Featured content

Most people who try Linux for the first time are surprised by how small changes — a lighter update schedule, a different package manager, a new desktop environment — can feel like reclaiming control over their PC. Background / Overview The argument to "move to Linux instead of Windows 11" is no longer fringe tech rhetoric: it’s a pragmatic choice for many users facing hardware limits, privacy concerns, subscription creep, or the end of support for older Windows releases. An accessible...

Microsoft has quietly removed the compatibility hold that prevented many Intel 11th‑gen PCs from receiving the Windows 11 24H2 feature update after Intel released an updated Smart Sound Technology (SST) audio driver — a fix that finally reached Windows Update in late September 2025 but only after roughly a year of blocked upgrades and repeated user pain. Background Windows 11 24H2 shipped with a long tail of compatibility safeguards that aim to prevent devices from installing the update when...

Microsoft has begun rolling out an AI-powered Auto-Categorization feature in the Windows Photos app that automatically groups images into practical buckets—screenshots, receipts, identity documents, and notes—making it far easier to find the document or snapshot you need without sifting through thousands of pictures. Background Microsoft has steadily added AI-driven capabilities to Windows 11, and the Photos app has been a clear testing ground for features that blend local on-device models...

Microsoft’s newest Office update makes it painfully easy to hand off large chunks of knowledge work to an AI assistant — and that convenience brings both immediate productivity gains and serious new governance, accuracy, and privacy questions for IT teams and knowledge workers alike. The company is calling the experience “vibe working,” and the headline features are Agent Mode for Office apps (beginning with Excel and Word) and an “Office Agent” experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot that can...

Microsoft is moving beyond single‑prompt Copilot chat and into what it calls “vibe working” — a new pattern that stitches multistep, steerable agents directly into Office apps so Copilot can plan, build, validate and iterate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations on your behalf. The headline pieces are twofold: Agent Mode embedded in Word and Excel (with PowerPoint coming soon) and an Office Agent surfaced from the Copilot Chat interface that can produce full Word docs and PowerPoint...

President Prabowo Subianto’s public posture in New York last week — a vociferous condemnation of Israel’s strikes on Gaza from the United Nations podium, immediately followed by a private ceremony honoring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with Indonesia’s highest civilian award — crystallizes a contradiction that matters for diplomacy, human-rights advocacy, and corporate accountability. Background Indonesia’s diplomatic identity has long been intertwined with the Palestinian cause. As a...

Microsoft’s Start menu may finally stop pulling web results into Edge and Bing by force — experimental flags discovered in Microsoft Edge Canary suggest Windows Search could soon open links in your system default browser and use your preferred default search engine instead of always routing everything through Edge and Bing. This change, visible in Canary build flags such as msWSBLaunchNonBingDSE and msExplicitLaunchNonEdgeDB, would be a long‑requested correction to a confusing user...

Microsoft has quietly given Windows 10 holdouts a one‑year lifeline: a consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) pathway that preserves security‑only patches through October 13, 2026 — provided users meet strict prerequisites and enroll before the formal end‑of‑support date of October 14, 2025. Background Windows 10 launched in 2015 and has remained the dominant desktop OS for many households and businesses. Microsoft’s official lifecycle calendar, however, established October 14, 2025 as the...

Windows 11 promises to be more than a cosmetic refresh for enterprises — it’s being framed as a strategic platform upgrade that combines a tighter security baseline, cloud-native management, and built-in AI productivity tools that together can reduce risk, lower operational overhead, and accelerate day-to-day work for knowledge workers. Recent coverage and industry analysis highlight a clear business case for migration while also flagging the real costs, hardware constraints, and...

Capcom has quietly redrawn the PC support map for three Monster Hunter titles: beginning October 14, 2025 the publisher says it “will no longer guarantee” that Monster Hunter Wilds, Monster Hunter Rise, and Monster Hunter: World will run on machines still on Windows 10 — a practical alignment with Microsoft’s own Windows 10 end‑of‑support deadline and a move that shifts troubleshooting and compatibility risk onto players who remain on the legacy OS. Background / Overview Microsoft set a hard...

