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Cambridge charity Rebooted’s call for businesses to donate idle Windows 10 laptops after Microsoft’s October 14, 2025 end‑of‑support is far more than a feel‑good recycling story — it’s a practical public‑interest proposal that converts a security and e‑waste problem into a measurable digital‑inclusion opportunity. The charity’s founder, James Tweed, says partners can securely wipe old corporate machines, install ChromeOS Flex, and redistribute them to disadvantaged young people — a model...

Microsoft has quietly changed the Microsoft Store’s app‑update behavior so the old consumer toggle that permanently disabled automatic updates is gone — in its place the Store now only lets you pause updates for one to five weeks, after which automatic updates resume. Background For years Windows allowed a simple consumer‑level choice in the Microsoft Store: a toggle labeled Update apps automatically that could be set to On or Off. That durable Off setting let home power users, creators...

Apple’s latest M5 system-on-chip stunned the enthusiast community this week after a Chinese tester published a CPU-Z (ARM64) run inside a virtualized Windows 11 session that recorded a staggering single‑thread score — one that, on paper, dwarfs the top desktop chips from Intel and AMD in the same synthetic test. The result, reported by a hardware news outlet and traced back to an NPacific post (shared by leaker HXL), lists the M5 at 1600.2 points in CPU‑Z 1.04.arm64 (single‑thread) when...

Windows’ software ecosystem is a long, eclectic museum — and among the relics are small, single-purpose utilities from the late 1990s and 2000s that still solve problems better than many modern apps. This piece revisits five such veterans — Volumouse, Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU), Ethervane Echo, PhotoFiltre 7, and SpaceMonger — verifying their claims, weighing strengths and risks, and explaining why each remains a practical tool on modern Windows 10/11 systems. These picks come from a...

Microsoft pushed an out-of-band emergency patch this week to repair a Windows 11 recovery-mode failure that left many PCs unable to accept USB keyboard and mouse input inside the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), restoring the ability to navigate recovery menus and perform system repair operations on affected devices. Background Microsoft shipped the October 14, 2025 security rollup (KB5066835) as part of its normal patch cadence. Within days, users began reporting that USB keyboards and...

Microsoft’s Copilot has a new face — and, if you’re feeling nostalgic, a hidden paperclip wink — as the company rolls out Mico, an expressive voice-mode avatar that can be nudged into a modernized Clippy and arrives alongside a suite of collaborative, health-grounded, and personality-driven Copilot features. Background / Overview Microsoft announced a major Copilot fall release that reframes the assistant from a single-session chat box into a persistent, multimodal companion. The headline...

Microsoft's latest PowerToys hotfix, version 0.95.1, arrives as a focused, corrective release that patches a high-profile theme-switching regression introduced with the 0.95 cycle while also addressing stability and installer concerns across several modules. The update zeroes in on the new Light Switch utility — which caused surprise automatic toggles between light and dark Windows themes for some users — and adds targeted fixes to Command Palette, Find My Mouse, the installer toolchain, and...

Microsoft’s Silverlight once powered streaming video, rich enterprise portals and browser-hosted LOB (line‑of‑business) apps, but today it exists almost entirely as legacy technology—still encountered in a handful of enterprise systems and government sites. The basic installation path is straightforward: download Microsoft Silverlight and run its installer, but the practical reality on Windows 10 is more complicated because modern browsers no longer support the plugin and Microsoft declared...

Microsoft’s newest Copilot roll‑out turns the company’s assistant from a reactive search box into a deliberately personal, voice‑and‑vision enabled companion — adding long‑term memory and explicit connectors, an optional animated avatar called Mico, group sessions for shared planning, grounded health flows, and a voice‑first tutoring mode called Learn Live. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily folding generative AI into Windows, Edge and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem for more than...

Microsoft’s Copilot Fall Release is a significant, consumer‑facing reframe of the Copilot experience: a dozen headline features that make the assistant more expressive, social, and agentic—led by a new animated avatar called Mico, shared Copilot Groups for up to 32 participants, long‑term Memory & Personalization, deeper Connectors to Gmail and Google Drive, voice‑first tutoring with Learn Live, health‑grounded answers via Copilot for Health, and expanded browser and OS automation through...

