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AMD’s latest Radeon Software: Adrenalin Edition driver — version 25.10.2 — arrives as a mixed bag: a headline slate of game-ready optimizations and new Vulkan/feature support for modern RDNA hardware, paired with platform compatibility noise that has reignited debate about Windows 10’s place in the PC gaming ecosystem. The release brings targeted tuning for Battlefield 6 and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, initial Work Graphs support for Radeon RX 9000-series, and explicit product...

Bottles is a practical, GUI-first bridge for running many Windows applications on Linux, and it can be the single tool that finally makes a full switch from Windows to Linux achievable for users who still depend on a handful of Windows-only programs. Background / Overview Bottles is built on top of the Wine compatibility layer but wraps Wine in a modern, opinionated UI that manages per-application environments (called bottles), runtime selection, and common tweaks so users rarely need to...

Hyper‑V is not included in Windows Home editions by default, but the underlying hypervisor components already exist in the OS image and can be unlocked with a careful, unsupported manual process that uses DISM to install built‑in packages — this step‑by‑step feature explains what to check, how to run the enabler safely, how to finish configuration, and what risks and alternatives to weigh before proceeding. Background / Overview Hyper‑V is Microsoft’s native hypervisor for Windows and...

If you’ve been installing and deleting paid task managers in the hope that the next app will finally make you productive, the answer may already be on your PC: Microsoft To Do, the lightweight but surprisingly capable task hub quietly bundled with Windows and tied into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Background Microsoft To Do traces its lineage back to Wunderlist and was reworked and integrated into Microsoft 365 as a focused task manager that emphasizes daily execution rather than heavyweight...

Windows 11 looks set to receive a device-targeted, interim update early next year tied to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 family — a release that may arrive first on Copilot+ Arm laptops and not on the wider Windows 11 install base. The reported plan: a narrow, hardware‑gated release (referred to in leaks as “26H1” for shorthand) timed to ship with Snapdragon X2 Elite systems so key platform work — drivers, NPU runtimes, firmware hooks and tuned binaries — can arrive with retail devices, while...

Microsoft’s October preview for Windows 11 — shipped as KB5067036 and hitting Release Preview channels — delivers the most visible Start menu overhaul in years along with small but meaningful taskbar, File Explorer, and on-device AI changes: a single-scroll Start with Category and Grid views, a Phone Link panel inside Start, color-coded battery icons and an optional battery percentage, new AI-assisted image and file actions in Photos/File Explorer, and Fluid Dictation for Voice Access on...

The Windows 11 Start menu has frustrated a lot of people for a long time — its rigid, overly simplified layout and limited customization feel like a step backward from the flexible menus of Windows 7 and 10. Microsoft has nudged the design forward in stages — restoring app folders in the 22H2 update and trialing a more flexible Start redesign with Insiders in 2025 — but for many power users those changes don’t go far enough. If you want the control, familiarity, and two-column layout that...

Creating a single folder on the desktop can unlock a surprising, decades-old Windows feature that surfaces hundreds of control panels, admin utilities, and hidden tools in one searchable view — a trick enthusiasts call God Mode that remains useful on Windows 11 for faster discovery, troubleshooting, and building a personal admin toolbox. Background / Overview Windows has long exposed special shell namespaces to Explorer using Class IDs (CLSID/GUID). One of those namespaces — the All Tasks...

Microsoft Copilot is no longer an experimental add‑on — it’s a working partner inside Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint and Windows, and with Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry it’s now a platform you can shape to your organization’s workflows. Background — why this matters now Artificial intelligence has moved from novelty to utility: everyday work increasingly includes drafting, summarizing, extracting insights, and automating routine sequences. Microsoft has folded that capability...

Microsoft and its partner ecosystem are quietly turning Dynamics 365 from a passive ledger into an agentic record-to-report engine — embedding AI agents that automate reconciliation, variance analysis, time & expense processing, and even customer-facing payment replies, with the stated goal of shortening close cycles and shifting finance teams from manual matching to exception handling. Background / Overview Microsoft has repositioned Copilot as an enterprise-grade, role-based AI layer that...