Microsoft’s formal end-of-support date for Windows 10 is now colliding with game publishers’ support cycles — and Capcom’s recent move to no longer guarantee that Monster Hunter Wilds (and its franchise siblings, Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter: World) will run on Windows 10 after October 14, 2025 has crystallized the problem for players and admins who still rely on the older OS. This is not a hard “kill switch” that stops games from launching, but it is a meaningful policy shift...

Microsoft’s Photos app for Windows 11 can now do more than display and edit images — it will proactively tidy your camera roll by automatically grouping receipts, screenshots, identity documents, and notes into dedicated categories, and the preview is rolling out to Windows Insiders on Copilot+ PCs. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily turning Photos from a basic viewer into a productivity surface that leans on AI: OCR, inpainting and background removal, on‑device super...

Microsoft’s productivity stack just took another step toward agentic work: today’s rollout of Agent Mode in Excel and Word, plus a new Office Agent available from Copilot chat, promises to let everyday users build complex, auditable spreadsheets and full documents from simple natural‑language prompts. The two features push Microsoft’s “vibe working” pitch — the idea that non‑experts can achieve specialist outcomes through conversational prompts and multi‑step AI planning — into the core...

SMB over QUIC is the most promising evolution in file sharing since SMB 3.x—promising VPN-less, always-encrypted file access, faster connection setup, seamless roaming, and resilience on flaky networks—but the technology is not yet a drop-in replacement for TCP-based SMB in most production environments. Background The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol has dominated Windows file sharing for decades, evolving from the early CIFS/SMBv1 era into the modern, feature-rich SMB 2.x/3.x family that...

MAME 0.281 lands with native Windows-on-ARM binaries and a clutch of emulation fixes that make running arcade and vintage computer systems on ARM laptops and mini‑PCs both easier and, in many cases, faster. The official release adds a precompiled Arm64 Windows package, contains targeted fixes to the 64‑bit ARM recompiler back end (with specific benefits for emulated Hitachi SuperH and Hyperstone E1 CPUs), and ships the usual monthly haul of driver updates, bug fixes, and newly working...

I’ve decided to keep using Windows 10 past Microsoft’s cutoff, and I’ve built a practical, risk‑aware plan that other holdouts can follow — a bridge that balances security, cost and sustainability while acknowledging the hard facts of lifecycle windows and hardware limits. Background: what “Windows 10 dies in October” actually means Microsoft has fixed a hard calendar date: Windows 10 mainstream support ends on October 14, 2025. After that date Microsoft will stop delivering routine...

Udemy’s latest corporate learning data make one thing unmistakable: enterprises are no longer dabbling in AI — they’re building fluency programs, wiring AI into daily work, and pairing technical depth with human skills to manage risk, quality, and change. The company’s 2026 Global Learning & Skills Trends Report frames AI fluency as table stakes, documenting massive year‑over‑year surges in Copilot and generative AI learning, while regional signals — notably in India — show very rapid uptake...

Microsoft’s Copilot is learning to plan — not just answer — and the company has rolled out a pair of agentic features that push that capability directly into Word and Excel: a new Agent Mode for in‑app, multistep assistance and an Office Agent that creates documents from the Copilot chat surface (the latter powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude models, rather than only OpenAI’s models). These additions are framed by Microsoft as a shift from single‑step prompts toward a collaborative...

Microsoft’s Copilot ecosystem has quietly entered a new phase: users and administrators can now choose Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 as alternative engines inside Copilot Studio and the Researcher agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot, while Claude Opus 4.1 has also been added to GitHub Copilot for developer workflows. This is not a minor UI tweak — it formalizes model choice as a first‑class capability across Microsoft’s productivity and developer surfaces, introduces practical...

Userful’s preview of Infinity EdgeAI marks a notable shift in how mission‑critical operations think about edge computing: rather than simply visualizing sensor and camera feeds, the company says the platform will observe, interpret and act at the edge—linking anomalies to source data and triggering audited workflows for NOCs, SOCs, EOCs and other control rooms. Background / Overview Userful introduced Infinity EdgeAI (preview) as an on‑premise, edge‑native cognitive intelligence add‑on for...