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Microsoft’s “Hey Copilot” wake word brings hands‑free AI to Windows 11: enable it, speak a prompt, and Copilot will answer, act, or walk you through tasks without a single keystroke. Background Microsoft’s Copilot has evolved from a sidebar chat helper into a system‑level assistant in Windows 11, and the addition of the “Hey Copilot” wake word is the clearest signal that voice is becoming a first‑class input on the desktop. The voice wake feature is opt‑in, requires the Copilot app to be...

Microsoft’s recent clarifications around Direct Send and the related protection options in Exchange Online change the way administrators should think about mail routing, tenant exposure, and the controls available to prevent spoofing and unwanted anonymous mail that appears to originate from their own domains. Background / Overview Exchange Online tenants are assigned a default MX-style endpoint (for example, contoso-com.mail.protection.outlook.com) that resolves to Microsoft’s shared mail...

Microsoft Teams is now the hub for large swathes of everyday work — chat, meetings, file collaboration, and increasingly AI — but that convenience brings serious governance and compliance risk if left unmanaged. The nine “easy wins” that UC Today outlines are a practical baseline: align Teams with regulatory policy, lock identity and access, govern guest access, encrypt and control keys, apply DLP and sensitivity labels, monitor and audit in real time, control lifecycle and sprawl, secure AI...

Samsung’s new Vision AI Companion brings conversational, generative AI to the living room — rolled out as a software upgrade across the company’s 2025 TV and monitor lineup, the platform turns the television into a shared, voice-driven assistant that can answer contextual questions, deliver visual results on-screen, and host third‑party AI agents such as Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Background Samsung’s Vision AI Companion is the company’s most significant push to date to put generative...

Boeing’s new Virtual Airplane Procedures Trainer (VAPT) turns a piece of consumer‑grade simulation technology into an enterprise training product — one designed to let pilots practice procedures on PCs, iPads and other lightweight devices, accelerate simulator familiarization, and give airlines a cloud‑managed authoring and tracking toolset for procedures training. Background Boeing announced its Virtual Airplane Procedures Trainer on November 6, 2025, positioning the product as the...

Microsoft’s recent push to widen Azure Local from a small validated cluster to a deployable private cloud at scale — and to add Nvidia’s RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU for sovereign AI — changes the calculus for regulated enterprises, governments and systems integrators that need both cloud-native services and hard, auditable control over where inference and productivity workloads run. Background Microsoft has been steadily repackaging Azure for customers that cannot accept the...

Microsoft’s latest quarter showed the company is not retreating from its AI bet — it is accelerating into it, and investors who sell now risk missing a multi-quarter story that is as much about infrastructure economics and enterprise monetization as it is about headline revenue beats. Overview Microsoft reported Q1 FY26 revenue of $77.673 billion and GAAP diluted earnings per share of $3.72, with non‑GAAP EPS of $4.13 — results that beat consensus on both top line and adjusted profitability...

If you still have a box of old floppies or a stack of CD‑ROMs in the attic, you can bring those DOS and Windows‑3.x classics back to life on a modern Windows 11 PC — but not the way you did in 1992. The practical route today is emulation: install a modern DOS emulator, mount your original media (or disk images), and run old installers and games in a controlled virtual DOS environment. This guide expands the PCWorld how‑to, walks through both “use the original discs” and “use images”...

Microsoft’s new Start menu for Windows 11 25H2 can be surfaced immediately on most fully patched PCs — but doing so requires understanding Microsoft’s staged rollout model, verifying exact servicing builds, and weighing the trade-offs of using a third‑party feature‑flag tool like ViVeTool to force the UI on now. Background / Overview Windows 11’s 25H2 release is delivered as an enablement-style update: much of the code has already been shipped through servicing updates, and Microsoft flips...

HCLTech has won Microsoft’s new Copilot Specialization, joining the first wave of Global System Integrators Microsoft is publicly recognizing for demonstrated, production-grade capability across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio and agentic extensibility. Background Microsoft introduced the Copilot Specialization in mid‑2025 as a workload‑specific credential that sits on top of the Solutions Partner model to help enterprise buyers identify partners that can move Copilot...