Microsoft’s latest Defender for Identity sensor v3.x unifies endpoint and identity protection, dramatically simplifying deployment on modern domain controllers while adding deeper visibility via Windows Filtering Platform (WFP)–based RPC auditing—but it also arrives with limited feature parity and operational trade‑offs that every security team must weigh before switching to the new unified sensor model. Background / Overview The Defender for Identity sensor is the on‑premises component...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud experienced a significant service disruption on Wednesday that left thousands of users temporarily unable to access the Azure Portal and, in some reports, affected Microsoft 365 services that depend on Azure infrastructure. Outage-monitoring platforms recorded large spikes in user reports — with snapshots of the incident showing different peak counts depending on the feed and time — and Microsoft acknowledged an ongoing investigation into an issue affecting portal...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric faltered again this week as an Azure outage — traced to instability in Azure Front Door and a regional networking misconfiguration — produced widespread authentication failures and partial service blackouts that affected Microsoft 365, Teams, the Azure and Microsoft 365 admin portals, the Microsoft Store and identity-backed consumer services in pockets around the globe. Background The disruption began as elevated error rates and timeouts for services fronted by Azure...

A Microsoft cloud outage knocked large swathes of Microsoft 365, Azure management consoles and even gaming services offline for hours, with users worldwide reporting failed sign‑ins, blank admin portal blades, intermittent 502/504 gateway errors and disrupted Minecraft and Xbox authentication — an incident tied to capacity loss in Azure Front Door (AFD) and a regional network misconfiguration that forced Microsoft engineers to restart infrastructure and rebalance traffic to healthy edge...

Microsoft services are not immune to interruption — and on October 29, 2025 a flurry of community posts and outage reports once again asked the same blunt question: Is Microsoft 365 down? and Is Microsoft Azure down? The DesignTAXI community threads raised the alarm, reporting user-facing failures and redirecting readers to outage trackers; those posts capture the immediate confusion and practical workarounds users tried while waiting for official updates. Background Microsoft 365 (the cloud...

Germany’s national cybersecurity agency has warned that an overwhelming majority of the country’s publicly reachable Exchange servers remain on unsupported software just after Microsoft ended mainstream updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 — a finding that raises immediate operational, regulatory, and security red flags for organisations across healthcare, education, public administration, and the private sector. Background What changed: end of support and a limited safety valve...

YouTube has quietly removed several Windows 11 tutorial videos that showed how to avoid Microsoft’s account and hardware checks, issuing takedown notices that cited the platform’s “harmful or dangerous” policy — a justification creators and many in the Windows community say is nonsensical for step‑by‑step technical guidance and strongly suggests algorithmic misclassification rather than a human moderation decision. Background Windows 11’s Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) and tightened hardware...

Microsoft’s “Copilot+ PC” push is no longer marketing fluff — it surfaces tangible, productivity‑first features that many Windows 11 users can try right now, and three in particular deserve immediate attention on Copilot+ hardware: Click to Do, Live Captions with translation, and Studio Effects. These features showcase the practical wins of on‑device AI and the Windows 11 Copilot integration while also illustrating the governance and hardware trade‑offs IT teams must manage. Background...

Clippy’s paperclip grin is back on the desktop — not as an official Microsoft resurrection, but as a DIY homage that runs entirely on your PC using local LLMs and the open-source LLM inference stack. What started as a nostalgic tinkering project has become a practical, privacy-conscious way to run lightweight assistants on Windows 11: an Electron-based wrapper that downloads compact models, chooses the most efficient inference backend (Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, or CPU), and speaks with the cheeky...

Microsoft has quietly corrected a frustrating hiccup that left some users unable to create Windows installation media on Arm-based machines: the Media Creation Tool failure tied to build 26100.6584 is listed as fixed in the October preview cumulative update KB5067036, which also bundles a broad set of feature previews and reliability improvements for Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2. Background What broke, when, and why it mattered In late September 2025 Microsoft shipped an updated...