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S&P Global Market Intelligence has built a cross-region disaster recovery design for its Capital IQ platform on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, using SnapMirror snapshots and FlexClone volumes to make a read-only SQL Server environment available in AWS’s US-West-2 region within 15 minutes. The interesting part is not that a financial-data giant moved another workload to the cloud. It is that S&P Global chose not to treat disaster recovery as a binary switch between dead and fully restored. As...

Microsoft has extended the consumer Windows 10 Extended Security Updates program through October 12, 2027, giving enrolled personal PCs another year of critical and important security patches after Windows 10’s official end of support on October 14, 2025. The change was quiet, but not small. It is Microsoft admitting, without quite saying so, that Windows 10 is too widely installed, too useful, and too entangled with older hardware to cut loose on the original schedule. As noted by...

Lumen21, L&L Consulting Services, and TechWise Group announced on July 7, 2026, that they have merged into a single national Microsoft partner operating as TechWise Group, with service hubs in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles for SMB and mid-market customers across the United States. The announcement, distributed through ACCESS Newswire, is not merely another small-channel consolidation story. It is a bet that the next phase of Microsoft services for the mid-market will be won less by...

Microsoft’s June 23, 2026 preview update for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 fixes a storage leak in CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal, a hidden write-ahead log under ProgramData that could quietly swell from kilobytes into tens or hundreds of gigabytes on affected PCs. The bug is not glamorous, which is precisely why it matters: it sits in the plumbing of Windows permissions, not in some flashy new AI button or Start menu experiment. As Microsoft’s support notes now put it, KB5095093...

Valve released official Windows drivers for its 2026 Steam Machine on July 7, enabling owners to replace SteamOS with Windows 10 or Windows 11, but the company still has not delivered the promised SteamOS installer support for clean dual-booting on the living-room PC. As reported by Windows Central and detailed on Valve’s Steam Support pages, the Steam Machine is being treated as a PC first and a console-like appliance second. That distinction is the entire story. Valve has widened the door...

Khaleej Times this week highlighted a low-friction way to turn many YouTube videos into notes: open the video’s built-in transcript, copy the text, and paste it into an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot with a specific summarization prompt. The trick is not new, but its usefulness is newly obvious in a world where tutorials, lectures, podcasts, earnings calls, repair walkthroughs, and conference sessions increasingly arrive as hour-long videos. For Windows...

Logicalis said on July 7, 2026, that it has achieved Microsoft Frontier Partner status and a Microsoft Copilot specialisation, positioning the London-based global technology services provider to help enterprise customers deploy Microsoft AI tools securely and at scale. The announcement, carried by PRNewswire and republished by The Manila Times and Newswire Canada, is not just another channel badge story. It is a small but telling marker of where Microsoft’s enterprise AI strategy is moving...

OptiSigns launched Unified Device Management on June 16, 2026, with broader coverage appearing July 7, giving IT teams one console for Microsoft Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, and idle-room digital signage across workplace displays. The move is not just a product launch; it is a bet that conference-room screens are too expensive, visible, and centrally located to remain dead assets between meetings. As reported by invidis and described in OptiSigns’ own launch materials...

Microsoft announced on July 6, 2026, that it will cut about 4,800 jobs, roughly 2.1 percent of its global workforce, with reductions concentrated in commercial sales, consulting, and Xbox as it redirects spending toward artificial intelligence infrastructure and enterprise AI deployment. The company says the affected roles are not simply being replaced by AI, but that distinction is thinner than it sounds. The deeper story is not a robot taking a desk; it is a balance sheet being rewritten...

Windows 11 preview builds released through Microsoft’s Windows Insider and Release Preview channels in early 2026 shifted attention toward practical efficiency features, including a taskbar network speed-test launcher, faster sleep resume, improved taskbar overflow behavior, quicker storage scanning, and more responsive Windows Update settings. The change is not a retreat from AI so much as a tacit admission that Windows users still judge an operating system by how little friction it adds to...

