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Microsoft’s 2025 Windows 11 updates read less like a single blockbuster release and more like a year-long series of practical, AI‑first refinements that changed how people actually use their PCs — from smarter, visual Copilot helpers to real recovery tools for when updates go wrong. The roundup below distills a dozen standout features highlighted in a recent industry piece and validates, verifies, and critiques each item with reporting from Microsoft and independent outlets. Background /...

Windows is trying to do for AI agents what it once did for applications: make the desktop the obvious place to discover, run, and manage intelligent helpers that can do work for you — not just answer questions — and Microsoft has already shipped the plumbing and the guardrails that will decide whether that experiment becomes a productivity breakthrough or a new supply‑chain/attack surface for enterprises and consumers. Background / Overview For decades Microsoft’s strategic advantage with...

If you have an aging Windows 10 PC that won’t—or shouldn’t—move to Windows 11, a lightweight Linux distribution can be the fastest, cheapest, and greenest way to breathe new life into that hardware. ZDNET’s comparison of Puppy Linux and Linux Lite frames the choice succinctly: Puppy Linux revives machines by running almost entirely in RAM with an ultra-small footprint, while Linux Lite provides a familiar, Windows-like desktop and Ubuntu LTS stability for users who want an easy full install...

Microsoft’s 2025 Windows 11 story is less about a single blockbuster release and more about steady, deliberate accretion: a stream of AI-first features, polish to long-neglected apps, and a clear hardware split between baseline Windows 11 and the new Copilot+ tier. The roundup that follows distills the dozen highlights called out in the PCMag Australia piece, verifies the key technical claims where possible, and assesses the practical value — and risks — for everyday users, power users, IT...

PowerToys’ new Light Switch is one of those small, shockingly practical features that makes you wonder why Windows 11 Settings never baked it in to begin with—yet the feature’s rough rollout, unexpected default enablement for some users, and leftover platform problems mean making it a default today would be premature without a few important fixes and clearer defaults. Background Windows has supported separate System and Apps appearance modes for several releases, but it historically lacked a...

HCL Technologies will hold its Board meeting on Monday, January 12, 2026, to consider and approve the unaudited financial results for the quarter and nine months ended December 31, 2025 — a schedule that also signals the company’s intention to discuss a potential fourth interim dividend and sets the stage for its Q3 FY26 results and investor conference call. Background HCL Technologies (HCLTech) is one of India’s largest IT services companies, with a business model split across services...

Microsoft and several leading vendors have pushed AI “agents” from lab concepts to production-grade features that automate threat detection, alert triage, and incident response across cloud, network, and endpoint systems—delivering faster, context-rich investigations while forcing security teams to build robust governance, identity controls, and auditability into the new workflows. Background Microsoft’s Security Copilot has evolved from a conversational assistant into a platform of...

If your organization has asked you to “install Microsoft Intune” on a Windows 11 PC, what they really mean is: install the Intune Company Portal app and enroll the device into your organization’s Intune tenant. Intune itself is a cloud service managed by IT; there is no single “Intune” binary to install on a client PC. The practical steps are simple — get Company Portal (Microsoft Store is recommended), sign in with your work or school account, and follow the enrollment prompts — but...

2025 began as another year of incremental gadget refreshes and closed 12 months later with an unmistakable industry diagnosis: we had collectively slopified our devices. What started as earnest experiments in generative assistance, on-device inference, and conversation-driven UIs became, for many users, a messy overlay of half-baked features, opaque data flows, and cloud-dependent behavior that often delivered more noise than value. Background In 2025 the tech industry doubled down on a...

Microsoft’s cloud controls and the internet’s DNS plumbing both showed real fragility on December 30, 2025, when a short but disruptive DNS-related incident that Microsoft labelled an “ACTIVE — DNS Resolution Issues for Azure Domains via OpenDNS” left customers around the world struggling to reach the Azure Portal and Microsoft 365 management surfaces, while a concurrent and separate telecom blackout in Israel — affecting major providers Partner and Hot — produced a national-scale disruption...

