Featured content

Microsoft’s latest push to give customers more control over where AI work happens marks a pragmatic — and politically sensitive — step toward making generative AI acceptable to highly regulated organisations, but the announcement leaves important technical, contractual, and governance questions unresolved. Background Microsoft has been steadily folding generative AI into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem under the Microsoft 365 Copilot brand while simultaneously extending its data residency...

Microsoft’s pitch to “create confidently with AI” is both an invitation and a challenge: the company is rolling AI image generation into Copilot and related tools in a way that makes visual creation fast, approachable, and deeply integrated — but it also raises a host of practical, legal, and ethical questions that creators need to understand before they hit generate. The company’s consumer-facing guidance frames Copilot as an entry point for designers, marketers, educators, and hobbyists...

Microsoft and Sharaf DG turned two Dubai malls into a hands-on classroom for AI, using a board-game-style activation called Co-Blocks to demonstrate how Microsoft Copilot+ features can be discovered through play, social sharing and everyday usefulness rather than product specs and slide decks. Background The Co-Blocks Innovation Showcase was staged at City Centre Zahia and City Centre Deira, pairing Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with Sharaf DG’s retail footprint and a creative activation by...

Microsoft’s messaging over the past 18 months has been blunt and consistent: Microsoft 365 is a broad productivity ecosystem — and Outlook is the mail, calendar and personal information management gateway Microsoft wants everyone to use on Windows. Background / Overview Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is a subscription-based suite of productivity apps and cloud services that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Teams and more. Outlook is the company’s long-standing email, calendar...

Microsoft’s announcement of a $15.2 billion investment in the United Arab Emirates — coupled with a 200‑megawatt datacentre expansion through G42’s Khazna Data Centres and new responsible‑AI initiatives — marks one of the largest regional commitments to cloud, AI infrastructure, and talent development in the Middle East, and it materially changes the technical and geopolitical landscape for hyperscale AI delivery in the Gulf. Background and overview Microsoft’s public breakdown frames the...

The UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) quietly disclosed that it has spent approximately £312 million modernising its IT estate — a programme that included removing 31,500 Windows 7 laptops and upgrading them to Windows 10, patching tens of thousands of vulnerabilities, migrating legacy applications, and beginning a programme of datacentre closures — even as Windows 10 reached its vendor-supported end-of-service milestone in October 2025. Background / Overview Defra...

Microsoft’s guidance for keeping commercial Windows 10 devices patched after end of support is practical but narrow: follow the prerequisites, open specific activation endpoints, and choose the right activation path — MAK for volume-licensed fleets or cloud entitlements for Azure/Windows 365 — while accepting that ESU is a time‑boxed bridge, not a long‑term substitute for migration. Background Microsoft formally ended mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. That milestone...

Microsoft has quietly added a simple but powerful convenience: you can now build a one‑click installer that downloads and launches multiple Store apps in one go, creating a single .exe “multi‑app install” pack from the Microsoft Store website that the Store app will execute on your PC. Overview Microsoft’s new Multi‑app install feature lets users select a curated set of apps on the Microsoft Store website and generate a single installer file that triggers the Microsoft Store app to download...

Microsoft has begun rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27982 to the Canary Channel, bringing a trio of user-facing experiments—lock screen widgets, a redesigned Widgets dashboard with multiple dashboards, and a new drag-and-share tray for faster file sharing—alongside a handful of stability fixes and a few Canary‑typical regressions Insiders should know about. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Canary Channel is the earliest public testbed for Windows platform work: features appear...

Microsoft’s new Full Screen Experience (FSE) for Windows 11 has arrived on the MSI Claw family via the Windows Insider Preview and—at least in early hands‑on tests—can free up memory, trim background noise, and deliver measurable but modest FPS gains in demanding titles, while exposing the real-world frictions of staging a console‑style shell on a desktop OS. Background / Overview Microsoft designed the Full Screen Experience (FSE) as a session posture layered on top of Windows 11, not as a...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 arrives with clear, tiered PC requirements and a strict anti‑cheat posture that will affect almost every Windows desktop player — the publisher has published Minimum, Recommended, and Competitive / 4K Ultra hardware targets, requires TPM 2.0 and UEFI Secure Boot for anti‑cheat to function, and schedules a regional midnight launch on November 14 with a timed preload window beginning November 10. Background / Overview Beenox (in cooperation with Treyarch and...

