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Microsoft has quietly added a first‑party command‑line client for the Microsoft Store to Windows 11: a built‑in Store CLI surfaced as the store command that lets you browse, search, install and update Store content from the terminal without opening the GUI. This is a small change on the surface, but it matters — especially to power users, IT pros and administrators who want faster, scriptable access to Store‑hosted apps. Microsoft documents the feature as part of an updated developer blog...

Almost a decade after Microsoft walked away from its own smartphone experiment, a small Hong Kong company is trying to answer a question enthusiasts keep asking: can a phone actually be a practical Windows PC in your pocket? Nex Computer’s NexPhone tries to answer that by shipping a single handset that runs Android as the everyday phone, offers a containerized Debian Linux desktop, and — most unusually — can reboot into a native Windows 11 on ARM installation that claims to be usable as a...

Most people treat Windows Search like a glorified File Explorer search box — and that simple habit turns a capable, context-aware tool into a source of frustration. The problem isn't always that Windows Search is "broken"; more often it's that we misunderstand which search we're using, what Windows actually indexes, and what the system is optimized for. Fix those misunderstandings and a feature that seems flaky becomes one of the fastest ways to get things done on a Windows PC. Background...

Microsoft’s decision to ship Windows 11, version 26H1, as a narrowly scoped, device‑first platform image — available at launch only on select Arm‑based PCs (notably those powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 series) — marks a deliberate engineering pivot in how Microsoft delivers low‑level OS changes to new silicon, and it raises important questions about fragmentation, servicing, and the path forward for users, IT teams, OEMs and developers. Background / Overview Microsoft surfaced Windows...

Anthropic’s Cowork landing on Windows is less a single product release and more a structural inflection point for how enterprises and knowledge workers will delegate work to AI on the desktop — and that makes February 2026 a moment worth parsing carefully for IT teams, security officers, and developers alike. Background / Overview Anthropic introduced Cowork in January 2026 as a research‑preview extension of Claude Code: an agentic, file‑aware assistant that can read, edit, create, and...

Microsoft's decision to ship Windows 11, version 26H1, as a narrowly scoped, device‑first platform image for new Arm‑based hardware — rather than as a broadly distributed feature update — marks a deliberate engineering move that will affect buyers, IT teams, OEMs and developers in materially different ways. The headline is simple: if your PC uses Intel or AMD, 26H1 is not for you; early Copilot+ and Snapdragon X2 systems will ship factory‑flashed with 26H1 (the Bromine platform), while the...

Dell has quietly widened the aperture of its on‑prem private cloud by adding Nutanix AHV support to Dell Private Cloud, joining VMware and Red Hat as first‑class hypervisor choices and signalling a deliberate push toward multi‑hypervisor, disaggregated private clouds. (blocksandfiles.com) Background Enterprises have spent a decade wrestling with two competing forces: the operational simplicity of public cloud and the control, cost predictability and data locality of on‑premises...

NVIDIA’s GeForce driver labeled “382.33” is real, WHQL‑signed, and was released in May 2017 — but the SEO‑styled “Clearance / Hotsell” pages pushing a purported “GeForce Game Ready Driver 382.33 Windows 10 32‑bit” for a GT 1030 carry real supply‑chain and compatibility risks. Before you click any download button, understand which NVIDIA packages actually added GT 1030 support, how to verify a driver binary safely, and why third‑party repackagers and advertorial landing pages (including the...

Microsoft is quietly rolling out a replacement for long‑lived Secure Boot certificates first issued in 2011, and while Microsoft and OEMs say most modern PCs will receive the new 2023 certificate family automatically, a material minority of systems—especially unmanaged Windows 10 machines not on extended servicing paths, air‑gapped endpoints, and devices with out‑of‑date firmware—face a real risk of losing future boot‑level protections when the old certificates expire in mid‑ and late‑2026...

