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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...

The race to build a genuinely useful AI personal finance assistant has moved from proof‑of‑concept to everyday reality, but the practical differences among ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude are now driven less by raw model “IQ” and more by ecosystem access, grounding (live data), privacy guarantees, and governance controls—and those are the dimensions that will determine whether an assistant can safely help you reconcile a bank statement, draft a budget, or...

Microsoft has quietly handed enterprise IT a narrowly scoped but important new lever: a Group Policy that can uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but the control is deliberately conservative, gated by multiple conditions, and designed as a one‑time cleanup rather than a fleet‑wide kill switch. Background Microsoft’s Copilot footprint on Windows now includes multiple, overlapping experiences: the free consumer Microsoft Copilot app that appears on...

Microsoft’s decision to remove Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) from Windows Server releases after Windows Server 2025 is more than a checkbox in a release note — it is a hard deadline that forces IT teams to confront decades of legacy name‑resolution assumptions and hidden dependencies before the platform removes the native server role, tooling, and automation surfaces they have quietly relied on. Background WINS emerged in the mid‑1990s to solve the practical problem of short‑name...

Microsoft’s quiet concession to enterprise customers — a narrowly scoped Group Policy that can uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app on managed Windows 11 devices — marks a rare public retreat from the company’s aggressive Copilot-first strategy, yet the tool’s conservative gates and one‑time semantics mean IT teams must still do the heavy lifting to assert durable control over AI services in the workplace. Background Microsoft has spent the last few years embedding Copilot across...

Windows and Linux users have been trading myths, half-truths, and sermon-like lectures for decades — and the latest round of “just use Linux” sermons misses important nuance: Windows today is neither defenseless nor hopelessly obsolete, but it also isn’t flawless. This feature untangles five common Windows myths Linux evangelists love to repeat, verifies the key technical claims, and gives practical context for users deciding whether to tweak Windows, switch, or run both side-by-side...

Microsoft’s January Insider release quietly gives IT administrators a surgical, policy-driven way to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but the control is narrowly scoped, one‑time, and intentionally conservative, leaving many real‑world management and privacy questions for enterprises and IT teams to resolve. Overview Microsoft shipped Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) to the Dev and Beta channels with two headline changes: a...