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Microsoft has reportedly begun replacing some OpenAI and Anthropic models with its own Microsoft AI models inside Microsoft 365 apps such as Excel and Outlook, according to Bloomberg reporting amplified Tuesday by Thurrott, as the company tries to reduce AI costs and gain more control over its product stack. The move is not a breakup so much as a rebalancing. Microsoft is discovering that the future of Copilot is not one giant frontier model answering every prompt, but a routing layer that...

Microsoft’s June 23, 2026 preview update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 addresses a storage bug in which the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal system file can reportedly balloon into tens, hundreds, or even 500GB on affected PCs. The bug is obscure in name but painfully ordinary in effect: the C: drive fills up, Windows blames “System files,” and the user is left hunting ghosts. Digital Trends amplified the warning this week, drawing on reporting from Windows Latest and user reports that...

Microsoft has extended the consumer Windows 10 Extended Security Updates program to October 12, 2027, giving enrolled home users another year of security patches after the operating system’s formal support ended on October 14, 2025. The change, first spotted in Microsoft’s own support language and picked up by Windows Latest, Windows Central, Ars Technica, and others, was not rolled out with the kind of stage-managed announcement Microsoft typically reserves for Windows lifecycle shifts...

Microsoft shares rose on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, after Investing.com and Bloomberg reported that the company has begun routing some Copilot prompts in Excel and Outlook through Microsoft’s own MAI models instead of relying entirely on OpenAI and Anthropic. The stock move is the easy headline, but the more important story is architectural: Microsoft is trying to turn Copilot from an expensive wrapper around other companies’ models into a margin-controlled platform. For Windows users, Microsoft...

Vibe announced in July 2026 that its new Vibe MCP server connects travel management company booking platforms with AI assistants including ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot, letting corporate travellers search, book, pay for and manage trips through conversational interfaces while keeping TMC controls in place. The claim, reported by The Business Travel Magazine and echoed by Business Travel News Europe, is that this is an industry first for managed travel rather than just another...

On July 1, the Eureka County School District Board approved an addendum to its Technology Plan that will bring Microsoft Copilot Education into classrooms, primarily for grades 5 through 12, while also approving Steven Sullivan’s contract as elementary principal for the 2026-2027 school year. The local decision, reported by the Eureka Sentinel, is small in geography but large in meaning. Eureka is not merely buying an AI tool; it is choosing a governance model for how children, teachers...

Microsoft is testing and rolling out a set of Teams changes in July 2026 that push AI deeper into meetings, reorganize chats into cleaner sections, and change guest invitation emails so they come from the human sender rather than a generic address. The most provocative part is not another recap button or prettier sidebar. It is Teams edging toward an AI participant that can listen for uncertainty, answer in the meeting chat, and search the web while everyone else is still deciding who should...

Deleting a file on Windows in 2026 can send it to the local Recycle Bin, a cloud service’s web trash, a backup snapshot, an Office recovery cache, or nowhere obvious at all, depending on where the file lived and how it was removed. The practical answer is not “run recovery software” but “follow the deletion path.” As Technobezz’s recovery guide lays out, the fastest rescue usually comes from Windows’ own undo and restore layers before you reach for command-line recovery. Microsoft’s own...

Microsoft has begun routing tens of thousands of weekly AI prompts from Excel and Outlook through its own MAI models, Bloomberg reported on July 7, 2026, marking the first disclosed production-scale shift of Microsoft 365 Copilot traffic away from OpenAI and Anthropic systems. The move is not a divorce from OpenAI, nor even a dramatic re-platforming of Copilot overnight. It is something more interesting: Microsoft has started treating frontier AI models as replaceable infrastructure. That is...

Microsoft’s Photos app in Windows 11 is now a three-part image viewer, editor, and library manager that handles local files, OneDrive, iCloud Photos, USB imports, and a growing set of AI features that expand significantly on Copilot+ PCs. That is the practical answer, but not the interesting one. The interesting answer, laid out in Paul Thurrott’s Windows 11 Field Guide and reinforced by Microsoft’s own support pages and Insider notes, is that Photos has become a miniature map of Microsoft’s...

