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Microsoft has quietly removed the compatibility block that kept thousands of machines off the Windows 11 24H2 pipeline by finally fixing a long-standing interaction between the integrated camera stack and Windows Hello facial recognition — a fix that closes a year‑long chapter of upgrade holds and awkward workarounds for affected users. Background Microsoft ships major Windows feature updates gradually and cautiously; when widespread instability is detected Microsoft applies targeted...

Microsoft has quietly given millions of Windows 10 users a one‑year safety net: a consumer-focused Extended Security Updates (ESU) program that lets qualifying Home and Pro devices keep receiving critical and important security patches through October 13, 2026 — but that lifeline is narrow, account‑centric, and comes with trade‑offs many users should understand before they enroll. Background Windows 10’s scheduled end of mainstream support is October 14, 2025. After that date Microsoft will...

Microsoft quietly turned Microsoft 365 Copilot from a single‑vendor assistant into a multi‑model orchestration platform by adding Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 as selectable back‑ends in Copilot’s Researcher agent and Copilot Studio, while making clear that OpenAI models will remain part of the default mix. Background / Overview Microsoft 365 Copilot launched as an integrated LLM assistant across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, historically leaning heavily on...

A new, tightly controlled study of tournament chess players delivers a blunt—and at times unsettling—reminder: overconfidence is resilient, even in a domain built to punish it. The researchers surveyed thousands of rated players who get continuous, precise feedback on performance and still found systematic overestimation of skill, a pronounced Dunning–Kruger pattern among lower-rated players, and a striking mismatch between what players say they can do and what their ratings actually...

Microsoft has quietly redefined the boundaries of Copilot: Microsoft 365 Copilot users can now select Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 as backend engines for key Copilot surfaces, a deliberate shift from a single‑vendor dependency to explicit multi‑model orchestration within the workplace assistant. Background Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot as an LLM-driven productivity assistant embedded across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. For most of Copilot’s...

Corning will manufacture Microsoft’s Hollow Core Fiber for Azure at scale, adding a major industrial partner to the cloud giant’s bid to remake the physical underpinnings of low‑latency AI and cloud networking worldwide. Background Microsoft’s effort to commercialize hollow core fiber (HCF) for Azure began with its acquisition of Lumenisity in December 2022 and has accelerated through internal research and field deployments that the company says already carry live traffic. Microsoft’s...

Microsoft’s decision to stop routine security and feature updates for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 has forced a hard decision for millions of households and organizations: upgrade to Windows 11 where possible, buy a new PC, enroll in a short one‑year Extended Security Updates (ESU) bridge, or accept rising security and compatibility risk. Background / Overview Windows 10 launched in 2015 and went on to become the dominant desktop OS for a decade, but its lifecycle was never indefinite...

Windows runs a quiet orchestra of background services: some are essential, others are convenience features, and a few are plain background overhead that quietly eat CPU, memory, disk I/O, and — sometimes — your internet bandwidth and battery life. After pruning a small list of nonessential services I stopped seeing unexplained slowdowns, background network spikes, and occasional battery drain, and the machine simply felt snappier. The changes are not magic, but they are real: disabling a...

Systems Limited has been named to Microsoft’s AI Business Solutions Inner Circle for 2025–2026, marking a fifth consecutive inclusion in the program and reaffirming the company’s standing as a leading Microsoft systems integrator across the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Background Systems Limited’s announcement confirms it was selected for the 2025–2026 Microsoft AI Business Solutions Inner Circle, an invitation-only cohort Microsoft reserves for its highest-performing partners in the...

Lenovo’s newest SMB-focused infrastructure bundles promise to make AI-ready IT solutions for SMBs more accessible by combining validated server hardware, partner software stacks, cloud-enabled management, and consumption-based pricing — but the real value for small teams will depend on careful trade-offs between convenience, ongoing cost, and long-term flexibility. Background Small and medium businesses (SMBs) face a convergence of pressures: the need to modernize aging on‑premises...

If your Fire TV or Fire TV Stick has turned into a sluggish slideshow, the problem is almost always a stack of small issues adding up: background services, accumulated cache, automatic updates, autoplaying previews and ads, and a handful of feature toggles that chew CPU or memory on every boot. I tested and changed ten settings across two Fire TV devices and a Fire TV Stick, and the result was instant responsiveness and fewer maddening pauses — without buying new hardware. Below I explain...

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 family promises to reshape the premium Windows laptop market by pushing ARM-based silicon into territory long dominated by Apple’s M-series and high-end x86 chips — and on paper the company’s flagship, the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, looks built to do exactly that. Background At Qualcomm’s Summit 2025 the company unveiled two new laptop-focused SoCs: the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. Qualcomm framed these chips as the next step in...

Medicat USB comes pre-packaged as a complete, bootable Windows rescue environment that can turn a blank flash drive into a one‑stop toolkit for troubleshooting, data recovery, malware removal, password reset, partition management, and more — a practical alternative to building a custom WinPE stick by hand. Background Medicat is distributed as a single, large archive that extracts to a Ventoy-formatted USB drive and exposes a full Mini Windows 10 (WinPE-style) desktop plus a raft of portable...

Schools are increasingly acting as the de facto front line for children’s health, wellbeing and social needs — but new research warns they cannot, and should not, be expected to carry that burden alone. Recent surveys from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) show high levels of pupil need alongside stretched school budgets and strained access to external services; the result is a system where teachers and leaders are patching gaps that would once have been met by health...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly crossed a new strategic threshold: business customers can now pick Anthropic’s Claude models as alternatives to OpenAI inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, marking the formal arrival of multi‑model choice in one of the world’s largest workplace AI deployments. This change — rolled out via Microsoft’s Frontier preview and announced on September 24, 2025 — exposes Claude Opus 4.1 in the Researcher reasoning agent and adds both Claude Opus 4.1 and...

The Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) has formally acknowledged that its custom-built NAVSEA Cloud cannot be moved to a higher Department of Defense security classification or to another cloud provider without Microsoft’s direct involvement — a reality spelled out in a recently published sole‑source justification that describes deep technical coupling to Azure services and an estimated “ground‑up” rebuild that would push migration timelines by at least 36 months. Background NAVSEA operates...

Microsoft’s latest Korea showcase makes one thing plain: agentic AI is moving from pilots to production, and a growing roster of Korean “frontier firms” are already rewiring how work gets done with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI integrations, and custom low‑code agents. The company’s Korea release highlights measurable wins at insurers, manufacturers, retailers and energy firms—while flagging a broader regional shift: according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, a large majority of Korean...

Google and Qualcomm have quietly moved a long‑running rumor into the realm of concrete strategy: Android is being prepared to run as a first‑class operating system on traditional PC hardware, with Google describing a joint effort to build “a common technical foundation” for phones and PCs and Qualcomm’s CEO publicly calling the implementation he’s seen “incredible.” Background Over the last 18 months Google has been steadily reshaping how it thinks about Android, Chrome OS and the broader...

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 family — led by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and the slightly scaled X2 Elite — marks a deliberate, high-stakes push to make Windows-on-ARM a first-choice platform for premium laptops, creators, and enterprise Copilot+ devices by combining higher single‑thread clocks, expanded core counts, a dramatically beefed-up Hexagon NPU, and a new Adreno X2 GPU architecture. Background Qualcomm used its Snapdragon Summit to position the X2 generation as the successor to...

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