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October 14, 2025 marked a hard line: Microsoft officially ended mainstream support for Windows 10, and the consequences—security, compatibility, and a renewed conversation about ownership of the personal computer—are already reshaping user choices and vendor behavior. Background / Overview Microsoft’s lifecycle calendar is explicit: Windows 10 mainstream support ended on October 14, 2025, meaning retail Home and Pro systems no longer receive routine security patches, feature updates, or...

Microsoft opened 2026’s Windows 11 Insider cycle with a focused preview drop that expands Copilot’s role in accessibility, gives IT admins more control over the consumer Copilot app, and offers developers an alternate, notification-based path for resuming Android app activity on Windows — all shipped as Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 rolling to Dev and Beta Insiders. Background / Overview Microsoft’s 25H2-era Insider deliveries continue the pattern used in late 2025: a single...

Windows 11 feels familiar the instant you log in, but a handful of free, first‑party Microsoft apps quietly amplify that experience in ways most new users never discover — PowerToys, Diagnostic Data Viewer, Windows File Recovery, Windows HDR Calibration, and Windows Scan are five such tools worth installing during a fresh setup. Background Windows has long shipped with a mixture of core system components and optional utilities. In recent years Microsoft has shifted many focused tools into...

Microsoft has pushed the first public preview build of Windows 11 for 2026 into the Insider channels, and at its centre is a focused set of fixes and experiments for File Explorer — including an optional background preload and a reorganized right‑click menu — alongside a handful of other quality and usability tweaks that signal Microsoft is reprioritizing everyday performance and polish. Background Windows’ File Explorer is one of the operating system’s most visible and frequently used...

Google is rolling Gemini into Gmail with a slate of features that promise to read, summarize, and even answer questions about the contents of your inbox — and the result is a dramatic convenience-versus-privacy trade-off that every user and IT admin should understand before enabling the newest smart features. Background / Overview Google announced a major Gmail update on January 8, 2026, positioning the app “in the Gemini era” and introducing three headline capabilities: AI Overviews (thread...

Microsoft’s first Windows 11 preview build of 2026 opens with a practical accessibility win: Narrator can now call on Copilot to describe images for all Windows 11 users — not just those with Copilot+ hardware — while IT administrators gain a new policy to remove the consumer Copilot app from managed devices and developers get an expanded path for cross‑device Resume via the Windows Notification System. Background When Microsoft introduced Copilot and the Copilot+ hardware tier, many of the...

Microsoft’s Copilot moving into in‑chat purchases, Google’s Gemini seeding deeper into Gmail, Elon Musk’s Grok under regulatory scrutiny for image misuse, OPPO shipping a camera‑forward Reno 15 Pro, and RayNeo touting compact, bright AR optics — together these developments mark a decisive shift from AI as a conversational advisor toward AI as an agentic actor in commerce, communication, content creation and mixed reality. Background / Overview The past week crystallized two parallel trends...

The AI showdown that matters for millions of knowledge workers has settled into a pragmatic split: in 2025, Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT no longer compete on novelty alone — they compete on where and how they fit into real work. Microsoft sells baked‑in Office automation, tenant governance, and agent tooling; OpenAI sells model flexibility, extensibility, and a developer ecosystem. The top‑line: Copilot wins when your work lives inside Microsoft 365; ChatGPT wins when you need...

Microsoft’s Copilot is no longer just a helper for writing emails and summarizing web pages — it’s being shaped into a full shopping platform that can compare prices, track deals, surface cashback, and even complete purchases inside the Copilot interface, folding browser-era shopping tools into an AI-first, conversational commerce experience. The shift consolidates Edge’s legacy shopping features into Copilot in Edge and extends them with native in‑chat checkout and merchant-facing “Brand...

Microsoft’s Copilot has moved decisively from a sidebar helper to a full-fledged AI companion across Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 — introducing a new expressive avatar, shared group sessions, tenant‑aware connectors, taskbar “companion” mini‑apps, and a raft of features that make Copilot both more social and more deeply embedded in everyday workflows. Background Microsoft’s Copilot story is no longer just about a chat box inside Office; it’s now an ecosystem strategy that ties generative...

Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence platform can now run its heavy-duty data scanning and classification entirely inside a customer-controlled Microsoft Azure tenancy — a Private Scan Manager for Azure that promises on‑tenant raw-data scanning while maintaining a central control plane for policy orchestration and remediation. Background Concentric AI has positioned Semantic Intelligence as a context‑aware data security governance platform that blends discovery, semantic classification...

Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) to the Dev and Beta Channels, a mid-January flight that packs targeted accessibility upgrades, new enterprise policy controls for Copilot, an expanded developer integration path for cross‑device continuity, a subtle Windows Spotlight icon refresh, multiple bug fixes, and a slate of still‑unresolved issues that make this build useful for testers — but risky for general deployment. Background This build is...

Microsoft appears to be testing a deeper Copilot integration inside File Explorer — not merely another right‑click shortcut, but a docked, chat‑style Copilot experience that can be attached to the Explorer window and detached into its own pane or window. Hidden strings and UI references in recent Windows 11 preview builds point to labels such as “Chat with Copilot” and “Detach Copilot,” suggesting an inline chat surface for file‑centric questions and actions rather than a hand‑off to a...

Microsoft’s step to let Windows users save and synchronize passkeys to their Microsoft Account changes the practical calculus for passwordless security: the company has combined Windows Hello’s local biometric and PIN unlock with a cloud-backed passkey vault (Microsoft Password Manager) so users can create a passkey once and use it across their Windows devices, while an encryption passkey and a separate vault PIN protect cross-device recovery and synchronization. Background Microsoft has...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly moved from assistant to checkout lane: shoppers in the United States can now complete purchases directly inside Copilot conversations, with payments and merchant plumbing provided by partners including PayPal, Stripe and Shopify — and Etsy sellers already surfacing in early availability. Background Microsoft unveiled the new in-chat purchase flow, Copilot Checkout, as part of a broader retail push built around agentic commerce — AI agents that not only...

Acronis Cyber Protect 17 lands as a major incremental release that doubles down on an aggressive one‑stop pitch: combine enterprise‑grade backup, recovery, and endpoint security into a single pane of glass and sell it to businesses that want fewer vendors and stronger ransomware resilience. This update expands platform support, adds agentless and discovery tools that simplify on‑prem and virtual deployments, and keeps Acronis’ familiar tiered licensing—an approach that remains powerful for...

This week’s Hackaday Podcast episode distilled a week of elegant, oddball engineering into a brisk coffee‑shop conversation: a mystery “What’s That Sound?” that turned out to be a flip‑dot display, two distinct ways to visualize sound (one budget Schlieren setup and one hacker’s strobe trick), an entertaining but unscientific benchmarking run that shows Windows 11 performing poorly on a 12‑year‑old ThinkPad, floppy disks turned into magnetic pixel canvases, deliberate JPEG corruption for...

If you’ve ever copied text or a table from Outlook and tried to paste it into Excel only to be met with the message “Your organization’s data cannot be pasted here,” the interruption is not a random Windows bug — it’s usually a deliberate data-protection control enforced by your organization’s mobile application management (MAM) or data-loss-prevention (DLP) settings. This article explains why the restriction appears, how to troubleshoot it as an end user, and what administrators need to...

Windows lets you open the Settings app in more ways than most users realize — and the fastest, most reliable method remains the keyboard shortcut Windows key + I — but there are also command-line, Run‑URI, File Explorer, Start menu and Power User menu approaches that are useful in specific situations. If you were sent a page or link claiming to “just click to open Settings,” treat it as suspicious: you can accomplish everything safely from the OS itself without visiting untrusted URLs...

Microsoft’s Copilot is no longer an experimental sidebar trick — it’s a multi‑modal assistant baked into Windows, Edge, macOS, mobile apps and Microsoft 365 that can see your screen, speak with you, generate images, work directly with your files and connect to your Gmail or Google Calendar — and there are practical ways to get more value from it right now. Background Copilot began as Microsoft’s answer to the wave of generative AI tools: a chat interface that could help you draft text...