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On October 14, 2025, Microsoft will end mainstream support for Windows 10 — a firm lifecycle cutoff that stops free security updates, feature fixes, and routine technical assistance. This is not an instant outage: Windows 10 PCs will continue to boot and run after that date, but they will become progressively more exposed to newly discovered vulnerabilities and compatibility issues unless you take action. The practical choices are straightforward: upgrade eligible machines to Windows 11, buy...

Global Growth Insights’ roundup of the “Top 21 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Software Companies in 2025” captures an important snapshot of the market: a mix of hyperscalers, regional champions, and vertical specialists that together illustrate how AI has shifted from experimental pilots into enterprise core systems. The list and accompanying market forecasts are informative, but they are also shorthand—useful as a vendor map but not as a final procurement guide—and they require careful...

Mint Group’s placement in Microsoft’s 2025–2026 AI Business Solutions Inner Circle is a significant marker of sustained performance in the Microsoft partner ecosystem and a vote of confidence in the company’s AI-first delivery across Dynamics 365, Microsoft Copilot, and the Power Platform. The recognition—announced via a Mint Group-issued release and reported by ITWeb—names Mint Group among a small set of global partners invited to the Inner Circle Summit and a year of strategic briefings...

The University of Oxford will provide free, campus-wide access to ChatGPT Edu — powered across the institution by OpenAI’s GPT‑5 — marking the first UK university to make the education-tailored version of ChatGPT available to all students and staff as part of a five‑year strategic partnership with OpenAI. Background / Overview Oxford's announcement confirms a formal expansion of the partnership first publicised earlier in 2025, and it names specific program elements: university-wide licences...

Microsoft confirmed that its September 2025 cumulative update for Windows 11, identified as KB5065426 (and preceded by the August preview KB5064081), introduced a regression that breaks playback of certain HDCP- and DRM‑protected video streams in legacy playback apps — notably those that use the Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR) with HDCP enforcement or platform DRM for digital audio — and that a targeted fix has been staged through the Release Preview channel while a broader rollout is...

Global Growth Insights’ countdown of the “Top 21 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Software Companies in 2025” crystallizes a broader truth: AI has moved from pilot projects to the strategic center of enterprise technology stacks, but the numbers and rankings that circulate in commercial roundups require careful verification and context. Background / Overview The landscape of AI software in 2025 is defined by three converging forces: the rapid commercial rollout of generative AI, hyperscalers...

Microsoft has quietly begun testing another Copilot shortcut in Windows 11 — a “Share with Copilot” button that appears when you hover over an app on the taskbar and lets Copilot Vision scan and analyze whatever’s visible in that window. Background Microsoft’s Copilot strategy has been to make its generative AI assistant an ever-present layer in Windows: baked into the taskbar, the system UI, inbox apps like Paint and Notepad, keyboard hardware with a dedicated Copilot key, and now into new...

ASDA’s renewed and expanded technology agreement with Microsoft marks a decisive step in the supermarket’s pivot to a cloud-first, AI-enabled operating model — a strategy the retailer says will sharpen price leadership, improve product availability, and free colleagues from repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher-value retail work. Background ASDA’s modernisation program, widely reported as Project Future, began after the retailer’s divestiture from Walmart and set out to replace and...

Microsoft’s decision to close the Windows 10 chapter on October 14, 2025 is now official, and the practical reality is stark: after that date Windows 10 installations will continue to boot, but they will not receive routine security patches, feature updates, or official technical support from Microsoft—leaving millions of home and small‑business PCs exposed to growing risk unless owners take action. Background Windows 10 debuted in 2015 and has powered a large portion of the PC ecosystem for...

When a decade‑old PC boots into Windows 11 with an unmodified Microsoft ISO and without a motherboard‑level TPM, a very practical question surfaces: is this a clever way to squeeze extra life out of aging hardware, or a fragile hack that will leave you unsupported and exposed when the next major update lands? Background: why Windows 11 left so many machines “unsupported” Microsoft set a new security and compatibility baseline for Windows 11 at launch: UEFI with Secure Boot, Trusted Platform...

