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Microsoft and PayPal have pushed the shopping cart inside the chat window: Copilot Checkout lets U.S. shoppers discover, compare, and complete purchases entirely within Copilot conversations, while PayPal supplies inventory surfacing, branded payments, guest checkouts, and card acceptance for participating merchants. Background Microsoft unveiled Copilot Checkout as part of a broader retail and "agentic commerce" push that folds conversational shopping, catalog tooling, and store-operations...

Microsoft has quietly given IT teams a supported, one‑time way to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but the new Group Policy is deliberately narrow, gated by three strict conditions and designed as a surgical cleanup tool rather than a permanent ban. Background Microsoft’s Copilot family now spans multiple products and delivery channels: a consumer‑facing Microsoft Copilot app that ships with many Windows 11 installations, the paid, tenant‑managed...

Three Democratic U.S. senators have formally asked Apple and Google to remove X and its AI chatbot Grok from their app stores, arguing that Grok’s image-generation features have been used to create and distribute nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children and that the apps currently violate app-store rules against sexual and exploitative content. Background Grok is an AI chatbot built by xAI and integrated into X (formerly Twitter). Launched as a conversational assistant with...

Microsoft has finally given IT administrators a supported, one‑time way to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but the new Group Policy is deliberately conservative, available only in Insider preview builds for Pro, Enterprise and Education SKUs, and it will only trigger when several strict conditions are met (both Microsoft 365 Copilot and the consumer Copilot app are installed, the app was not user‑installed, and it has not been launched in the last...

MS Paint may be heading for the exit sign in Microsoft’s product roadmap, but losing Paint does not mean losing the ability to capture, annotate, and share screenshots on Windows — far from it. Built-in tools have quietly matured over the past decade and a half, and the modern Snipping Tool (plus legacy keyboard shortcuts and the Xbox Game Bar) gives Windows users a complete, flexible screenshot toolkit that covers everything from quick clipboard captures to annotated files and short screen...

When a Windows PC “suddenly” crawls, the root cause is usually not mystical—it's measurable: a runaway process, excessive background work, full storage, or simply hardware that’s being asked to do too much. The quickest, safest way to find the bottleneck is to stop guessing and start measuring with Windows’ built‑in tools—beginning with Task Manager—and then apply a short, methodical troubleshooting flow to isolate the culprit and fix it. Background Modern versions of Windows favor...

Fiserv’s new, expanded partnership with Microsoft signals a decisive push to embed generative AI across a major payments and fintech platform — combining Microsoft 365 Copilot for knowledge workers, deeper use of Microsoft Foundry for AI application development, and existing investments in GitHub Copilot for engineering productivity. The announcement frames the agreement as a productivity and product-innovation accelerator that will touch developer toolchains, client-facing systems, fraud...

If you still own a GeForce 9600 GT and are trying to run it on Windows 10 in 2026, the practical reality is this: the last NVIDIA driver family that explicitly supported that card for Windows 10 is the Release 340 branch — specifically GeForce Windows 10 Driver 341.81 (Release 340 family), released on August 24, 2015 — and installing it today requires careful preparation, an awareness of security and compatibility trade‑offs, and a conservative installation workflow. Background The GeForce...

Microsoft’s next living‑room console is increasingly being described not as a sealed, custom operating‑system appliance but as a TV‑focused Windows 11 PC that boots into a console‑style interface — driven by the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE), co‑engineered AMD silicon, and a new emphasis on OEM hardware and cross‑store access that could reshape what “console” means in 2027 and beyond. Background / Overview Since the Xbox debut in 2001, Microsoft’s console strategy has alternated between...

Microsoft has simplified the way Windows Update displays update titles in the Settings and Update history panes — a server-side change that prioritizes a short classification, the canonical KB number, and a compact build or version token — and the move, announced in late October, has already prompted lively debate among admins and power users that forced Microsoft to adjust the plan. Background For years Windows Update titles have been a study in trade-offs: long, catalog-style strings gave...

