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Microsoft is rolling out an AI-driven tidy-up for the Windows 11 Photos app that automatically sorts images into four practical categories—Screenshots, Receipts, Identity documents, and Notes—as a preview to Windows Insiders running the updated Photos build on Copilot+ PCs. Background Microsoft has been steadily converting the Photos app from a passive viewer into a productivity surface by adding features such as OCR, Super Resolution upscaling, and generative editing throughout 2024–2025...

Valve’s quiet effort to keep a 13‑year‑old Radeon GPU working on modern Linux is a vivid reminder that software maintenance—and who chooses to do it—matters as much as hardware age when it comes to device longevity. While Microsoft prepares to stop regular updates for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, a single contractor tied to Valve is pushing kernel patches that resolve display flicker, avoid platform hangs, and tighten clock‑management behavior for AMD’s Southern Islands (Radeon HD 7000)...

PC shipments to the United States cooled in Q2 2025, slipping 1.4% year‑on‑year to about 18.6 million units, even as the commercial sector expanded and vendors doubled down on marketing AI-capable PCs ahead of the Windows 10 end‑of‑support deadline. Background The broader story behind the soft headline lies in two overlapping dynamics: tactical inventory management by vendors in response to tariff volatility, and structural demand differences between business buyers and consumers as the...

A recent Business Column in the Norman Transcript — “Privacy and computers should go together, Part Three” — picks up the same thread readers have been arguing about for years: the convenience of modern computing increasingly clashes with the privacy expectations of everyday users, and the trade-offs being baked into platforms today are not neutral or accidental. That tension is visible in new Windows features, vendor “connected experiences,” and the rapid rollout of on-device and cloud AI...

President Trump’s public demand that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco has transformed what began as a corporate hire into a high-stakes clash over national security, federal contracting, and corporate independence — and it raises immediate, concrete questions about what private-sector executives can and cannot access, how cloud vendors police customer misuse, and how far a sitting president can legitimately push a private company on personnel decisions. Background Who is Lisa Monaco and why her...

Space42 has announced plans to build what it calls the UAE’s first Sovereign Mobility Cloud, a dedicated, sovereign-enabled cloud platform for smart mobility and autonomous systems that combines Space42’s operational mobility stack with Core42’s Sovereign Public Cloud and Microsoft Azure to keep mobility data and workloads inside the UAE while accelerating pilots, mapping, fleet operations and regulatory sandboxes. Background / Overview Space42 unveiled the initiative on the sidelines of...

OLED has gone from a niche premium option to a mainstream laptop feature in India, and this year’s crop of machines proves why: richer blacks, vastly higher contrast ratios, and dramatically improved color accuracy make OLED laptops a compelling choice for creators, commuters, and anyone who spends long hours in front of a screen. The market snapshot compiled from recent retail roundups and OEM pages shows strong offerings across ultraportables, 2‑in‑1 convertibles, and gaming notebooks —...

ASUS and Xbox have opened pre-orders for two new handheld Windows gaming PCs — the ROG Xbox Ally and the higher‑end ROG Xbox Ally X — promising a console‑like, controller‑first experience built on Windows 11 and tuned jointly by ASUS and Microsoft to bring Game Pass, installed PC libraries, and cloud streaming into a compact, ergonomic form factor. Pre-orders begin late September with on‑shelf availability scheduled for October 16, 2025; the ROG Xbox Ally is positioned as the value‑focused...

Microsoft has made Windows ML generally available, delivering a built-in, on-device AI inference runtime for Windows 11 that aims to let developers run ONNX models across CPUs, GPUs and NPUs without requiring cloud trips for every inference. Background: why this release matters Windows ML (Windows Machine Learning) was first shown publicly at Microsoft Build 2025 and moved from preview to general availability in late September 2025. The runtime is shipped as part of the Windows App SDK...

Microsoft’s latest push into voice and agent AI marks a decisive expansion of Copilot’s capabilities: a high-performance, in‑house speech generator and a new text model intended to power agentic experiences, paired with a broader, multi‑model strategy that lets enterprises mix and match providers. The practical result is a Copilot platform that can speak faster and more naturally than before, run lightweight speech inference on a single GPU, and tap alternative language models — but the...

