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Microsoft’s quiet pivot to make Copilot-driven “companion” apps a default presence on Windows 11 devices is now public policy: starting in late October 2025 the Microsoft 365 companion apps — People, Files (File Search), and Calendar — will be automatically installed on Windows 11 machines that already have Microsoft 365 desktop clients, unless an administrator explicitly blocks the behavior. This rollout is tenant-scoped, configured to launch at startup for immediate discoverability, and...

Microsoft’s September 9, 2025 Setup Dynamic Update (KB5066990) for Windows 11, version 24H2 and Windows Server 2025 refreshes the small, critical set of setup binaries used during feature updates and media-based installations — a narrowly scoped but operationally significant package that fixes file-version mismatches, hardens in-place-upgrade (IPU) and imaging scenarios, and is available through Windows Update, the Microsoft Update Catalog and WSUS. Background Dynamic Updates (DU) are a...

Microsoft appears to be building a dedicated, stand‑alone OneDrive app for Windows 11 — a web‑backed, photos‑first client that leaked from Microsoft’s own program files and was captured in a set of screenshots and hands‑on notes published by third‑party outlets this week. The early build opens into a Gallery view that places photos and videos front and center while preserving a separate file‑management mode; the executable is reportedly present on systems as OneDrive.app.exe and surfaces as...

The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation’s recent agency-wide orientation on Microsoft Copilot represents a pragmatic, low-friction approach to bringing generative AI into a high-risk public-sector workplace — one that balances productivity gains with governance controls, but which also exposes gaps in how organizations and vendors explain adoption metrics, licensing, and data protections. Background In late September, the agency held an online “Microsoft Copilot Chat Masterclass” for...

Windows Hotpatch has quietly rewritten one of the oldest trade-offs in enterprise IT: the choice between applying security updates quickly and preserving uninterrupted user productivity. Microsoft’s Hotpatch technology—now generally available for Windows 11 Enterprise clients and rolled into server offerings and cloud-managed services—lets qualified devices receive many security updates and have those fixes take effect immediately without a system reboot. The result: dramatically shorter...

Below is a full-length, deeply sourced feature-style explainer you can use as an article. It explains what the Fox56-style headline (“How to extend Windows 10 support for free instantly”) is summarizing, how the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) path actually works, step‑by‑step enrollment instructions, regional caveats, privacy and risk trade‑offs, troubleshooting, and long‑term recommendations. Read it fully before taking action — the “instant” promise is real for many users, but it...

Windows 10 will reach its official end of support on October 14, 2025, but one critical piece of the platform — Microsoft Edge and the WebView2 runtime — will continue to receive security and feature updates on Windows 10 (22H2) through at least October 2028, even for devices that do not purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU). Background Microsoft’s lifecycle for Windows 10 has been fixed in public notices for months: the OS will stop receiving regular security patches and technical...

Microsoft has opened a narrowly scoped, one‑year safety valve that lets many Windows 10 users keep receiving security‑only patches beyond the platform’s formal end‑of‑support date — and in many cases that extra year can be claimed directly from Settings at no cost with just a few clicks. Background / Overview Windows 10’s official end‑of‑support date is fixed: October 14, 2025. After that date Microsoft will no longer provide the usual monthly security and quality updates for consumer...

DapuStor’s Roealsen6 R6101 7.68TB U.2 Gen5 SSD arrives not as a curious challenger but as a full‑blown contender: a PCIe 5.0 x4, NVMe 2.0 enterprise drive built around DapuStor’s in‑house DP800 controller that delivers some of the highest steady‑state 4K read IOPS we’ve seen from any single‑port U.2 drive — numbers in the multiple millions — and a feature set that clearly targets read‑intensive datacenter workloads where latency, QoS, and predictable performance matter most. Overview...

Microsoft has quietly provided a practical — and in many cases free — one‑year lifeline for millions of Windows 10 users who cannot move to Windows 11 before Microsoft’s end‑of‑support cutoff, but the extension is neither unconditional nor permanent: it’s a narrowly scoped Extended Security Updates (ESU) option that requires specific prerequisites, account linkage, and deliberate action to claim. Background / Overview Windows 10’s formal end of mainstream support is fixed: after October 14...

