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Microsoft has not confirmed a product called “Windows 12,” but the combination of Microsoft’s public roadmaps, the Copilot+ hardware program, Insider-channel leaks, and sustained reporting across the tech press makes a strong case that Microsoft is preparing a major platform shift—one centered on AI-first features, tighter hardware integration, and a more modular, cloud-friendly OS architecture. Background / Overview Microsoft’s official lifecycle calendar establishes a hard milestone that...

Microsoft has quietly removed the decades‑old, truly offline method for activating Windows and Office: the telephone-based Installation ID → Confirmation ID exchange now directs callers to a web‑only Product Activation Portal that requires internet access, CAPTCHA validation and sign‑in with a supported Microsoft identity — a change that effectively ends phone-first offline activation for many real‑world scenarios. This is not a small UI tweak; it rewrites a long‑standing operational escape...

Windows 11 users who want an AI-free desktop now have a community-made tool that goes well beyond the built‑in toggles: a free PowerShell script called RemoveWindowsAI can remove Copilot, Recall, and a broad set of Microsoft’s built‑in AI entry points, then attempt to stop Windows Update from reinstalling them. The script is presented as a one‑stop way to strip visible AI UI and services from a Windows 11 system, and it combines registry policy changes, Appx package removals, scheduled‑task...

Microsoft 365 Copilot’s promise—turning email avalanches, scattered files, and back-to-back meetings into a manageable workday with a few well-crafted prompts—is both practical and already real for many organizations, and the recent how‑to primer that recirculates Leila Gharani’s “10 Copilot Productivity Prompts” is a useful, pragmatic entry point for anyone looking to move from curiosity to daily use. Background Microsoft has embedded Copilot across Microsoft 365 to let AI operate where...

Born2Invest's two how‑to pieces — one promising an Urdu/Hindi walkthrough for downloading and installing the NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 driver on Windows 10, the other offering remediation steps for “AMD Radeon Settings not opening” on Windows 10/11 — are useful entry points for casual readers but contain incomplete, sometimes dated advice and important omissions that can put users at risk if followed literally. This feature unpacks both articles, verifies the technical claims against vendor...

PayPal and Microsoft have quietly stitched together two of the most consequential moves in AI-powered commerce to date: PayPal will power payments and product discovery surfacing for Microsoft’s new Copilot Checkout, enabling shoppers to find, decide, and complete purchases inside the Copilot experience without being redirected to merchant websites. Background Copilot Checkout is part of Microsoft’s broader push to convert Copilot from an assistant into an agentic commerce platform — a place...

TCL’s CES 2026 showcase moved the company decisively from a “display maker” to an AI-first smart‑terminals vendor, unveiling a broad lineup of smart TVs, NXTPAPER phones and tablets, wearables, AR glasses and smart appliances that the company says will leverage Microsoft cloud AI — notably Azure Speech, Azure OpenAI via Microsoft Foundry, and Copilot-enabled features — to deliver multimodal, cross‑device experiences. Background / Overview CES 2026 made one thing clear: vendors are embedding...

Stibo Systems’ announcement that it will demo AI-powered “personal shopper” agents at NRF 2026 — built by pairing Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Fabric with Stibo’s master data management (MDM) platform — is a concrete example of how vendors are racing to turn generative AI from a proof‑of‑concept into a commerce engine. The vendor claims these first‑party agents, grounded in Stibo’s product information, can deliver up to a 15% lift in conversions and an eightfold increase in...

Microsoft has begun rolling out Copilot Checkout, a new AI-driven shopping and payment experience that lets consumers discover products and complete purchases directly inside the Copilot interface without being redirected to a retailer’s website. The feature, announced at the NRF 2026 retail conference, positions Copilot as an in-chat commerce layer powered by partnerships with major payments and storefront platforms and is available now in the U.S. on Copilot.com in collaboration with...

Hexagon Robotics’ new strategic partnership with Microsoft aims to turn humanoid robots from staged demos into production-ready automation — pairing Hexagon’s AEON humanoid, sensor-fusion and spatial-intelligence stack with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric Real‑Time Intelligence, and Azure IoT Operations to deliver inspection and manipulation solutions for automotive, aerospace, manufacturing and logistics environments. Background / Overview Hexagon first unveiled AEON, its industrial...