Microsoft’s Copilot just got a face: Mico, a floating, blob‑shaped animated avatar that Microsoft introduced during its Fall 2025 Copilot Sessions, is designed to add emotional cues, real‑time expressions, and a playful wink to the company’s AI assistant while arriving alongside a major set of collaboration, memory, and safety features that together reshape how Copilot will show up across Windows, Edge, and mobile. Background Microsoft framed the Fall 2025 Copilot Release as a pivot toward...

Google’s plan to improve how Chrome captures audio on Windows promises to close a long-standing gap between what desktop recording apps deliver and what web apps can do. The change — surfaced in recent reporting and visible in Chromium project commits — aims to let Chrome request and preserve higher-quality input from microphones and audio interfaces on Windows, replacing the browser’s long default behavior that effectively limits web-based recording to a basic 16‑bit capture path. Early...

If you thought uninstalling Firefox removes every trace of the browser, think again — extensions, plugins, cache and full user profiles are often left behind by design, and these leftover files can linger in hidden folders across Windows, macOS, and Linux. This feature-length guide shows exactly where Firefox leaves data, how to find and safely remove Firefox plugins after uninstalling the browser, and what to watch for so a future reinstall is truly clean. Background Firefox intentionally...

Microsoft’s Copilot Fall Release turns a familiar set of AI experiments into a cohesive consumer-facing push: a browser that behaves like a personal assistant, a Windows companion you can call by name, and a suite of features that aim to make health, learning and group work feel more natural — while putting explicit control and consent at the center of the experience. The release bundles a dozen new capabilities — most notably Copilot Mode in Microsoft Edge, expanded Copilot on Windows...

Microsoft’s latest Copilot update redraws the boundaries of what a personal assistant on Windows and the web can do: it adds multi-person collaboration, deeper cross‑platform connectors (including Gmail and Google Drive), persistent memory and personalization, permissioned agentic actions in Microsoft Edge, and a playful — but carefully designed — avatar called Mico to make voice and study sessions feel more natural. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily repositioning Copilot...

Microsoft’s AI chief distilled a product pitch, a safety manifesto and a public challenge into one plain sentence this week: “I want to make an AI that you trust your kids to use.” That declaration, delivered by Mustafa Suleyman as Microsoft rolled out a major Copilot consumer update, signals a deliberate product posture — one that rejects romantic or erotic AI interactions and bets that bounded, auditable assistants will win trust from parents, educators and enterprises. The claim is both...

Microsoft’s latest push to make the browser feel less like a passive window and more like an active assistant arrives in a bold, feature-rich update: Copilot Mode in Edge now includes multi-step “Copilot Actions,” session-aware “Journeys,” optional use of your browsing history for richer responses, and tighter on-device protections such as a local-AI “Scareware blocker.” The rollout continues Microsoft’s strategy of embedding generative AI directly into everyday tools, turning the browser...

Microsoft’s Edge browser is getting a new layer of AI that aims to shift the browser from a passive tool into an active assistant: Copilot Mode brings voice- and text-driven automation, session-aware “Journeys,” local protections against full‑screen scams, and expanded password and privacy controls — all designed to let the browser complete tasks, reconstitute past projects, and reduce the tab chaos that has defined modern browsing. This launch places Microsoft squarely in the emerging race...

Microsoft’s Copilot Fall Release makes the assistant feel more social, more persistent, and — quite literally — more personable with a new animated avatar called Mico, expanded long‑term memory and connectors, collaborative Copilot Groups, and deeper agentic capabilities inside Microsoft Edge. Background / Overview Microsoft framed the Fall Release as a move from ephemeral, session‑by‑session question‑answering toward a persistent, human‑centered companion that can remember context...

I switched my default browser from Chrome to Opera and, after a week of real work, found myself missing a handful of built‑in conveniences that made daily browsing significantly faster and less cluttered—features that in Chrome require extensions, workarounds, or simply don’t exist in the same integrated form. Background / Overview Opera has long positioned itself as a Chromium-based browser that differentiates through an aggressive set of native features: integrated messengers in the...