For WSL users doing AV1 work today, the practical answer is to keep using native Windows encoding tools for production and treat Mesa 26.2’s new DirectX 12 AV1 encode path as an experimental development to watch, not a workflow replacement. The reason is simple: the Mesa change scheduled for 26.2 is explicitly prototype-level, and it currently covers only basic I- and P-frame encoding while omitting more advanced features such as B-frames. That does not make the patch unimportant. It makes...

OpenSSH 10.4 arrived on July 6, 2026, as a security-and-maintenance release for the ubiquitous SSH implementation, fixing eight security issues across its client, server, SFTP, SCP, and agent components while adding an experimental post-quantum signature scheme for administrators willing to test the future early. The release is not a fire drill, and treating it like one would miss the point. OpenSSH’s importance comes from its quietness: it is the plumbing behind remote administration...

Microsoft says Windows 11 version 26H2 will enable Windows settings backup by default on eligible Microsoft Entra-joined and Entra hybrid-joined devices when administrators leave the backup policy Not Configured, while explicit enable or disable settings still win and restore remains off unless an administrator turns it on. The practical move for IT is simple: audit your current Intune and policy state now, decide whether “Not Configured” should mean “Microsoft default” in your tenant, and...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is available through the Xbox and Microsoft Store ecosystem for Xbox consoles, Windows PCs, and supported Game Pass access, with Microsoft’s listing describing Treyarch and Raven’s 2024 spy thriller campaign, multiplayer suite, and expanded round-based Zombies offering. The store page is doing more than selling another annual shooter. It is a snapshot of Microsoft’s post-Activision strategy: make the biggest boxed-game franchise in the world feel native to Xbox...

Microsoft introduced Cloud rebuild for Windows 11 Insiders on July 6, 2026, in Experimental build 26300.8782, giving broken PCs a WinRE-based path to reinstall Windows from Windows Update without USB media or a working local operating system. The feature is small in interface and large in implication: Windows recovery is being moved from the old world of prepared media, OEM partitions, and local reset images into the same cloud-serviced pipeline that already feeds updates and drivers. As...

Microsoft announced on July 7, 2026, that Dynamics 365 Field Service is getting new Schedule Board enhancements for moving multiple bookings, reassigning work in bulk, using a dedicated map view, showing week numbers, and partially cancelling long-running bookings. The update, described by Microsoft product manager Michael Kelleher on the Dynamics 365 blog, is not a moonshot feature in the way an AI scheduling agent is. It is more revealing than that. Microsoft is admitting, in product form...

Cancer Council NSW, the Sydney-headquartered cancer charity, has built Genie, a Microsoft Copilot Studio agent embedded in Teams, to give roughly 475 employees fast, cited answers from approved SharePoint policy documents, according to a Microsoft customer story published on July 7, 2026. The obvious headline is that one staff member’s four-hour search became a seconds-long interaction. The more important story is that Cancer Council NSW is treating generative AI not as a magic search box...

Microsoft is using cloud infrastructure, Microsoft 365 subscriptions, and AI-infused services such as Azure AI and Copilot to defend one of the technology industry’s largest profit pools in 2026, while investors judge whether the company’s enormous data-center spending can keep producing durable growth. The short version is that Microsoft’s story has become less about Windows alone and more about whether the company can turn its installed base into an AI distribution machine. That makes the...

Microsoft began testing Cloud Rebuild for Windows 11 Insiders on July 6, 2026, adding a recovery option in Windows Recovery Environment that can reinstall Windows and device drivers from Windows Update without USB installation media, even when the installed copy of Windows will not boot. The feature, highlighted by TechRadar after Windows Central’s coverage and documented in Microsoft’s Windows Insider release notes, is not just another convenience toggle. It is Microsoft’s clearest...

Windows audio problems in 2026 are usually fixed first by selecting the correct output device, checking app volume and permissions, running Microsoft’s Get Help audio troubleshooter, and only then moving to Bluetooth repair, sound-format changes, driver refreshes, services, and Windows Update. That order matters because most “no sound” cases are not driver disasters. They are routing, muting, permissions, or post-update state problems masquerading as broken hardware. Microsoft’s own support...