INBRAIN Neuroelectronics and Microsoft announced a strategic collaboration on November 11, 2025, that pairs INBRAIN’s graphene‑based brain‑computer interface therapeutics (BCI‑Tx) platform with Microsoft’s Azure AI infrastructure to explore agentic artificial intelligence for real‑time precision neurology and closed‑loop BCI therapeutics. Background INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a Barcelona‑based spin‑out from leading nanoscience institutes, has built a high‑density graphene neural platform that...

Telefónica’s Brazil unit has moved from public-cloud experimentation to a concrete hybrid strategy by adopting Azure Local for on‑premises workloads, using Azure Arc to unify management and planning IaaS-first deployments today with AKS and Azure Virtual Desktop on the roadmap. This marks a deliberate shift from purely public cloud operations to a distributed model that blends local hyperconverged infrastructure with Azure’s control plane, driven by requirements for low latency, regulatory...

Microsoft has flipped the switch on Xbox Cloud Gaming in India, opening Microsoft’s Azure-backed game streaming to Indian players and folding cloud play into the local Game Pass lineup — a move that instantly reshapes how many Indians will access console-quality games on phones, PCs, smart TVs and streaming dongles. Background / Overview Xbox Cloud Gaming (formerly Project xCloud) is Microsoft’s cloud-streaming layer for Xbox Game Pass: remote Xbox hardware in Azure datacenters runs titles...

Pantone’s long‑standing authority on colour has moved decisively into generative AI: the company and Microsoft have launched the Pantone Palette Generator — a chat‑driven, AI‑powered feature inside Pantone Connect that creates custom, forecast‑backed colour palettes in seconds, powered by Azure OpenAI and an enterprise Azure stack. Background Pantone’s Color Institute has shaped how designers, brands and manufacturers think about colour for more than six decades. Its seasonal forecasts, the...

CPU shipments rose again in Q3 2025, and this time the bump looks less like a cyclical blip and more like a reaction to Windows 10’s end-of-life and the practical barriers consumers face when moving to Windows 11. Jon Peddie Research (JPR) reports a modest 2.2% quarter‑on‑quarter increase in client CPU shipments for Q3’25 and a server CPU market up roughly 13–14% year‑over‑year, while desktop and notebook shares remain near a 70/30 split—patterns that point to replacement demand, OEM...

Snap Layouts is quietly becoming one of the most effective productivity features in Windows 11, turning chaotic desktops into organized, task-focused workspaces with a single hover or a quick keyboard press. Background / Overview Windows has long offered ways to “snap” windows to screen edges, but Windows 11’s Snap Layouts elevates that basic idea into a visual, template-driven system that’s optimized for modern displays and multitasking workflows. Instead of dragging and resizing windows by...

Shutting down a laptop using only the keyboard is a small skill with outsized value — it can save unsaved work, rescue you from a frozen touchpad, and give you immediate control when the GUI stops responding, and the methods below work reliably across modern Windows versions like Windows 10 and Windows 11. Background Shutting down a Windows PC has historically been a GUI-driven activity, but Windows also exposes numerous keyboard-driven paths that are fast, predictable, and available even...

When you finish the Windows 11 out‑of‑box experience and stare at a blank desktop, a tight, curated set of free utilities will turn that empty machine into a productive, familiar workspace in under an hour — and the seven apps most writers and reviewers reach for first are PowerToys, Google Chrome, Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, GIMP, WSL, and Spotify. Background / Overview Windows 11 ships with stronger built‑in tools than it used to, but there remain persistent friction points that...

Dave Plummer — the engineer behind Windows Task Manager, ZIP Folders, the Space Cadet Pinball port for Windows NT and a string of other Windows-era utilities — has published a blunt, pragmatic video outlining why parts of Windows “suck” for advanced users and how Microsoft could fix it. His prescription centers on a single, system-wide toggle (a “Pro” or “Expert” mode) that would change Windows’ operational personality from “safe and chatty” to deterministic, terse, and respectful of a...

Running Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac is no longer a niche hack — it’s a mainstream, supported workflow for many users thanks to mature virtualization tools like Parallels Desktop, which now ships with explicit support for Apple’s latest macOS releases and Windows 11 ARM builds. This in-depth guide explains why Apple Silicon requires virtualization, how Parallels turns an M1/M2/M3/M4/M-series Mac into a reliable Windows 11 workstation, step-by-step setup and tuning advice, licensing and...