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Microsoft’s deadline for Windows 10 support and a wave of opportunistic attacks have combined into a blunt — and expensive — message for users: patch or pay, upgrade or expose your data. A recent promotional push offering heavily discounted Windows 11 Pro keys (reported in multiple deal outlets) has landed alongside repeated security warnings and a short-term Extended Security Updates (ESU) option from Microsoft. The result is a frantic upgrade market aimed at protecting aging PCs, but also...

A widely distributed December cumulative update for Windows 11 — KB5072033 — quietly changed the startup behavior of a core app deployment service and, for a significant subset of PCs, turned routine background activity into persistent resource pressure that can make systems sluggish, noisy in monitoring consoles, and in some cases practically unusable until the configuration is reverted. Background / Overview Microsoft shipped the December 9, 2025 cumulative update identified as KB5072033...

The U.S. Department of Commerce has quietly withdrawn a proposed rule that would have barred the import of Chinese-made drones — including market leader DJI — a last-minute reprieve that arrives amid high-level diplomatic thawing between Washington and Beijing ahead of a planned Trump–Xi summit in April, even as the Federal Communications Commission’s existing restrictions on approvals for new foreign-made drone hardware remain firmly in place. Background The policy debate over Chinese-made...

Players worldwide were abruptly cut off from Minecraft Bedrock Realms when Microsoft-backed authentication and routing systems failed, leaving Realms inaccessible for hours and igniting an intense backlash from the game's massive community. The outage was not a game-engine crash; it was a cloud‑edge control‑plane failure tied to Azure Front Door (AFD) that broke authentication, storefront and matchmaking flows, producing widespread launcher errors and Realm disconnects across consoles and...

African startups are at an inflection point: constrained talent pools and tight budgets are colliding with a moment when AI tools—if applied thoughtfully—can multiply human capacity rather than replace it. The result is an emerging playbook for augmented teams: small, interdisciplinary crews that pair human judgment and empathy with AI copilots, low-code agents, and self‑service analytics to scale operations rapidly and cheaply. This is not a theoretical trend — vendors like Zoho are...

Microsoft quietly removed the online CD metadata lookup that Windows Media Player has relied on for decades, so inserting an audio CD into a Windows 10 or Windows 11 machine no longer reliably returns album artwork, track names, composer/genre fields, or other standard metadata — both the legacy Windows Media Player and the new Media Player app fail to connect to the service that previously populated those fields automatically. Background / Overview For many Windows users the ritual was...

Alejandro Armas — known on GitHub as mycroftsnm — has released a compact collection of five boot-time UEFI games that force a simple choice every time you start a PC: win, and the machine continues to boot; lose, and it shuts down. The project, published as the UEFIGame repository, bundles a mix of quiz, pattern-memory, Simon-like and reflex tests — User Evaluation for Ineptness, Insult Sword Fighting, Fall To Boot, Age Verification and UEFI Says — and the developer states the suite took...

Lenovo has confirmed a factory-shipped SteamOS variant of the Legion Go 2 at CES 2026, promising a June 2026 arrival and a premium starting price of $1,199 for a handheld that pairs the original Go 2’s high-end hardware with Valve’s controller-first Linux image. Background / Overview Lenovo launched the Legion Go 2 as a Windows 11 handheld in late 2025 and earned praise for its large 8.8‑inch OLED, 74 Wh battery and support for AMD’s new Ryzen Z2 family; the device quickly became a lightning...

Understanding the hardware & the driver version numbers you mentioned GeForce 525M — what it is The GeForce 525M is a mobile (notebook) GPU from NVIDIA’s earlier product families. Many of those notebook GPUs were supported in the Verde/R295 and later driver families; OEM notebook vendors also often published tailored drivers for their models. Because this is a mobile GPU, the safest source for a driver is the laptop manufacturer’s downloads page (OEM package) or NVIDIA’s “notebook” driver...

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus lands not as a footnote but as a strategic wedge between flagship ambition and mainstream reality — a chip aimed squarely at the $799–$1,299 laptop segment that could, for the first time, make high‑throughput on‑device AI and multi‑day battery life ordinary expectations for everyday Windows users. The X2 Plus keeps the headline NPU that powered Qualcomm’s premium X2 Elite family while trimming CPU and GPU resources to hit much broader price and thermal...