Microsoft has ended regular security updates for Windows 10, and that expiry is already reshaping the threat landscape — a situation made more urgent this week after the developer of the popular Windows 11 bypass tool issued a blunt “do not download” warning about an impostor download site distributing potentially tampered builds. Background: why October’s cutoff matters Microsoft officially declared that Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. From that date forward, Home and...

Windows 11 is rolling out a practical, standards‑based way to let a single PC stream the same audio to two wireless headsets or earbuds at once — a small change with outsized convenience that rides on the new Bluetooth LE Audio stack and arrives first as a preview for select Copilot+ devices in the Windows Insider program. Background: why this matters right now For years, sharing private audio from a laptop meant awkward workarounds: analog splitters, wired headphones passed back and forth...

Microsoft has deprecated Microsoft Defender SmartScreen inside Internet Explorer and IE Mode on Windows 11, removing in-process SmartScreen URL and download checks from the legacy IE runtime while preserving platform-level protections such as the Windows Shell SmartScreen and Mark‑of‑the‑Web handling. Background Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is a reputation-based security feature that defends against phishing, malicious websites, and suspicious downloads by checking URLs and file metadata...

Microsoft has quietly corrected a small user-facing symptom with outsized consequences: the long-standing “Update and Shut Down” option in Windows 11 that commonly behaved like “Update and Restart” has been fixed in the October 28, 2025 optional preview cumulative update (KB5067036), and the fix is scheduled for broader distribution in the November 11, 2025 Patch Tuesday rollout. For years this mismatch between label and behavior frustrated home users and IT pros alike — leaving laptops...

Microsoft is preparing to add short-form video generation to Copilot by wiring in OpenAI’s next‑generation video model Sora 2, together with a new Videos tab and a refreshed settings modal — an expansion that would move Copilot from a multimodal assistant that “sees and writes” toward a full creative workspace where users can ideate, store, and (potentially) publish short AI‑generated clips directly from the assistant interface. Background: why this matters now Microsoft has been steadily...

Microsoft has quietly repaired one of the small but surprisingly persistent annoyances in Windows: the Start menu’s “Update and shut down” command now behaves as it promises in recent preview builds and the October 28, 2025 optional cumulative preview (KB5067036), addressing an orchestration problem that in many configurations caused the machine to return to an awake state instead of powering off after updates. Background For many users the “Update and shut down” option is a convenience...

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 arrives on PC with a clear, tightly choreographed rollout — a November 14 global launch (midnight local time) and a timed pre‑load window beginning November 10 at 9:00 AM PT — and the PC build is packed with granular graphics options, modern upscaling, and a strict anti‑cheat posture that will require TPM 2.0 and UEFI Secure Boot on day one. Background / Overview Beenox (in partnership with Treyarch) built the PC client to be a “tailormade” experience for Windows...

Keeping your desktop wallpaper fresh is an easy, low-friction way to make your computer feel new every day; whether you want minimal daily scenery, reactive live backgrounds, or full multi‑monitor control, there’s now a mature ecosystem of wallpaper managers that automate the hard part for you. Overview Auto‑changing wallpaper apps sit in one of two camps: lightweight image rotators that pull curated photos from services like Unsplash or Bing, and full‑feature engines that run animated...

AI social media managers have moved from experimental add‑ons to table stakes: today’s platforms use large language models, computer vision, and scheduling intelligence to turn briefs into captions, images into multi‑format posts, and analytics into actionable recommendations—freeing teams to test more and move faster while keeping a human in the loop. Background / Overview Social teams are under constant pressure to publish more, respond faster, and justify spend with measurable outcomes...