Napster’s new Napster Station promises to move conversational AI off screens and into the busiest public spaces by packaging purpose‑built hardware, studio‑grade audio, and Azure‑backed realtime models into a ready‑to‑deploy kiosk engineered specifically to work in noisy, crowded environments where ordinary voice assistants routinely fail. Background / Overview Napster announced Napster Station on December 30, 2025, positioning the product as an enterprise AI concierge for hotel lobbies...

Wall Street’s most vocal tech bull has drawn a line under a provocative idea: the next chapter of the AI rally won’t only be won by the silicon giants, but by companies that can monetize AI through software, services, devices, autonomy and security — and his top-five roster for 2026 reflects that thesis. In a widely circulated Wedbush note and subsequent media roundups, Dan Ives named Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Palantir, and CrowdStrike as the “best AI names for 2026,” deliberately emphasizing...

2025 closed as a year of hard choices: established platforms were retired, niche experiments were wound down, and companies redirected scarce engineering resources toward AI, consolidation, and hardware that could carry the next decade’s software ambitions. Background / Overview The tech industry’s exits in 2025 fall into clear, connected categories: scheduled lifecycle retirements (calendar‑hard end‑of‑support dates), strategic consolidation (folding standalone apps into larger platforms)...

Replit’s December updates strip another layer of friction from turning ideas into live software: a free Starter Plan with daily Agent credits, a deep ChatGPT integration that lets you build apps inside conversations, and a set of Agent improvements—most notably Agent 3 and a new Fast mode—that push Replit from assisted editing toward genuinely autonomous app creation. These changes are not marketing vapor: Replit’s product blog and documentation lay out the mechanics, and independent...

Microsoft finished 2025 with its most consequential year-in-review in recent memory: impressive financial momentum driven by cloud and AI, matched by persistent product and consumer-facing missteps that damaged trust in Windows, strained Xbox’s consumer business, and left many long-time users wondering who the company is building for. Background / Overview 2025 for Microsoft was a study in contrasts. The company’s cloud and AI revenue engines kept delivering strong results and justified...

The piece circulating with the headline "How generative AI is growing and the risks to Iowans" captures a real — and increasingly urgent — set of trends playing out across Iowa: rapid adoption of generative AI tools, rising incidents of deepfakes and AI-driven misinformation, legal and educational harms tied to hallucinated content, and an emerging patchwork of state-level controls and guidance intended to limit damage while preserving utility. While the specific Des Moines Register URL you...

The Magnificent Seven’s narrative for 2025 ended not with a clean sweep but with notable divergences: a handful of the group — Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon — underperformed broad benchmarks despite pouring unprecedented capital into artificial intelligence and infrastructure, while NVIDIA, Alphabet, and Tesla posted outsized gains. That split leaves these 2025 laggards poised for a potential re-rating in 2026 if AI monetization, cloud scale, and policy clarity fall into place. This...

Microsoft has been quietly reshaping Windows from a traditional, user-controlled desktop OS into a service-first platform — and many of the changes are now pushed into users’ systems rather than offered as optional choices. Automatic updates that restart your PC, an operating-system search that routes web queries through Bing, persistent promotion of Microsoft Edge and OneDrive, in-OS ads and recommendations, tighter pressure to sign in with a Microsoft account during setup, and telemetry or...

PowerToys’ Color Picker is a deceptively simple utility that solves a persistent pain point for designers, developers, and anyone who needs precise color values: pick any pixel on the screen, get a clean color code in the format you need, and move on—fast. Background Since its modern revival as an open-source project, Microsoft PowerToys has become the go-to toolkit for power users who want lightweight, pragmatic enhancements to Windows. One of the most meaningful additions in recent cycles...

Satya Nadella has pushed Microsoft into what insiders and outside observers call “founder mode” — a fast, hands‑on reset that reassigns responsibilities, elevates outsiders and longtime deputies, and creates a new engineering axis aimed at building a Microsoft‑owned AI stack capable of standing on its own amid a ferocious battle with Google, OpenAI and a wave of specialist startups. Background / Overview Microsoft’s shift is no incremental rejig. In recent months the company has stood up a...