Windows Sandbox is the built‑in, disposable Windows desktop that lets you run untrusted installers and files without leaving a trace on your main PC — and while that claim is true in practical terms, it needs context: it’s an excellent low‑friction tool for short, safe testing but not an impenetrable “one‑click” cure for every malware or driver risk. Background / Overview Windows Sandbox is a lightweight, ephemeral virtual environment included with supported Windows editions that boots a...

Paul Thurrott’s site recently published language reminding readers that the content on Thurrott.com is proprietary, intended for “personal, non-commercial use only,” and off-limits to automated scraping, republication, or use as a substitute for the site’s Service — a stance that has ignited debate among readers, researchers, and downstream services that ingest news and forum content. The policy excerpt emphasizes restrictions on robots, spiders, scrapers, and other automated access, signals...

The head-to-head tests and archive analysis of a seven‑way chatbot roundup deliver a clear, practical takeaway: there is no single “best” AI chatbot for every job — instead, pick the assistant that matches the task you need done, and treat every answer as a draft that needs verification. Background / Overview The recent hands‑on comparisons ran structured, real‑world prompts across a set of mainstream chatbots and several rising challengers. Test frameworks combined ten text tasks...

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas delivered a clear message for anyone watching the automotive booths: at CES 2026 the car itself has become a delivery vehicle for software, sensors and cloud‑connected intelligence, and the industry is aggressively re‑shaping vehicle design, safety and business models around artificial intelligence rather than metal, paint and horsepower alone. Background CES has not traditionally been the place to break wide new vehicle lineups, but it has long...

Alison Wagonfeld’s move from Google Cloud to NVIDIA as the chipmaker’s first-ever chief marketing officer marks a deliberate pivot: NVIDIA is now investing in a centralized, senior marketing function to translate its technical dominance in AI hardware into a broader, enterprise- and public-facing narrative. Background NVIDIA’s ascent from a gaming-focused GPU company to the de facto supplier of advanced chips for generative AI has been meteoric. Over the last several quarters the company...

The Radeon HD 4850, once a value-star at launch, can still serve as a reliable desktop GPU on Windows 10 for basic tasks and legacy gaming—but only with careful driver choices, realistic performance expectations, and an acceptance that CrossFire’s historical glory days are effectively over for modern titles. Background / Overview The Radeon HD 4850 debuted in mid‑2008 as part of AMD’s R700 family (RV770 GPU). It shipped as a 55 nm design with 800 stream processors, a 256‑bit memory bus and...

When the Recycle Bin is emptied it feels final, but deleted files often survive long enough to be rescued—if you act quickly, choose the right method, and understand the limits imposed by your storage hardware and Windows itself. Background / Overview Recovering files after the Recycle Bin has been emptied is a common scenario for Windows users, and the practical reality is a mixture of optimism and constraint: Windows typically marks deleted data blocks as free rather than instantly...

Get ready: the first half of 2026 brings a deep, diverse slate of fiction from big-name returnees to bold debuts — from intimate domestic dramas and literary historicals to hair-raising horror and twisty psychological thrillers — giving readers more than enough reasons to clear their TBR lists. Background The opening six months of 2026 show publishers leaning into safe bets and adventurous swings at the same time. Established authors who reliably sell (and headline seasonal lists) are...

If you still have a LEGO Boost Creative Toolbox (set 17101) on your shelf and a Windows 10 PC, you can bring Vernie, Frankie and the AutoBuilder to life — but the route from box to working robot on Windows is more complicated in 2026 than it was in 2017. This guide breaks down the current state of LEGO Boost software for Windows 10, explains what works and what doesn’t, compares the top PC-side options, and gives step‑by‑step setup and troubleshooting advice so you can pick the best, safest...

Microsoft’s first Insider preview of 2026 lands as a focused, practical update: Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (delivered as KB5072046) expands Copilot’s role in accessibility, gives IT administrators a new uninstall policy for the consumer Copilot app, and opens an alternate developer path for Cross‑Device Resume — all while polishing a few UI edges and shipping a collection of fixes and known issues for testers to validate. Background / Overview Windows 11’s early‑2026 Insider...