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Windows 11 can feel faster and far less distracting with just a handful of settings changes — many of them reversible, all of them built into the OS — and you can complete the full cleanup in under ten minutes on most machines. What looks like “bloat” — Start menu suggestions, File Explorer prompts, lock‑screen tips and constant app promotions — not only adds visual clutter but also keeps background processes and telemetry active; switching those off often improves responsiveness, reduces...

It’s an understandable temptation: with Windows 10 now past its support life, shoppers are hunting aggressively for inexpensive, Copilot‑ready Windows 11 machines — and Dell’s new Inspiron Copilot 14 is surfacing in conversations as a value‑focused option that bridges modern AI features with a mainstream price point. Background / Overview Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, creating a clear push for many users to move to Windows 11 or to purchase extended...

Windows 11 quietly packs dozens of productivity shortcuts and system tools that most users never discover — and that’s a shame, because three of them alone can shave minutes (and frustration) off everyday workflows. Flip on Clipboard history, learn the three- and four‑finger touchpad gestures, and set up Storage Sense correctly, and you’ll find tiny wins stack up into meaningful time saved. Below is a thorough, hands‑on guide to those three hidden Windows 11 features: what they do, how to...

Shopify’s third-quarter results arrived as a statement of momentum: gross merchandise volume (GMV) and revenue both surged roughly 32% year‑over‑year, while the company doubled down on an AI‑first narrative — pushing Sidekick and agent integrations with major assistants into the center of its growth story, and pointing to a payments engine (Shop Pay) that is scaling rapidly and globally. The quarter produced a high‑quality free cash flow margin and set an outlook that implies sustained...

Agentic commerce has moved out of concept slides and into live rollouts: conversational assistants can now not only recommend products but also complete purchases inside the chat window, powered by new standards, tokenized payments, and platform partnerships that promise frictionless buying — and a host of novel operational, security, and regulatory headaches for merchants, platforms and IT teams. Background / Overview Agentic commerce describes a model where autonomous, goal‑driven AI...

Microsoft’s Azure team has pushed a single rack‑scale system to an industry record of roughly 1.1 million tokens per second, using ND_GB300_v6 virtual machines built on NVIDIA’s GB300 (Blackwell Ultra) NVL72 rack — a headline milestone that proves rack‑scale inference at industrial throughput is now a reality, but one whose practical impact is far more nuanced than the press release suggests. Background The Azure announcement describes a run of the MLPerf Inference v5.1 Llama 2 70B offline...

Microsoft Azure has demonstrated an industry-record inference throughput — 1.1 million tokens per second from a single GB300 NVL72 rack built on NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra GPUs — a milestone Microsoft says underscores deep co‑engineering with NVIDIA and the new ND GB300 v6 VM family for large-scale reasoning workloads. Background What was announced, in plain terms Microsoft’s public brief describes the ND GB300 v6 virtual machines as the Azure packaging of NVIDIA’s GB300 NVL72 rack platform...

Microsoft’s terse changelog entry finally delivered: after years of intermittent frustration, the Start‑menu option “Update and shut down” now behaves as advertised in recent Insider builds and the October 28, 2025 optional preview (KB5067036), restoring deterministic shutdown semantics for many Windows 11 (and some Windows 10) configurations. Background For many users the two words Update and shut down read like a promise: install pending updates while you walk away, and return to a...

Microsoft has quietly corrected a long‑standing inconsistency in Windows’ update workflow: the “Update and shut down” option now actually powers the PC off after applying updates in the latest Windows 11 preview and staged Patch Tuesday releases, restoring deterministic behavior that many users and IT admins have relied on for years. Background: the annoyance that wouldn’t die For a long time, a small but very visible mismatch existed between what Windows promised and what many machines...

Microsoft’s newest Canary‑channel flight, reported as Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27982, pushes three tightly linked UI experiments into the wild: a reworked lock screen widget model that replaces the old “Weather and more” surface, a major Widgets board redesign with multiple dashboards and left‑hand navigation, and a refined drag‑to‑share tray that surfaces sharing targets while you drag files from File Explorer or the desktop. Background Windows Insider Canary builds are a deliberate...

