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Windows 11 still ships with legacy utilities and interface paths from Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, and even the Windows 95 era, as a recent How-To Geek tour of six buried tools shows. The discovery is funny in the way old Windows archaeology is always funny, but it also says something serious about Microsoft’s operating system. Windows is not a cleanly rebuilt product; it is a living compatibility treaty. Every old dialog box is a reminder that the modern desktop is still negotiating...

Microsoft has confirmed that a Windows 11 update due later in 2026 will let PCs with a dedicated Copilot key remap that key to Right Ctrl or the Context Menu key through native Settings. The change is small in code but large in symbolism: after two years of treating AI as something deserving permanent real estate on the keyboard, Microsoft is acknowledging that a physical shortcut can break real workflows. The Copilot key was sold as the future of the PC; the remap option is Microsoft...

Microsoft patched CVE-2026-20841, a high-severity Windows 11 Notepad remote code execution vulnerability, in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday cycle, after researchers found that Markdown links could make the modern Notepad app launch unsafe protocol handlers and execute remote files under the current user’s permissions. That is the plain answer, but it is not the whole story. The uncomfortable part is that this was not some exotic kernel edge case hiding in a dusty subsystem. It was Notepad —...

On May 19, 2026, Kyndryl announced that Kyndryl Cloud Uplift is now available in Microsoft Azure data center regions in Tokyo and Osaka, giving Japanese enterprises a local Azure path for modernizing IBM Power, AIX, IBM i, Linux, and x86 workloads. The news is not simply another regional cloud expansion. It is a bet that the next wave of enterprise cloud migration will be won less by glossy AI demos than by the unglamorous work of moving stubborn, business-critical systems without breaking...

A Burger King order-status screen in Sheffield’s Centertainment leisure complex was photographed displaying a Windows Defender Firewall prompt on May 19, 2026, after a foreground application attempted network communication that Windows did not already trust. The gag writes itself, and The Register duly wrote it: Windows stood between customers and “greasy delight.” But the more interesting story is not that a fast-food screen borked in public. It is that two decades of Windows security...

Microsoft confirmed on May 15, 2026, that Windows 11 is bringing back the ability to move the taskbar to the top, left, or right side of the desktop, restoring a Windows 10-era customization option that users have demanded since Windows 11 launched in 2021. The reversal is small in code-facing terms only if you ignore how much emotional freight the taskbar carries. For many users, this was never about pixels at the bottom of a screen; it was about Microsoft removing a mature workflow and...

Microsoft’s May 12, 2026 Patch Tuesday release shipped Windows 11 cumulative update KB5089549 for versions 24H2 and 25H2, alongside fixes for 137 Microsoft-tracked vulnerabilities across Windows, Office, Azure, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and related services. The Daily Express is right about the practical advice: if Windows Update is waiting, restart the PC. But the real story is less “red alert” than “this is exactly the kind of boring maintenance window attackers hope you skip.” May’s...

Microsoft says missing Microsoft Teams meeting recordings and transcripts are often not gone at all but have expired and been moved by OneDrive or SharePoint into the recycle bin, where users generally have a limited recovery window. The fix is deceptively simple: understand where Teams stores the files, check the right recycle bin, and adjust the Teams admin policy that controls automatic expiration. That answer is useful, but it also exposes a deeper design problem in Microsoft 365: Teams...

Microsoft Incident Response disclosed on May 12, 2026, that attackers compromised a third-party IT services provider and used legitimate HPE Operations Manager and HPE Operations Agent infrastructure to run scripts, deploy web shells, harvest Windows credentials, and tunnel into a victim environment for more than 100 days. The important word is not HPE, and it is not even web shell. The important word is trusted. This was the kind of intrusion that thrives in the space between what an...

Microsoft has made computer use in Copilot Studio generally available for enterprise customers, extending Power Platform agents so they can operate websites and desktop-style interfaces with virtual clicks, typing, and visual interpretation when no usable API exists. The move turns Copilot Studio from a conversational agent builder into something closer to an enterprise action layer. That is powerful, useful, and dangerous in the same breath. The real story is not that Microsoft found a new...

