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When Windows users boot their PCs and find their Desktop, Documents or Pictures folders suddenly empty and replaced by a small shortcut reading “Where are my files?”, the culprit is increasingly familiar: OneDrive’s folder backup and sync features have quietly moved those files into the cloud. What looks like data loss is usually an interaction between Known Folder Move (KFM), Files On‑Demand, and OneDrive’s backup controls — a combination that can be confusing, aggressive, and, in some edge...

Advertisers who believe they’ve fully stepped away from X (formerly Twitter) may still be sending budget to the platform without realizing it — because X quietly opened much of its ad inventory to programmatic buyers and major demand sources like Google Ads can purchase that inventory indirectly. This is not hypothetical: industry consultants and reporting show programmatic pathways, supply‑side partnerships, and automation defaults that together create a practical loophole for brands trying...

A quiet but consequential Outlook update has left some Windows users unable to open messages protected with Microsoft’s “Encrypt Only” setting, turning sensitive emails into unreadable attachments and forcing administrators and senders into an urgent triage mode until a permanent fix ships. Background: what landed and where it hit On January 5, 2026 Microsoft acknowledged a regression in the Classic Outlook (Win32) client delivered via the Current Channel update Version 2511 (Build...

Mizuho Americas and NPower have quietly turned a pilot into a noteworthy first-year outcome for New York’s entry-level tech ecosystem, launching Path2TECH: Networking & Systems Administration (NetSA) as a free, blended asynchronous 26-week pathway designed to move underemployed young New Yorkers into systems and network roles. The program — seeded by a three-year FutureReady grant from the Mizuho USA Foundation — couples employer-aligned curriculum, vendor certifications, and an...

The AMD Radeon HD 3450 is effectively a legacy device on modern Windows releases, and the practical reality for users trying to run it under Windows 10 is that official vendor support ended years ago — Windows Update will usually supply a basic, Microsoft‑signed display driver (version 8.970.100.9001 in AMD’s guidance), while full Catalyst packages were never released for Windows 10 and any attempt to force newer or non‑OEM packages carries real risk. Background The Radeon HD 3450 launched...

Windows 11 ships with a deceptively simple tool that quietly solves a surprising number of everyday problems: Live Captions. Flick it on with Windows + Ctrl + L and your PC will generate on‑screen subtitles for almost any audio playing on the machine — from browser videos and podcasts to Zoom calls and local media — and it does so on your device, without streaming your audio to the cloud. What began as an accessibility feature has become one of the most useful, low‑friction productivity...

Microsoft's monthly Windows Office Hours on January 15, 2026, brings together product engineers and servicing experts from Windows, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Windows 365, Windows Autopilot, security teams, and FastTrack to provide a live, chat-based Q&A for IT professionals preparing to adopt Windows 11, manage hybrid estates, implement Zero Trust, keep devices current, and plan cloud-native workloads while preserving on-premises investments. Background Windows...

Microsoft's Exchange engineering team has made a clear — and important — clarification for Exchange Online administrators: using New-MoveRequest to force local mailbox moves inside the same tenant or datacenter is not supported and is actively discouraged. While the cmdlet still exists and can sometimes be used in rare troubleshooting scenarios, manual intra-tenant moves bypass the service’s automation, expose mailboxes to real risk, and will not be expedited or reliably troubleshot by...

Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout has gone live in the United States, turning conversational AI into a direct checkout lane and doing so with a clear “merchant consent” argument as its public differentiator. The rollout ties Copilot to payment and commerce infrastructure from PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe and ships with Shopify merchants automatically enrolled after an opt‑out window — a move that instantly scales Microsoft’s reach into millions of storefronts while attempting to avoid the consent...

PayPal’s technology is now a built‑in payment lane inside Microsoft’s Copilot: shoppers can discover, decide and complete purchases without leaving the Copilot experience, as PayPal announced it will power inventory surfacing, branded and guest checkout, and card acceptance for Copilot Checkout starting on Copilot.com. Background Copilot Checkout represents a strategic shift from “search-and-click” to what the industry calls agentic commerce—AI agents that do more than recommend products and...