Valve has released official Windows 11 drivers for the new Steam Machine through Steam Support as units begin reaching customers in July 2026, but the company still has not shipped the promised SteamOS dual-boot wizard needed for a clean side-by-side Windows setup. That makes the news both more important and less liberating than it first sounds. Windows can now live on Valve’s living-room PC, but only by weakening the very SteamOS-first premise that makes the box interesting. As Digital...

Microsoft’s Windows 11 design team has added the “Switch to a local account” BitLocker recovery-key warning dialog to its rejuvenation list after Windows Latest highlighted that a 25H2 build still tells users to use the long-dead Windows 8 Search charm. That is a small dialog, but a revealing one. It shows both the depth of Windows’ archaeological layers and the seriousness of Microsoft’s late-stage effort to make Windows 11 feel like one operating system rather than several eras wearing the...

Microsoft’s Windows 11 passkey system, documented by Microsoft and surfaced for enthusiasts in Paul Thurrott’s Windows 11 Field Guide coverage on January 4, 2024, lets users create, store, manage, and use passwordless sign-ins through Windows Hello, security keys, phones, and newer third-party passkey providers. The story is not that Windows suddenly discovered passwordless authentication. It is that Microsoft is trying to make Windows itself the broker for a post-password web, and that...

Microsoft extended the Windows 10 Consumer Extended Security Updates program in late June 2026, giving enrolled personal devices security update coverage until October 12, 2027, nearly two years after Windows 10’s official end of support on October 14, 2025. The change was not delivered as a grand Windows strategy keynote; it surfaced through updated Microsoft language and was picked up by Windows-focused outlets including BleepingComputer, Windows Central, Windows Latest, and local...

On July 7, 2026, Microsoft published a customer story describing how Sirva, a U.S.-based global mobility services company, moved its post-merger relocation operations onto Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Copilot Studio, Power Apps, Power Automate, Azure Communication Services, and Power BI. The headline is not simply that another enterprise standardized on Microsoft software. It is that Microsoft’s AI-first business-apps pitch is starting to look less like a Copilot demo reel and more like the...

Microsoft Teams drew outage reports on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, after UptimeRobot detected unusual response times for the service while other third-party trackers continued to list Teams as operational and Microsoft had not publicly confirmed a platform-wide incident by early afternoon Eastern time. The most defensible reading is not “Teams is down everywhere,” but something more familiar to administrators: a cloud service may be degraded for some users before the official dashboard catches...

Microsoft began testing Cloud rebuild for Windows 11 on July 6, 2026, in an Experimental Windows Insider release, adding a recovery path that reinstalls the operating system from Windows Update even when the installed copy of Windows can no longer boot. The feature, highlighted by VideoCardz and Windows Report after Microsoft’s Insider announcement, is less flashy than AI desktops or new Copilot hooks, but it may matter more to anyone who has ever stared at a broken recovery partition...

Microsoft is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit filed July 1, 2026, in federal court in Wisconsin by residents near its Fairwater AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, who allege the facility emits unreasonable, excessive, persistent noise that interferes with sleep, property use, and home values. The case, first surfaced locally by the Wisconsin Examiner and Wisconsin Public Radio and later picked up by Windows Central, turns one of Microsoft’s most celebrated AI infrastructure projects into...

Microsoft told employees on July 6, 2026, that it is eliminating about 4,800 roles worldwide, with the deepest cuts falling on its commercial business and Xbox division as the company reorganizes around AI deployment, sales efficiency, and a smaller gaming footprint. The Register framed the moment bluntly: Microsoft says the world is changing faster than the company can keep up. That is not just layoff language. It is a confession that one of the most powerful companies in technology is now...

Microsoft said on July 6, 2026, that it will cut roughly 4,800 jobs, about 2.1 percent of its global workforce, while restructuring Xbox, spinning off or divesting several studios, and pushing more capital toward artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company insists the eliminated roles are not being “replaced by AI,” according to an employee memo reported by Reuters, but that distinction is narrower than it sounds. Microsoft is not saying AI fired people; it is saying AI has changed...