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Microsoft's new "becoming Frontier" narrative is a declaration of intent: push AI from an assistant role into the core operating model of large organizations, pair agentic AI with human judgment, and use an integrated Microsoft stack — Azure, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 — to scale those changes across industries and geographies. The company frames this not just as product evolution but as an organizational strategy — AI‑first differentiation — that...

Microsoft’s latest Azure Linux 3.0 monthly roll-up — billed in Phoronix coverage as 3.0.20251021 — surfaces a mix of platform hardening, hardware enablement and packaging changes, and a surprising note about AppArmor that conflicts with existing Azure guidance; the update is important for AKS node operators and cloud platform engineers but also carries operational trade‑offs that demand careful testing before adoption. Background Azure Linux 3.0 is Microsoft’s curated, cloud-first minimal...

October’s software news delivered two practical, sharply different updates that matter to everyday Windows users: Microsoft rolled out a set of October 2025 Excel additions that push deeper AI, Python and developer-friendly controls into workbooks, while Mozilla issued Firefox 144.0.2 to patch a clutch of stability regressions — most notably crashes on Windows tied to Exploit Protection and other platform-specific issues. Background Microsoft and Mozilla both used October to refine...

Windows 11 will now offer an immediate, one‑click path to check system RAM after an unexpected restart, prompting users to schedule a quick Windows Memory Diagnostic scan the next time the PC reboots. Background Microsoft has begun testing a feature called Proactive Memory Diagnostics in recent Windows Insider Preview builds, surfaced to Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels as part of the cumulative update identified with KB5067109 (Dev build 26220.6982 and Beta build 26120.6982). The goal...

Artificial intelligence is now passing the roadside interview: a UK recycling firm’s hands‑on comparison of three mainstream chatbots found surprisingly competent guidance on common car faults, while also underscoring clear boundaries where professional inspection and human judgement remain essential. Background / Overview The testing was commissioned by Scrap Car Comparison (SCC), described in reporting as the UK’s largest vehicle‑recycling comparator, and evaluated the outputs of OpenAI’s...

Australia’s competition regulator has launched a high‑stakes Federal Court action against Microsoft, alleging the company deliberately concealed a lower‑cost Microsoft 365 option when it bundled its Copilot generative‑AI assistant into consumer subscriptions and raised renewal prices — conduct the ACCC says misled roughly 2.7 million Australian customers. Background Microsoft began broad consumer rollouts of Copilot — its generative‑AI assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and...

Microsoft’s Copilot tooling and Azure OpenAI Assistants have moved rapidly from demonstrations to production-ready building blocks, and local meetups — like the LeedsSharp session titled “Copilot studios and Azure OpenAI Assistants” — are now the front lines where developers and IT pros decode what these platforms really mean for applications, security, and operations. This feature looks beyond marketing language to give Windows and enterprise practitioners a practical, evidence‑backed view...

Microsoft Teams’ next desktop update will automatically mark whether you’re “In the office” by sensing when your PC joins a mapped corporate Wi‑Fi or plugs into a mapped desk peripheral — a convenience for hybrid teams that also introduces new privacy, governance, and security trade‑offs IT leaders and employees need to understand now. Background / Overview Microsoft has extended its Places and Teams presence features so that a user’s work location can be updated automatically when their...

PCMag’s recent roundup of the best AI chatbots positions ChatGPT as the default all‑rounder while pointing enterprise and specialist users toward Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Perplexity and Grok according to use case — a practical hierarchy that reflects capability, ecosystem fit, privacy posture and price. Background / Overview AI chatbots in 2025 are no longer a single product category but a spectrum of tools: generalist conversational models, ecosystem copilots embedded in...

The October 20 AWS outage tore through the internet’s nervous system, leaving major apps, banks and government services intermittently offline and delivering a blunt reminder: modern digital infrastructure is fast, cheap and startlingly concentrated. Background On October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported elevated error rates in its US‑EAST‑1 (Northern Virginia) region and later attributed the immediate symptom to DNS resolution problems for the DynamoDB service endpoint. AWS’s...