Microsoft has confirmed in May 2026 that a future Windows 11 update will let users remap the dedicated Copilot key on newer PCs so it behaves as either Right Ctrl or the Context Menu key instead. That sounds like a small concession, but it is really an admission that Microsoft overreached when it treated a physical keyboard key as a marketing surface. The company did not merely add a shortcut to Windows; it allowed OEM keyboards to delete muscle memory in service of an AI launch strategy...

Microsoft began testing movable and smaller Windows 11 taskbars on May 15, 2026, in Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8493, restoring the ability to place the taskbar on the top, left, right, or bottom of the screen. The change is small only if you have never watched a power user lose a decade of muscle memory overnight. Five years after Windows 11 shipped with a rebuilt, restricted taskbar, Microsoft is conceding that polish without choice was never going to satisfy the people who...

Paul Thurrott’s May 18, 2026 “Switcher 2026” walkthrough on minimizing Microsoft’s footprint in Windows 11 is less a niche power-user recipe than a public stress test of what Windows has become: an operating system that still can be made clean, local, and quiet, but only by users willing to fight the defaults. The point is not that Windows 11 is unusable. The point is that the most technically satisfying version of Windows now feels like something you carve out of the shipping product rather...

Microsoft is preparing a Windows 11 update later in 2026 that will let PCs with a dedicated Copilot key remap that key to act as either Right Ctrl or the Context Menu key. The change is small in the way keyboard settings are small: invisible to most people until the moment muscle memory breaks. It is also a concession that Microsoft’s AI-first hardware branding ran into the oldest rule of personal computing. A keyboard is not a billboard if users depend on the key you replaced. The Copilot...

Microsoft has confirmed that a Windows 11 update later in 2026 will let users remap the dedicated Copilot key on newer PCs so it behaves as either Right Ctrl or the Context Menu key. The change is small in code and large in symbolism. After two years of treating a keyboard key as a billboard for the AI era, Microsoft is conceding that the physical PC still belongs partly to muscle memory, accessibility, and the boring productivity habits that actually keep Windows useful. Microsoft’s AI Key...

Australian aged care provider Regis has been using RegiCare Assist since September 2025 to summarize clinical handover notes, flag resident concerns, and sort overnight reports across its 72-home network, with the AI system built on Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry alongside Cognizant. The story is not that AI has suddenly become a nurse. It is that one of healthcare’s least glamorous bottlenecks — the daily grind of reading, sorting, and prioritizing paperwork — is becoming a...

Microsoft announced Azure Linux 4.0 at Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis on May 18, 2026, turning its formerly container-focused Azure Linux work into a supported, general-purpose server distribution for Azure virtual machines while separating container hosting into Azure Container Linux. The surprise was not that Microsoft uses Linux; that has been obvious for years. The surprise was that Microsoft finally stopped treating its own Linux as infrastructure plumbing and began...

Microsoft has confirmed in May 2026 that it will phase out SMS codes for personal Microsoft accounts, replacing text-message sign-in and recovery with passkeys, authenticator apps, and verified secondary email addresses across the Windows account ecosystem. The move is not a cosmetic cleanup of an old security option; it is Microsoft using its consumer identity platform to force a mass migration away from one of the web’s most familiar login rituals. The company is right about the security...

Windows 11 and Windows 10 users choosing a PDF editor in 2026 are effectively choosing among three mature paths: Wondershare PDFelement for approachable AI-assisted editing, Adobe Acrobat for enterprise-standard document workflows, and Foxit PDF Editor for fast, practical office productivity. That is the useful reading of the BBN Times comparison, but it is not the whole story. The PDF editor market has stopped being about whether a program can change text in a file; nearly all serious...

Microsoft confirmed on May 15, 2026, that Windows 11 security update KB5089549 can fail to install on version 24H2 and 25H2 systems when the EFI System Partition has 10 MB or less of free space. The visible error is usually 0x800f0922, but the real story is less about one bad patch than about Windows’ growing dependence on tiny, hidden boot infrastructure most users never see. KB5089549 is a mandatory security update, yet its failure mode exposes an awkward truth: the modern Windows...