The ChatGPT-era lexicon has become part of everyday tech conversation, and the 57-term glossary shared on bahiaverdade is a useful, plain‑language battery of definitions that captures both the practical tools and the philosophical flashpoints of modern AI. Background The pace of change in generative AI has outstripped public literacy: products and acronyms now appear faster than most readers can learn what they mean. That gap has produced a demand for approachable glossaries — lists that...

Seelen UI offers a quick, surprisingly polished way to make a Windows 10 or Windows 11 PC look and behave more like a Linux desktop or macOS — but it also brings clear trade-offs in performance, security, and manageability that every power user and IT pro needs to weigh before installing it. Background / Overview Seelen UI is a community-driven, web-first desktop environment that runs on top of Windows. Instead of a single cosmetic tweak, it replaces or overlays core shell surfaces — the...

Microsoft is testing an AI-powered Auto‑Categorization feature in the Windows 11 Microsoft Photos app that scans local photo libraries and automatically groups images into four focused buckets — Screenshots, Receipts, Identity documents, and Notes — with the preview currently rolling out to Windows Insiders on Copilot+ PCs. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily embedding AI into core Windows experiences and native apps, and the Photos app has moved from a basic image viewer into...

Microsoft’s search engine briefly dressed up as its rival and added a charitable carrot — a move that reveals as much about modern product marketing as it does about the ethics of nudging users inside an operating system. Background In early January 2025, Bing began serving a special results page when users typed “Google” (or similar queries) into the address bar while using Microsoft Edge. The page replaced Bing’s usual header with a large, centered search box and an illustrated hero...

Microsoft's Surface Pro 11 still feels like the most sensible Swiss Army knife in Microsoft's hardware shed: a powerful tablet that will happily masquerade as a laptop when you need it, and an excellent drawing surface when you want it. The flagship 13-inch model—available with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus or the higher-end Snapdragon X Elite, and with either an LCD or an OLED panel—delivers genuinely impressive battery life, class-leading ARM performance, and a PixelSense display that...

Microsoft’s revelation this week that it has “ceased and disabled a set of services” for a unit inside Israel’s Ministry of Defense marks an extraordinary moment where a major cloud provider publicly acknowledged that commercial infrastructure had been used in ways that correlate with investigative reporting alleging mass surveillance of Palestinians. Background In August a joint investigative package led by The Guardian alongside +972 Magazine and Local Call documented an intelligence...

Microsoft’s official support clock for Windows 10 is winding down, and a growing cottage industry of community tools now offers a practical — if unofficial — path forward: build a pared-back Windows 11 installer with Tiny11, then write it to USB with Rufus to bypass Microsoft’s hardware checks and deploy a lean, fast system on older machines. This piece explains how those tools work, verifies the key technical claims, weighs the benefits, and lays out the risks for anyone considering a...

The Yoga Pro 9i 16 (Gen 10) lands as an unexpectedly pragmatic answer to the 16‑inch workstation question: a thoughtfully equipped, port-rich powerhouse that prioritizes everyday usability and creative performance over design gymnastics — and at a price that undercuts many direct rivals while still delivering flagship-level features and a premium OLED experience. Background The 16‑inch laptop market in 2025 has bifurcated into two broad strategies: extreme minimalism and design theater on...

Microsoft’s long-standing habit of routing Windows Search and several shell-driven links into Microsoft Edge — regardless of the user’s chosen default browser — may be closer to ending than many thought, but the change comes with caveats and new technical complexities that power users and IT pros need to understand now. A recent update to Microsoft Edge Canary exposed a group of experimental flags that strongly suggest Windows 11’s Start/taskbar search and related “Windows Search Bar”...

Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith, confirmed that the company has “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense” after an expanded review concluded elements of investigative reporting that pointed to large‑scale use of Microsoft Azure for the storage and AI‑assisted analysis of intercepted Palestinian communications were supported by Microsoft’s business records and telemetry. Background and overview The action follows a coordinated...