Microsoft’s Phone Link on Windows 11 can now push Android apps into an almost full‑screen windowed experience — a pragmatic change that makes streamed phone apps far more usable on large monitors while still keeping the phone as the authoritative runtime. Background Phone Link (the modern descendant of “Your Phone”) and its mobile companion, Link to Windows, have long aimed to blur the line between PC and phone by surfacing notifications, messages, calls, photos, and — on supported hardware...

Kenyan Windows 11 users woke up to a small but conspicuous change on January 9, 2026: a colourful, larger battery icon has started appearing on the taskbar for some machines — while the much-promised redesigned Start menu remains gated behind Microsoft’s staggered server-side rollout. Background Microsoft bundled the binaries for this suite of UI refinements into the November 2025 cumulative update (KB5068861), which was published on November 11, 2025. The KB and associated release notes...

If the modern, Copilot-enabled Notepad landed on your PC and you want the old, minimalist notepad.exe back, the good news is that Windows gives you safe, reversible ways to do exactly that — without uninstalling anything or resorting to hacks that break updates. Background / Overview Microsoft has been incrementally modernizing Notepad in Windows 11, adding lightweight formatting, Markdown preview, tabs, session restore and generative AI actions such as Rewrite, Summarize, and Write. These...

TCL’s CES 2026 showcase reframed the company from “display maker” toward an AI-first smart‑terminals vendor, announcing a broad lineup of devices—smart TVs, NXTPAPER phones and tablets, wearables, AR glasses, and smart appliances—tied together by Microsoft cloud AI services such as Azure Speech, Azure OpenAI (in Microsoft Foundry), and Copilot-enabled features. The company described these integrations as the connective tissue for speech recognition, real‑time subtitles, cross‑language...

Microsoft’s Copilot is now a checkout lane: the company has launched Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents, two tightly coupled tools that aim to collapse product discovery and purchase into a single AI-driven interaction across Copilot surfaces and merchant websites. The move—announced alongside partner integrations with PayPal, Shopify and Stripe—places Microsoft squarely in the fast-growing field of agentic commerce, where assistants not only recommend but also complete transactions on behalf...

The Longhorn-era screenshots and management-console previews that once circulated as “Windows Server ‘Longhorn’” remain essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how Microsoft remade its server roadmap in the mid-2000s — and why that remaking still shapes Windows Server design today. The PCMag gallery you linked to is an archival-style image set showing beta-era Server Manager screens, role-based configuration flows, and the early Server Core and initial-configuration user...

Microsoft’s preview of Azure HorizonDB signals a deliberate push to make PostgreSQL the anchor of large, cloud‑native and AI‑driven workloads on Azure, blending a scale‑out, disaggregated storage model with native vector search and an engine partly written in Rust. Background Azure has offered PostgreSQL as a managed service for years, but HorizonDB represents a new architectural tier: a cloud‑native, shared‑storage, scale‑out PostgreSQL service aimed at mission‑critical OLTP and AI‑adjacent...

Certifications remain one of the fastest, most visible ways for developers to signal skill and land higher-paying roles in 2026 — but the landscape has shifted. Analytics Insight’s recent roundup of the “Most In‑Demand Programming Certifications 2026” mapped the headline winners (cloud, AI/ML, Kubernetes, Java, front‑end, and security), and recruiters are still privileging candidates who pair credentials with demonstrable, production‑grade work. This feature expands that roundup into a...

Amazon enters 2026 with the kind of narrative investors have been waiting for: a re‑accelerating AWS, a marquee multi‑year compute agreement that recalibrates cloud market dynamics, visible retail margin expansion and automation gains, and a valuation that many institutions now describe as undervalued relative to the company’s growth trajectory and profit mix. Background Amazon has always been a two‑headed company: a massive, low‑margin global retail engine and a high‑margin cloud computing...

TomTom’s latest announcement that it is deepening integration with Microsoft Azure — bringing Azure OpenAI through Microsoft Foundry Models together with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Kubernetes Service into the TomTom Automotive Navigation Application and TomTom AI Agent — signals a decisive step toward fully cloud-native, agent-driven in-car navigation and voice systems that are being shown at CES 2026. This move builds on multi-year collaboration between TomTom and Microsoft and promises...