Agentic AI has moved off road‑show slides and into vendor roadmaps that are already finding their way into enterprise pilots, but the real test isn’t which product demo looks slick — it’s whether organisations can measure and validate real time savings and quality gains before they commit large-scale budgets. Background Agentic AI describes a shift from passive helpers (transcripts, summaries, search) to systems that act on behalf of users: drafting agendas, nudging calendars, executing...

Microsoft is preparing to flip the switch on Windows 11 version 25H2, but the update arriving in the coming weeks is not a horsepower‑hungry revamp — it’s an enablement package that mostly activates features already staged on devices, trims legacy baggage, and adds a handful of targeted improvements (notably some Start menu and manageability tweaks). Background / Overview Microsoft has placed Windows 11, version 25H2 (Build 26200.x) into the Release Preview Channel as the final public...

Enterprise IT budgets are under a new kind of pressure: a fast-moving AI adoption cycle that’s forcing organizations to pay more for the software, infrastructure, and data plumbing that power modern applications. Over the past year enterprises have reported rising renewal costs, new usage-based charges, and a proliferation of AI-enabled features that vendors are packaging — and often re-pricing — as premium capabilities. The result is a scramble for visibility, governance, and measurable ROI...

Valve's Steam will stop supporting 32‑bit versions of Windows on January 1, 2026, a change that quietly completes the platform's long migration to a 64‑bit‑first ecosystem and leaves a very small but real number of users with a clear deadline to upgrade or accept an unsupported configuration. Background Steam has spent the past decade moving away from legacy operating systems and architectures as the PC ecosystem standardized on 64‑bit hardware and modern driver stacks. The company’s...

Duo Directory Sync delivers a practical, one-way bridge from on-premises Active Directory into Duo by importing users, phones, groups and administrators via the Duo Authentication Proxy — but getting it right requires careful attention to authentication, transport security, proxy placement, attribute mapping and sync ownership rules to avoid surprises in production. Background / Overview Duo’s Directory Sync lets organizations import end-users and administrators from Active Directory (AD) or...

Nscale’s announcement that it will host the UK’s largest AI supercomputer, in collaboration with Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI, marks a major inflection point for Britain’s AI infrastructure—an audacious package of GPU capacity, sovereign compute initiatives and private-sector investment that aims to reshape where and how large-scale AI models are trained and served across the country. The plan centers on a 50MW (scalable to 90MW) AI campus in Loughton initially populated with 23,040 NVIDIA...

The pace of change in consumer and enterprise technology has never been higher: this week the industry doubled down on AI-first computing with major model and platform updates, GPU makers pushed a new generation of AI-native graphics into both desktops and the cloud, chip vendors rolled out fresh silicon for creators and workstations, and regulators in Europe moved from rulemaking to enforcement — all while a contentious shift in how productivity software is distributed landed squarely in...

Christopher Ketcham’s Los Angeles Times opinion — a brisk, apocalyptic meditation that frames AI as the next evolutionary step in making humans intellectually lazier — crystallizes a fear that has migrated from elite theory to everyday worry: the machines that augment our thinking will, if unregulated and unexamined, hollow it out. The piece stitches together a personal anecdote about an e‑biker, references Nicholas Carr’s influential critique of the internet’s cognitive effects, and cites...

Blackmagic Design’s latest point release, Desktop Video 15.1, lands as a narrowly targeted but important maintenance update for users of the DeckLink Quad HDMI Recorder — addressing two high-impact capture problems that have plagued multi-input HDMI capture workflows: distorted audio when capturing computer resolutions and incorrect bit‑depth detection where 8‑bit RGB inputs were being reported as 10‑bit. The update is small in scope, but the fixes address real-world reliability and quality...

After years of trying multiple assistants, some users now say they won’t switch away from Google Gemini — and their reasoning captures a larger trend: AI loyalty is increasingly less about which model “talks best” and more about how deeply the assistant is woven into the tools people already use every day. A recent first‑person writeup praising Gemini’s seamless access to Gmail, Calendar and Drive captures that mindset: for many, Gemini is not just an assistant; it’s an extension of a...