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Microsoft has confirmed that the October cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5066835), shipped alongside the 25H2 rollout, introduced a regression that prevents USB keyboards and mice from functioning inside the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), leaving the very tools meant to repair broken systems difficult or impossible to operate for many users. Background The Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is the lightweight, pre‑boot toolkit built into Windows that provides Startup Repair...

In the telling recollection of former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, the company's 1990s talent machine looked less like a nurturing incubator and more like a high-stakes gauntlet: merciless interviews up front, strict role-fit triage inside, and a blunt performance architecture that either polished you into a contributor or pushed you out. Plummer’s account — calling interviews “merciless,” describing Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) as a pathway to being “managed out,” and comparing...

Microsoft’s latest security briefing makes a blunt point: Azure Blob Storage is no longer just a convenient object store — it is an active battleground, and defenders need to treat it as such now that adversaries are weaponizing cloud-native scale, features, and orchestration to probe, persist, and profit. Background Azure Blob Storage sits at the heart of many modern workloads: AI training datasets, analytics parquet stores, media delivery, backups, IoT telemetry, and archival vaults. This...

More than 1,000 websites and apps went dark across large parts of the internet on Monday morning as a major outage in Amazon Web Services’ US‑EAST‑1 region triggered elevated error rates, DNS resolution failures and cascading service interruptions that briefly knocked out popular consumer apps, government services and corporate platforms worldwide. Background The disruption originated in AWS’s Northern Virginia cluster—US‑EAST‑1—a critical hub for Amazon’s cloud infrastructure and one of the...

A wide-ranging outage in Amazon Web Services’ US‑EAST‑1 cloud region crippled dozens of high‑profile internet services for hours on Monday, knocking streaming platforms, messaging apps, gaming services and even some bank websites offline and refreshing urgent questions about how much of the global digital economy runs through a handful of hyperscale providers. Background The company at the center of Monday’s disruption, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the largest provider of cloud...

Changing your browser homepage is a tiny tweak with outsized benefits: it lets a single click put your email, intranet, or preferred search page in front of you the moment your browser opens. The quick how‑to circulated by Windows Report lays out the basics for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, and this feature expands that guidance into a practical, verified, and security‑minded handbook for Windows 11 users and IT pros alike. Background Windows 11 ships with Microsoft Edge as the built‑in...

Microsoft’s latest Insider preview brings a long‑awaited polish to File Explorer’s dark mode, but a badly timed PowerToys update has accidentally flipped a new “Light Switch” feature on for some users — causing random theme toggles and a flurry of support headaches even as Microsoft races to push hotfixes. Background / Overview Windows’ systemwide dark mode has been available since Windows 10, yet for years the operating system suffered from a patchwork implementation: modern apps and WinUI...

This month’s Windows update cycle produced a sobering reminder that the most important feature of any operating system is not flashy new UI polish but the reliability of its fallback plans — and for many users, Microsoft’s October security update (KB5066835) failed that basic test. A widely reported bug left USB keyboards and mice unresponsive inside the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) on recent Windows 11 builds, while the same update introduced a cluster of secondary issues — broken...

Windows 11 includes a deliberately hidden, last‑resort Emergency Restart that can save a frozen session when the desktop shell, Start menu, or taskbar refuse to respond — but it comes with clear trade‑offs that power users and IT teams must understand before relying on it. Background When Windows becomes unresponsive, the operating system exposes the Secure Attention Sequence (SAS) — the full‑screen menu invoked by Ctrl + Alt + Del. That screen is handled at a privileged level, separate from...

Microsoft’s October cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5066835) created an urgent problem for many users and IT teams by rendering the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) non‑interactive: after installing the update, USB keyboards and mice stopped responding inside WinRE while continuing to work normally in the full Windows session, and Microsoft acknowledged the issue and said engineers were working on a fix. Background Windows ships a small, separate recovery image known as Windows...

