Featured content

Microsoft's public clarification about Windows 11, version 26H1 has done more to deepen the industry’s questions than to settle them: the company confirms 26H1 exists, explains it’s targeted at specific new silicon, and that it is not a conventional feature update — but the announcement leaves critical follow‑up questions unanswered for consumers, IT teams, and OEM partners. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Windows release model has been unusually stable in the past few years: a single...

I swapped Microsoft 365 for a stack of free tools and, after a few months, discovered that my daily productivity didn't collapse — it simply changed shape. The move cut a recurring subscription, kept collaboration intact for most use cases, and exposed exactly which Office features I actually missed. This is not a universal recommendation, but for many users who mainly draft documents, manage basic spreadsheets, prepare occasional slides, and handle email, a carefully chosen combination of...

Microsoft has issued a blunt, time‑bound warning: several long‑lived Secure Boot certificates provisioned around 2011 will begin to expire in mid‑2026, and devices that do not transition to Microsoft’s replacement certificate family risk losing the ability to receive security fixes and trust newly signed pre‑boot components. This isn’t routine housekeeping — it’s a platform‑level trust migration that touches firmware, OEM BIOS processes, Windows servicing, and enterprise update playbooks...

Microsoft and OEMs are rolling out a coordinated certificate refresh to replace Microsoft’s long‑lived Secure Boot certificates issued in 2011 — and if your Windows 11 PC doesn’t receive the new certificates before the 2011 keys begin expiring in June 2026 (with additional expiries through October 2026), that machine risks losing the ability to accept future Secure Boot updates and may fail to validate newer, properly signed pre‑boot components. Background / Overview Secure Boot is a UEFI...

OpenAI's decision to begin testing advertisements inside ChatGPT has redefined what "free" means for conversational AI — and it forces a practical choice on users: pay to escape ads, switch to a competitor that promises ad‑free chat, or accept a world where some AI answers come with sponsored cards and shopping CTAs attached to them. Background / Overview The economics of modern large language models (LLMs) are stark: running real‑time multimodal assistants for hundreds of millions of users...

Chris Titus Tech’s WinUtil has quietly become one of the most consequential PowerShell toolboxes for Windows tweakers and technicians — a single, script-driven GUI that can debloat a fresh install, apply dozens of privacy and performance tweaks, bulk-install apps, and even build a custom “MicroWin” installation ISO — but with great power comes real risk, and anyone who plans to run it should treat it like a surgical instrument: precise, intentional, and backed by full backups. Background...

If you buy one new component in 2026, make it a balanced one: a modern multi‑core CPU with strong single‑thread boost, 32 GB of fast system memory for serious multitasking, a PCIe/NVMe SSD for the OS and active projects, and a GPU that supports hardware AV1 encoding and at least 8 GB of VRAM — that combination hits the sweet spot for gaming, creative work, and futureproofing without overspending on a single bottleneck. //www.pcgamer.com/best-cheap-gaming-pc/) Background The message from...

Microsoft has set firm, non‑negotiable deadlines for the end of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online — tenant‑by‑tenant disablement begins on October 1, 2026, and EWS will be permanently and irrevocably removed on April 1, 2027 — and organizations that still rely on EWS have a narrow, concrete runway to inventory, protect, and migrate critical integrations. Background Exchange Web Services (EWS) arrived more than a decade and a half ago as a SOAP‑based API surface for Exchange...

Microsoft quietly shipped a new Windows 11 variant this year — Windows 11, version 26H1 — but for most users it isn’t an “upgrade” at all: it’s a factory‑installed, device‑specific platform image built to enable next‑generation silicon such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2, and it will not be delivered as a normal Windows Update to existing Intel‑ or AMD‑based PCs. Background / Overview Microsoft has long kept a predictable Windows release rhythm: feature updates in the second half of the year...

Microsoft’s recent guidance — amplified by industry reporting this week — shifts the practical baseline for serious Windows 11 gaming toward 32 GB of system RAM, while continuing to treat 16 GB as sufficient for most titles. That subtle but meaningful change has ripple effects for gamers, builders, and OEMs: from component prioritization to upgrade timing, and from PC pricing to the marketing narrative around Copilot+ AI‑enhanced systems. This article unpacks the guidance, verifies what...