Microsoft’s Copilot has moved from assistant to checkout lane: Copilot Checkout lets users discover products and complete purchases inside Copilot conversations without being redirected to merchant websites, and the initial U.S. rollout arrives with major commerce partners—Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe—plus prebuilt retail templates (Brand Agents, catalog enrichment, store‑ops agents) that aim to make “agentic commerce” practical for retailers and IT teams. Background / Overview Microsoft...

Microsoft has begun testing a native in-chat shopping and checkout experience called Copilot Checkout, letting U.S. users search for products and complete purchases without leaving the Copilot conversation — a move that stitches discovery, comparison, and payment into Microsoft’s conversational surface across Copilot.com, Bing, MSN, and Microsoft Edge. Background Microsoft’s step into in-chat commerce is part of a larger industry trend toward agentic commerce — where conversational AIs act...

The Linux Foundation has launched the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a vendor‑neutral home for three rapidly adopted open standards for autonomous, multi‑tool AI agents—Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block’s goose framework, and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md—backed at launch by Anthropic, OpenAI and Block as co‑founders and a membership roster that includes Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg and Cloudflare. Background Agentic AI describes systems that move beyond single‑turn...

Picture this: your Security Operations Center lights up at 03:00 because an AI-driven campaign has sent 10,000 bespoke phishing messages aimed at your executives, each message tuned from public LinkedIn content and corporate signals. The immediate threat isn't a novel zero‑day — it’s volume, fidelity, and speed. Microsoft‑centric organizations must treat this as a structural shift: defenders who rely on slow, manual playbooks will lose. The new calculus is identity, automation, and governed...

TomTom’s latest announcement confirms a deepening of its multi‑year collaboration with Microsoft: the company is integrating its TomTom Automotive Navigation Application and TomTom AI Agent with Azure OpenAI in Microsoft Foundry Models, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to deliver production‑grade, brandable in‑car navigation and voice capabilities for automakers. This is being pitched as a pre‑integrated, scalable stack that shortens time‑to‑market and enables OEMs to ship...

Thurrott readers are reporting a familiar — and increasingly visible — set of problems with the site’s commenting layer after Thurrott integrated the OpenWeb commenting platform: slow or missing comment loads, inconsistent notifications, apparent moderation opacity, and sporadic UI breakage that together undermine the value of site conversation and reader engagement. Background OpenWeb is a commercial commenting and community-engagement platform that sells moderation, analytics, and audience...

Headline: Dell’s XPS comeback at CES 2026 — what it means for Windows 11, buyers, and the PC market Lead paragraph Dell has quietly — and quickly — reversed course on a controversial 2025 rebrand by bringing the XPS premium laptop family back into its lineup at CES 2026. The relaunch (anchored by new XPS 14 and XPS 16 models) is already rolling into select markets and ships with Windows 11 on the new hardware, a development that strengthens Microsoft’s ecosystem at the premium end of the PC...

Raycast has landed a properly modern replacement for the old Win+R prompt — a keyboard-first, discoverable Run command added to Raycast for Windows in v0.41 that aims to behave like the classic Run dialog while offering the features and polish users expect from a modern app launcher. The update, published on January 8, 2026, positions Raycast as a full-featured Windows alternative to the decades-old Run box and sits alongside other modern launchers — including Microsoft’s own evolving Run...

Windows Weekly 965 distilled a chaotic week in PC tech into a sharp, pragmatic briefing: Paul Thurrott and his cohosts threaded CES highlights, Microsoft’s high‑stakes engineering pivot toward Rust, stealth platform changes like hardware‑accelerated BitLocker, fresh Windows Insider previews and Copilot updates, and a sweeping set of gaming and hardware notes that together sketch where Windows users and IT teams should focus in 2026. Background Windows Weekly has long been the pulse check for...

Microsoft has begun shifting BitLocker’s heavy lifting out of general-purpose CPU cores and into dedicated silicon, introducing a hardware‑accelerated BitLocker mode in Windows 11 that promises both measurable performance gains and tighter key protection on supported new devices. Background / Overview BitLocker has been a foundational Windows feature for disk‑at‑rest protection since the Vista era, relying historically on the host CPU (with AES‑NI where available) to perform AES‑based sector...