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AI personal‑finance assistants have moved from novelty chatbots to practical productivity tools, but choosing between ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude now comes down less to flashy model claims and more to where your financial data lives, what governance you require, and how you plan to verify outputs. Background AI assistants are no longer judged solely on conversational fluency. For personal finance workflows — budgeting, transaction reconciliation, long PDF...

Amazon’s move to bring a native Prime Video app to Windows 10 — and with it, the long‑awaited ability to download titles for offline viewing on laptops and desktops — finally closed a persistent feature gap between mobile devices and the PC. The Windows 10 Prime Video app, distributed through the Microsoft Store and built as a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) experience, delivers a Store‑managed installer, a desktop‑oriented UI, and the same download controls that mobile Prime Video users...

Zorin OS 18’s launch has become one of the clearest, most visible signals that a significant number of Windows users are actively testing Linux as a practical alternative — a surge driven by timing, product design, and a hard deadline in the Windows lifecycle. Background Microsoft’s decision to end mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 created a sharp moment of choice for millions of users: upgrade to Windows 11 where hardware permits, purchase limited Extended Security...

I stopped typing passwords the day I clipped a hardware security key to my keyring—and the change was seismic. A one-inch device the size of a thumb drive now does the heavy lifting of my account security: plug it into a USB port or tap it over NFC, touch the metal contact, and cryptographic authentication grants access. That’s the YubiKey model the MakeUseOf writer described, and it’s the same phishing‑resistant approach Google rolled out to its workforce—an approach Google says eliminated...

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AI assistants are now competent helpers for everyday money work, but the practical choice between ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude comes down less to flashy model claims and more to where your data lives, how much auditability you need, and how you plan to verify outputs. Background / Overview The four mainstream consumer and enterprise assistants have settled into distinct product positions: ChatGPT as the flexible generalist and plugin hub; Gemini as Google’s...

Microsoft’s sudden retirement of the long‑standing Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) marks a decisive break with a toolset that generations of Windows administrators relied on for offline, scriptable, and repeatable operating‑system imaging and provisioning. The company’s documentation now calls MDT “retired,” warns that MDT integration with Configuration Manager and standalone MDT are no longer supported, and urges customers to migrate to modern provisioning options such as Windows...

Alaska Air Group is executing a major technology remediation program after a sequence of high‑impact outages exposed brittle on‑premises infrastructure and dangerous concentration of control‑plane dependencies in cloud edge services, prompting an external audit, increased technology spending, and a public pivot toward multi‑path redundancy. Background Alaska Air’s outages in late 2025 combined two distinct failure modes: a primary data‑center hardware failure that disabled mission‑critical...

Microsoft’s incremental promise to make Windows 11 a genuinely cross‑device operating system took its most practical step yet this month: the Resume feature — Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Handoff — has expanded in Insider builds to support a broader set of real‑world Android scenarios, lowering developer friction and surfacing one‑click continuity prompts on the Windows taskbar for activities started on a paired Android phone. This update shifts Resume from a narrow demo into a usable tool...

Apple’s decision to lean on Google’s Gemini for the next phase of Apple Intelligence — including a major Siri overhaul — is a watershed moment in the mobile AI race, and it redraws the strategic map for mobile-first AI experiences. The tie-up hands Google a deeper reach into Apple’s device base while letting Apple keep the user-facing promise of on‑device privacy and its Private Cloud Compute; for Microsoft, already struggling to find consistent traction for Copilot on phones and in...

AI assistants are now practical tools for managing everyday money tasks, but choosing between ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude depends less on marketing and more on how each assistant connects to your data, its privacy guarantees, and its document‑handling limits. Background / Overview The consumer AI landscape has matured from novelty chatbots into ecosystem‑specific assistants that compete on integration, context window size, and governance features rather than raw...

Chris Avellone's blunt assessment that Bethesda "doesn’t fully understand [Fallout's] roots" has reopened an old wound in the franchise: a recurring split between players who prize the series' original CRPG sensibilities and those who prefer Bethesda's blockbuster, open-world reinventions. His comments — delivered publicly and amplified across gaming outlets this January — are simple, direct, and worth taking seriously because Avellone both helped shape the classic Fallout identity and later...

Microsoft has quietly begun retiring Microsoft Lens — the long‑running mobile document scanner formerly known as Office Lens — removing a tiny but beloved utility that turned phones into instant PDF, Word, PowerPoint and OCR tools and steering its users toward OneDrive and Microsoft 365 Copilot instead. The company’s support guidance now sets a phased timeline users must act on: Microsoft Lens enters retired status on January 9, 2026, will be removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play...

Microsoft’s latest Insider previews show the company quietly experimenting with embedding Copilot directly into Windows 11’s File Explorer as a docked, detachable side panel — a change that would turn a once‑episodic helper into a persistent, in‑context assistant for everyday file work, while Microsoft simultaneously surfaces a narrowly scoped Group Policy that lets administrators remove the consumer Copilot app under strict conditions. Background File Explorer is the single most‑used...

Microsoft has quietly handed IT administrators a new lever to excise the visible Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices while open-source projects and community scripts promise to strip much broader AI surface area — but the reality of removing AI from Windows 11, version 25H2 is complicated, partial, and fraught with trade‑offs between control, functionality, security, and future maintainability. Background Windows 11, version 25H2 continues Microsoft's aggressive integration of...

The consumer-facing race to build an AI personal finance assistant is no longer theoretical: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude each promise to speed budgeting, reconcile transactions, draft negotiation letters and automate spreadsheet work — but they arrive with materially different tradeoffs in grounding, privacy guarantees, actionability, and cost. A hands‑on comparison in regional press distilled those differences for everyday users, and independent product...

Microsoft and PayPal have pushed the shopping cart inside the chat window: Copilot Checkout lets U.S. users discover, compare, and complete purchases entirely within Microsoft Copilot, with PayPal supplying inventory surfacing, branded checkout, guest payments and card acceptance to make in‑chat commerce possible. Background Microsoft announced Copilot Checkout as part of a broader push into agentic commerce — the idea that AI assistants should not only recommend products but also execute...

Microsoft’s little bitmap editor is no longer just nostalgia — it’s a testbed for UI tweaks and generative AI, and the company now faces a clear crossroads: gently modernize Paint while preserving the simple, predictable experience millions expect, or push harder into new territory and risk alienating that same audience. Background Microsoft Paint launched with Windows 1.0 and for decades has been the quintessential low-friction image tool: fast to open, simple to use, and reliable for...

VLC’s long-awaited native Arm64 build for Windows has finally arrived, letting the ubiquitous media player run directly on Snapdragon-powered laptops and tablets without falling back to x86 emulation — and that change matters for performance, battery life, and day‑to‑day usability for Windows on Arm users. Background / Overview VLC has been the Swiss‑army knife of media playback for years: free, open‑source, and able to handle an extraordinary range of codecs and containers. Until now, on...

Microsoft’s latest preview-build sleuthing suggests Copilot is moving from a context‑menu helper to a first‑class, in‑Explorer assistant: hidden UI strings in Windows 11 Insider packages reference a “Chat with Copilot” trigger and a “Detach Copilot” affordance inside File Explorer, pointing to a docked chat pane that can be popped out into its own window. Background / Overview Microsoft has steadily folded Copilot into Windows surfaces over the last two years, layering conversational AI...