Microsoft is quietly rolling out a built-in way for Windows 11 PCs to share the same Bluetooth audio feed with another listener, and the implementation — based on Bluetooth LE Audio — is already appearing on a growing list of Copilot+ devices for Windows Insiders and early adopters. Background / Overview Bluetooth audio on PCs has long been hamstrung by legacy trade‑offs between high‑quality playback and simultaneous microphone use. The old Classic Bluetooth profiles split roles across A2DP...

Microsoft’s long silence on hard Copilot metrics ended with a single, headline-grabbing disclosure — and the numbers that followed are as revealing for what they prove as for what they leave unanswered. In its fiscal Q2 FY26 earnings release and call, Microsoft reported 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, said GitHub Copilot has 4.7 million paid subscribers, and disclosed an unusually large $37.5 billion quarter in capital expenditures largely devoted to short-lived AI compute (GPUs...

Microsoft’s recent public foray into high‑temperature superconductors (HTS) for datacenter power delivery represents more than a laboratory novelty — it is a deliberate engineering bet that the next generation of cloud-scale compute will require fundamentally different approaches to electricity delivery, and that superconducting cable systems can unlock capacity, density, and community‑friendly siting that copper and aluminum simply cannot sustain at hyperscale. Background High‑temperature...

Microsoft’s long-neglected desktop has, shockingly to some and unsurprisingly to others, begun to show signs of life: the company that many argued had turned Windows into a legacy cash cow amid an AI-and-cloud renaissance is now publicly re-prioritizing the platform, reorganizing leadership, and rolling out security and consent changes that materially reshape how Windows behaves by default. This isn’t a press release dressed as progress; it’s a sequence of tactical moves and public...

Microsoft has quietly closed a dangerous macOS performance hole in Microsoft Edge — but the fix raises as many questions as it answers: a release-candidate bug that could drive a modern MacBook’s CPU into sustained high usage, produce sudden fan ramp-ups, and wreck battery life made it into the stable channel despite being reported earlier in testing. Microsoft’s stable-channel update 144.0.3719.115, published in early February 2026, carries a one-line changelog entry: “Fixed a macOS issue...

Security researchers have shown that a single, seemingly legitimate Copilot link can be weaponized to hijack an active Microsoft Copilot Personal session and siphon sensitive data silently — a one‑click exploit the community has labeled “Reprompt.” ://www.varonis.com/blog/reprompt) Background / Overview Microsoft Copilot has been integrated deeply into Windows, Microsoft Edge, and consumer Microsoft 365 experiences to provide contextual assistance: summarizing emails, drafting replies, and...

The arrival of AI agents inside enterprise environments has created a paradox for modern security teams: simultaneous promise and peril. Microsoft’s recent Cyber Pulse messaging and related security briefings argue that agentic AI—autonomous, tool-enabled assistants that can read, act, and orchestrate—is already reshaping internal operations, but it also widens attack surfaces, compounds insider risk, and challenges the visibility and governance models most organizations still use. That...

Microsoft defenders say intruders used exposed SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances as a beachhead in December, then moved laterally to harvest high‑privilege credentials — but the exact bug that opened the door remains unresolved. Background SolarWinds Web Help Desk is a widely deployed IT ticketing and asset‑management product that frequently sits on internet‑facing infrastructure to support remote IT operations. In late January 2026 SolarWinds published a set of critical and...

Microsoft has warned that several long‑lived Secure Boot certificate authorities that Windows and many OEM firmwares depend on will begin to expire in June 2026 (with a final boot‑signing PCA following in October 2026), and Microsoft — together with major OEMs — is actively rolling a replacement “2023 CA” family to capable devices to avoid a calendar‑driven loss of Secure Boot trust. Background / Overview UEFI Secure Boot is the firmware‑level trust gate that verifies the digital signatures...

Microsoft’s February 2026 Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 arrived as a workmanlike but meaningful quality release: KB5077181 (OS Build 26200.7840 / 26100.7840) stitches together months of Release Preview testing, restores several long‑requested controls, modernizes niche platform stacks (notably MIDI), and carries servicing and AI component baggage that administrators should plan for. ) Background This February cumulative is unusual in tone rather than scale. After a turbulent 2025 that...