Microsoft has shipped a new, narrowly scoped Windows 11 release — Windows 11, version 26H1 — but the company has made it abundantly clear: for almost everyone running Windows today, this is academic until you buy specific new hardware. Background / Overview Microsoft announced Windows 11, version 26H1 as a platform-specific release intended to enable next‑generation silicon in early‑2026 devices. The release is built on a new engineering baseline (internal build strings in the 28000-series)...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 security pivot reframes desktop trust around consent, signatures, and visible agent behavior, moving the platform closer to the permission-first model smartphone users have long experienced. The company’s announcement — led by Distinguished Engineer Logan Iyer — promises a new Baseline Security Mode (BSM) that enables runtime integrity safeguards by default, and a companion User Transparency and Consent (UTC) system that surfaces per-app prompts when software or...

Microsoft has quietly implemented a practical, user‑facing fix for one of the most persistent annoyances in modern Windows laptops: unexpected wake events during Modern Standby that quietly siphoned battery life overnight. The change—part of Windows 11, version 24H2 and reinforced through recent quality updates—introduces an adaptive guardrail that limits wake sources when the OS detects unusually high battery drain, so a sleeping device will only wake for explicit user actions like opening...

Notepad’s quietly expanded Markdown preview just became a public-security problem — and you should update now if you use the app’s Markdown or clickable-link features. Background / Overview Microsoft disclosed and patched CVE-2026-20841 on February 10, 2026: a command‑injection, remote‑code‑execution (RCE) flaw in the modern Windows Notepad app that specifically targets the app’s Markdown rendering / clickable‑link handling. The core issue is an improper neutralization of special elements...

Windows 10 didn’t stop working on October 14, 2025 — but the safety net that kept it reasonably safe for most people has been removed, and that changes how long it’s sensible to keep running the OS on any machine that stores valuable data or connects to the internet. Background Microsoft formally ended mainstream support for consumer editions of Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. That official milestone means Microsoft no longer issues routine cumulative updates, feature updates, or general...

IrfanView still feels like one of those tiny, indestructible tools from the Windows XP era that quietly does exactly what you need—fast, reliable, and stubbornly practical on modern Windows 11 machines. Background IrfanView began life as a compact image viewer and has grown into a lightweight, extensible media utility that continues to be maintained by its original author. Over the decades it has developed a reputation for speed, format breadth, and a plugin architecture that lets the core...

Microsoft has begun a coordinated refresh of the Secure Boot certificates that underpin Windows’ pre‑boot trust model, and the change will accelerate through March as Microsoft, OEMs and IT teams push a staged, telemetry‑gated rollout to keep devices secure before the legacy certificates begin expiring in mid‑2026. Background / Overview Secure Boot is the firmware‑level gatekeeper introduced with UEFI that ensures only trusted, digitally signed code runs before the operating system loads...

Microsoft’s Copilot is now the practical fulcrum of Microsoft’s AI strategy: a multimodal, tenant‑grounded assistant that lives in Windows, Edge, Bing and the Microsoft 365 applications, and—if your organization chooses—can be tuned, governed and embedded into line‑of‑business workflows to deliver measurable productivity gains and new product opportunities. Background / Overview Microsoft introduced the Copilot concept in 2023 and positioned it as a single, consistent AI companion that...

Microsoft's latest Copilot push has a new face — and a new pitch for industrial customers: Mico, the animated Copilot avatar unveiled in late 2025, is now being promoted by Microsoft’s Copilot channels as more than a conversational companion. According to a February 10, 2026 Copilot post summarized in industry press, Microsoft is positioning Mico as part of an AI-assisted planning workflow that can help teams “get green flagged” on energy projects — reducing guesswork in permitting...

Microsoft’s latest wave of updates pushes Microsoft 365 Copilot from an assistant into a platform: new Copilot Actions, domain-aware agents, a Copilot Control System for IT, and analytics that promise to measure real business impact — all designed to make AI-driven workflows both more powerful and more manageable. The changes, rolled out across late 2024 and into 2025, sharpen Copilot’s reach into Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, PowerPoint, and the Microsoft 365 admin experience while...

Anthropic’s Cowork landing on Windows — and the broader rollout of folder-scoped, sandboxed Claude agents — marks a decisive product moment: a pragmatic tradeoff between capability and containment that, in practice, can outmaneuver larger incumbents whose integrated architectures create governance friction for enterprises. Background / Overview Anthropic’s Cowork takes the agentic capabilities that powered Claude Code and packages them into a desktop-first assistant that can read, edit...