FlexNetworks has doubled its capacity into the MICE Internet Exchange (MICE), a strategic upgrade the Saskatoon‑based fibre operator says will give Central Canadian businesses and residents a more direct, lower‑latency on‑ramp to major cloud and content platforms including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. The move — announced in a GlobeNewswire release reproduced by business outlets — is pitched as a targeted performance play: more peering capacity at a top‑tier North American...

RIB Software has announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to embed Azure cloud and AI services — explicitly including Azure AI Foundry and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) — across RIB’s construction software portfolio, positioning the company to deliver AI-native workflows for estimators, schedulers, procurement teams, project controllers and field crews. Background RIB Software is a long-standing German vendor of construction and engineering software that has been moving...

If Windows 10’s end-of-support has nudged you toward a change, the easiest bridge off the Microsoft train may be Linux Mint — a polished, Windows-friendly distro that lets you test-drive a new operating system from a USB stick, dual-boot safely, or erase Windows entirely and keep only the new Linux install. The steps and philosophy in PCMag’s how‑to guide map directly to practical actions: choose a beginner-friendly distro (Mint’s Cinnamon edition is the recommended landing spot), create a...

Microsoft has finally given IT teams a supported, first‑party way to remove selected preinstalled Microsoft Store apps from managed Windows 11 devices: a device‑level, ADMX‑backed policy in Windows 11, version 25H2 that lets administrators pick which inbox Store packages to deprovision centrally through Group Policy, Microsoft Intune, or the MDM Configuration Service Provider (CSP). Background Enterprise and education IT shops have long struggled with the operational friction of “debloating”...

Microsoft’s new full‑screen “Xbox mode” in Windows 11 is more than a cosmetic skin—it's a purpose‑built, controller‑first shell that suppresses parts of the traditional desktop, trims background services, and reorients the operating system toward a console‑like handheld gaming experience. First shipping preinstalled on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X, the feature has already been surfaced in Windows 11 25H2 preview builds and unlocked by enthusiasts on other handheld PCs. Early tests...

Microsoft’s upcoming fiscal Q1 results — the quarter ended Sept. 30 — will be the next high-stakes checkpoint for investors, partners and IT leaders watching whether the company’s AI and cloud investments are finally converting into sustained revenue and margin momentum. Expectations center on Azure growth, Microsoft Copilot traction, capital spending for AI infrastructure, and whether CIOs’ budgets are loosening enough to sustain enterprise-scale AI projects. Analysts’ models vary, but the...

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a new definitive agreement that keeps the companies tightly partnered through the next technological era — but crucially changes the exit conditions for an AGI milestone by insisting any AGI declaration be verified by an independent expert panel before OpenAI can unilaterally alter the partnership's terms. Background / Overview The Microsoft–OpenAI relationship has been one of the defining commercial partnerships of this AI decade: Microsoft invested heavily...

IPT’s practical push to turn Microsoft Copilot into a team of specialised, role-based AI agents marks a clear and timely shift: from experimenting with chatbots to operationalising agentic AI across business processes, with measurable outcomes, governance and South African compliance considerations front and centre. Background IPT, a Cape Town–based managed IT services and cybersecurity provider, has started offering a structured service to help organisations deploy Microsoft Copilot as a...

Microsoft appears to be preparing an intermediary Windows 11 release — version 26H1 — that will arrive early next year but only on a narrow class of new Arm-based laptops powered by Qualcomm’s freshly announced Snapdragon X2 family, according to reporting that surfaced this week. The report says 26H1 will act primarily as platform support for the new Snapdragon X2 Elite chips and related device enablement; feature work introduced there will reach the broader Windows 11 install base later in...

Keeping your AMD chipset driver current is one of the easiest and highest‑impact maintenance tasks for a Windows 11 PC: it affects power management, PCI/USB/SATA interfaces, SMBus communications and platform stability. This guide shows several reliable ways to check the installed AMD chipset driver version in Windows 11, explains what the version numbers mean, reviews safer update paths, and highlights known pitfalls — including the rare installer/Windows Update race condition that can leave...