Microsoft has taken a major step toward making passkeys truly practical for everyday Windows users by adding cloud sync for passkeys in Microsoft Edge via Microsoft Password Manager, allowing passkeys created on one Windows device to follow you across devices signed into the same Microsoft Account. Background / Overview Passkeys are the FIDO2- and WebAuthn-based replacement for traditional passwords: instead of a shared secret you type, your device creates a public/private key pair and the...

Windows includes a built‑in diagnostic that can tell you, in plain numbers, whether your laptop battery is merely tired or truly failing — and it’s one command away. Background Laptop batteries are consumable parts: they age, their usable capacity falls, and the moment they stop holding charge can arrive sooner than you expect. Windows exposes a powerful, no‑install tool — the battery report generated by the powercfg utility — which writes a human‑readable HTML file showing usage history...

Shopify is betting the future of commerce on AI agents: the company told investors and the press that traffic from AI tools to Shopify storefronts has jumped sevenfold since January, and that purchases attributed to AI-powered search are up 11×, while announcing deeper integrations with ChatGPT and other AI assistants as part of a broader push toward what it calls agentic commerce. Background Shopify’s message came during its third-quarter results and earnings commentary, where executives...

Shopify’s latest public briefing paints a clear picture: AI is no longer a boutique experiment for discovery — it’s becoming a primary commerce channel, and the company is already seeing traffic and order signals that insist merchants prepare for a very different e-commerce stack. Background / Overview Shopify closed its most recent quarter with revenue near $2.84 billion, a roughly 31–32% year‑over‑year increase, and used its earnings narrative to frame AI integrations and agentic commerce...

Microsoft has quietly resolved one of Windows’ most quietly irritating UX mismatches: the Start menu option “Update and shut down” now behaves like it says, after Microsoft shipped a servicing correction in the optional preview package identified as KB5067036 for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2. Background / Overview For many Windows users the difference between Update and restart and Update and shut down has always been straightforward: one should reboot to finish updates now, the other...

Microsoft and AMD’s co-designed EPYC 9V64H — the CPU at the heart of Azure’s new HBv5 virtual machines — changes the calculus for memory‑bound HPC in the cloud by bringing HBM3 directly to an EPYC‑class CPU and delivering an order‑of‑magnitude uplift in sustained memory bandwidth for real‑world applications. Background / Overview Microsoft’s HBv5 family targets the narrow but high‑value segment of HPC and memory‑bound workloads: computational fluid dynamics, weather and climate modeling...

Windows users have long envied the tactile precision and gesture-friendly surface of Apple’s Magic Trackpad — and now a crowdfunded contender claims to deliver that same feel plus Windows-focused features: the HyperSpace Trackpad Pro, launched on Kickstarter by Hyper, pledges full-force sensing, contextual piezo haptics, a 240 Hz response rate, and deeply customizable app profiles via its Hydra Connect software. The campaign hit its funding goal within minutes, early-backer pricing undercuts...

A veteran tinkerer has released a bootable Windows 7 x86 image that measures just 69.0 MB on disk — a headline-grabbing proof‑of‑concept that boots to a desktop but deliberately strips so much of the userland that “virtually nothing can run” without manually restoring missing system files. Background / Overview Windows enthusiasts have long pushed the boundaries of what the operating system can tolerate when pared down. Recent community efforts such as Tiny11 and container-focused...

Microsoft has quietly corrected one of those small, long‑running Windows annoyances: the Start‑menu command “Update and shut down” now behaves as labeled in recent Insider preview builds and an October 28, 2025 optional preview package, addressing an intermittent issue that sometimes left PCs powered on instead of truly shutting down after updates. Background The problem was simple to describe and hard to fix: when users selected Update and shut down they expected Windows to apply pending...

Microsoft has quietly corrected the maddening “Update and shut down” behavior that for years sometimes left Windows machines powered on after updates — the October 28, 2025 preview cumulative update (KB5067036) and related Insider builds now include a servicing change that ensures the system honors a user’s choice to install updates and then power off. Background For a surprising number of Windows users the Start menu’s Update and shut down option became unreliable: you would select it, go...