Modern Standby — the S0 “instant-on” model Microsoft promotes as the smartphone-like sleep for Windows laptops — has quietly become an Achilles heel for many users, turning closed lids into hot, battery-draining surprises and eroding trust in Windows as a travel-ready platform. Background / Overview Modern laptops are supposed to be invisible partners: pick them up, close the lid, drop them in your bag, and forget about them until you need them again. That expectation is central to the...

Whimsical street scene of panicked villagers amid surreal props and SPAM branding.

Call of Duty: NEXT ripped the curtain back on Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 with a packed showcase that confirmed maps, modes, movement changes, Zombies content, Warzone integration, and the beta schedule — and it did so while doubling down on hardware-level anti-cheat enforcement that will reshape who can play on day one. Background / Overview Activision and Treyarch used Call of Duty: NEXT to present a wide-ranging first look at Black Ops 7’s multiplayer, Zombies, and Warzone plans ahead of...

Microsoft’s new consumer play is simple on the surface and strategic in the long run: Microsoft 365 Premium bundles the desktop Office apps, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, consumer-grade Microsoft Defender protections and the company’s highest-usage Copilot features into a single $19.99-per-month subscription aimed squarely at individuals and prosumers. This launch consolidates Microsoft’s recent consumer AI experiments into a clearer product ladder, but it also raises practical questions about...

Microsoft’s cloud playbook is full of maps, toolkits and incentives — but moving workloads into Azure is only the opening act; turning that infrastructure into measurable business value requires a fundamentally different conversation about modernisation, governance and long-term partner-led change. The TechCentral piece from Westcon-Comstor is a blunt reminder that migration is technical work, modernisation is strategic work, and too many cloud projects get stuck between the two. Background...

Microsoft’s October overhaul of Xbox Game Pass is the largest restructuring the subscription has seen since its 2017 debut — and it has changed the math for millions of players overnight. In a single announcement Microsoft renamed and recast the lower tiers, bumped up PC Game Pass pricing, and raised Xbox Game Pass Ultimate from $19.99 to $29.99 a month while adding partner perks such as Ubisoft+ Classics and Fortnite Crew; the changes prompted a wave of cancellations and heated debate about...

Microsoft has quietly opened a practical lifeline for millions of Windows 10 users: a one-year extension of security updates through the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program that can be obtained instantly and without payment for qualifying devices — but it comes with specific requirements, trade-offs, and regional caveats that everyone running Windows 10 needs to understand right now. Background Windows 10 reaches its official end-of-support milestone on October 14, 2025, after which...

Rufus’ latest pre-release brings practical fixes that directly target the headaches technologists and enthusiasts hit when creating Windows 11 25H2 installation media—most notably a mode to produce Windows CA 2023–compatible USB media from a proper 25H2 ISO, a native dark theme, improved VHD/VHDX error reporting, and utilities to save an existing USB back to ISO (UDF only); these are paired with stability fixes (long-path crash, timezone/DBX reporting) and continue the project’s pattern of...

Steam’s September 2025 Hardware & Software Survey delivered a clear signal to the PC ecosystem: Windows 11 has passed a new milestone among Steam users, and Nvidia’s RTX 4060 family—especially the laptop variant—has consolidated its position at the top of the GPU leaderboard. These shifts matter because Steam’s monthly snapshot, while not a census of all desktop users, represents a concentrated, upgrade‑prone slice of the gaming population whose behavior often presages wider changes in...

Sammyuri’s CraftGPT is more than a stunt — it is a fully working, if glacial, small language model assembled entirely out of Minecraft’s Redstone mechanics, packing roughly 5.09 million parameters into a physical structure of hundreds of millions of blocks and proving, in spectacular fashion, that Minecraft can be pushed into the realm of real computation. Background Sammyuri is a veteran of Minecraft’s extreme-engineering scene, known for projects that turn the game into a platform for...