Microsoft has quietly ended the decades‑old ability to activate Windows and perpetual Office products entirely over the telephone, replacing the traditional offline IVR confirmation‑ID flow with a web‑first Product Activation Portal that requires a browser and a supported Microsoft sign‑in to complete the exchange. Background For more than 20 years, telephone activation was the fallback that let users and administrators activate Windows and Office without exposing the target machine to the...

Dolby Vision 2 will begin rolling out later this year, promising what Dolby calls the most significant upgrade to its premium HDR image engine in more than a decade and setting the stage for a major rethink of how modern TVs handle brightness, colour, motion and ambient viewing conditions. Background When Dolby first introduced Dolby Vision more than a decade ago it reset expectations for high dynamic range (HDR) on consumer displays: frame-by-frame metadata, deep colour, and dynamic tone...

Microsoft’s Windows Insider preview now includes a narrowly scoped, admin‑facing policy that lets IT teams uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — a one‑time, conditional removal designed to balance enterprise governance with user choice. The capability appears in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (delivered as KB5072046) and is exposed as a Group Policy named RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp; it triggers only when very specific conditions are met...

Microsoft has quietly handed IT administrators a narrowly scoped, supported tool to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but the feature comes with strict preconditions, practical limitations, and an operational checklist that every admin should read before deciding whether to deploy it at scale. Background / Overview Microsoft published Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (delivered as KB5072046) to the Dev and Beta channels and documented a...

A small, new utility called Winslop has re‑entered the long-running debate over Windows “debloat” tools by promising a targeted way to detect and remove hidden or unwanted components — especially recent AI surfaces — while giving users more granular control over what stays and what goes. Background / Overview Windows enthusiasts and IT pros have for years wrestled with preinstalled apps, provisioned packages, and telemetry surfaces that reappear after updates or new-user provisioning...

I spent most of my adult life defending Windows like it was a family heirloom, and yet one month with a 14-inch MacBook Pro later I’m writing this from the other side: I switched hardware and operating system, and three concrete things convinced me I’m not going back. The reasons are simple but consequential — dramatically longer battery life, fewer real-world slowdowns, and macOS Sonoma’s modern, productivity-first features — and together they change what “portable work” feels like. This...

Microsoft’s quietly staged euthanasia of Microsoft Lens — the compact, dependable mobile document scanner that many Windows and Office users relied on for quick scans and OCR — landed this week with concrete dates: the app entered a formal retired state on January 9, 2026; it will be removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store on February 9, 2026; and its scanning capabilities will cease when Microsoft turns off the underlying services on March 9, 2026. These changes force users...

I swapped FancyZones for a true tiling window manager on Windows — and it changed how I work, how I think about windows, and how often I touch the mouse. Background / Overview For years, Microsoft PowerToys’ FancyZones has been the go-to way to tame window chaos on Windows. It offers a polished, GUI-driven editor to create custom zones, assign per-monitor layouts, and snap applications into predictable spots. FancyZones is fast to adopt and low risk: you drag, drop, or use a keyboard...

Households across the country are being urged to open their windows for roughly ten minutes a day to reduce condensation, lower indoor humidity and cut the risk of mould — a simple habit that experts say can protect buildings and health while limiting needless energy waste when done correctly. Background Condensation forms when warm, moisture-laden indoor air meets cold surfaces and turns into liquid droplets. Everyday activities — showering, cooking, drying clothes indoors and even...

AirPods Pro that sound fine on an iPhone can become frustratingly thin, muffled, or unusable when the same pair is used in "Headset" mode on a Windows 10 PC — and the ATI Radeon HD 4570, a once-popular budget GPU, still shows up in Windows 10 driver headaches and compatibility questions for users trying to keep aging hardware alive on modern systems. Overview Two short pieces republished from Born2Invest touch on familiar Windows pain points: Bluetooth headset audio quality with AirPods Pro...