A massive, multi‑hour disruption traced to Amazon Web Services’ US‑EAST‑1 region knocked dozens of major apps, games and even some UK banking portals offline on October 20, exposing in blunt terms how a single cloud‑provider fault can cascade across the modern internet and everyday business operations. The interruption — first visible in user reports and outage trackers in the early hours of the US east coast morning and in the UK around 08:00 BST — affected social apps, gaming back ends...

Windows 10 opens web links in Microsoft Edge by default, but changing your system-wide browser to Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Brave, or another browser is quick and reversible — and doing so helps you preserve bookmarks, extensions, and a browsing workflow you already trust. Background Windows registers one application as the system default web browser, which determines what opens when you click links in email, documents, and many desktop apps. On Windows 10 that selection lives in Settings →...

Casting a Windows 11 laptop to a TV is one of the quickest ways to turn a small-screen setup into a living-room media center or a flexible presentation station, and the process is straightforward once you know which method to use and how to troubleshoot the common snags. Background / Overview Casting and screen mirroring on Windows 11 can be done either wirelessly (using Miracast/Wireless Display) or wired (using HDMI or USB-C with DisplayPort Alt Mode/Thunderbolt). Wireless casting is...

Windows 11 quietly includes a built‑in Emergency Restart — a last‑resort, software‑initiated reboot that you can trigger from the familiar Ctrl+Alt+Del screen by holding Ctrl and clicking the power icon — a trick ZDNet recently highlighted after the method resurfaced in community posts. Background Windows exposes a special, privileged screen when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del (the Secure Attention Sequence, or SAS). That screen is intended to be handled by the operating system rather than user‑mode...

Microsoft has acknowledged a serious regression in its October cumulative update for Windows 11 — the security patch released as KB5066835 on October 14, 2025 — after reports that USB keyboards and mice stop responding inside the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), effectively blocking access to built‑in recovery tools on affected machines. Background The Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is a trimmed‑down runtime that loads when Windows cannot boot normally or when users intentionally...

Microsoft’s October cumulative for Windows 11—delivered as KB5066835—landed as a routine security rollup on October 14, 2025, and within days created an operational firestorm: local development workloads stopped responding to localhost, key installer and File Explorer behaviors broke, and, most alarmingly, the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) began ignoring USB keyboard and mouse input on many systems, forcing Microsoft into an emergency remediation cycle. Background / Overview The...

Microsoft’s October Patch Tuesday cumulative update (KB5066835) introduced a serious regression that can render the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) unusable on many machines by making USB keyboards and mice unresponsive — a problem Microsoft has acknowledged and is working to fix, while pragmatic workarounds (external recovery media, PS/2 peripherals, or replacing the local winre.wim) let most users and administrators regain recoverability in the short term. Background What went wrong...

Microsoft's consumer guidance on “5 Smart Ways to Use Copilot Today” signals a clear pivot: Copilot is no longer a novelty chat window—it's a productivity layer that now touches shopping, writing, meetings, data and even your Windows desktop, and consumers should start using it that way today. The message is simple and practical: you don’t need to be a developer or AI expert to get measurable time savings. Whether you’re triaging a clogged inbox, building a slide deck from rough notes, or...

The enterprise automation story that began with rules, scheduled jobs and single-step RPA has taken a decisive turn: intelligent, multi-step AI agents are now being woven into the fabric of business operations, and a new operational discipline — AgentOps — is emerging to manage, govern and optimize fleets of these digital workers. The transition is not incremental; it’s structural. AgentOps reframes automation from brittle “if this, then that” chains into adaptive, context-aware...

CPA Practice Advisor’s 2025 Innovation Awards make a blunt, industry‑shifting statement: artificial intelligence has moved from “useful” to essential for modern accounting, audit, and tax practices—an assertion reflected in this year’s winners and finalists, nearly all of which embed agentic or deeply integrated AI to automate work, scale advisory services, and reduce time spent on manual, error‑prone tasks. Background The Innovation Awards—now in their 22nd year—were created to recognize...