a substitute for the public cloud’s scale and elasticity. This article explains what Azure Local delivers, what it intentionally does not, and how to evaluate it for real-world use, drawing on vendor guidance, Microsoft documentation and practitioner experience, plus the practical advice from PQR experts referenced in the Techzine...

Microsoft’s announcement of a commercial deployment service for driver and firmware updates — first teased in 2021 and now baked into Intune’s driver update policies and Microsoft Graph workflows — fundamentally changes how enterprises control, approve, and monitor device-level updates from Windows Update. The move replaces opaque, opportunistic driver pushes with a managed, auditable pipeline that surfaces applicable driver/firmware candidates, lets administrators approve or pause them...