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Steam's desktop client is set to stop supporting 32‑bit editions of Windows on January 1, 2026, a move that will leave the tiny cohort of Steam users still running 32‑bit Windows without future client updates, security fixes, or official Steam support for OS‑specific issues. Background Steam's platform lifecycle has been trending toward modern, 64‑bit desktop environments for years. Valve's hardware and software telemetry shows an overwhelming majority of Steam clients running 64‑bit Windows...

Microsoft’s decision to stop shipping regular security and feature updates for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 has escalated from a routine end‑of‑life announcement into a full‑blown consumer advocacy and cybersecurity conversation, with Consumer Reports publicly urging Microsoft to reverse course and continue providing free updates for the many PCs that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. The debate now touches on practical questions for households and small businesses—how to remain secure...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 Insider flight quietly folds generative and assistive AI into three of the operating system’s oldest — and most widely used — utilities: Notepad, Paint and the Snipping Tool. The changes are modest on the surface but signal a broader, deliberate push to make AI part of everyday desktop workflows rather than a separate, high‑friction product. Microsoft published the rollout details on September 17, 2025, laying out specific builds and practical behavior changes...

Valve is preparing to stop supporting 32‑bit editions of Windows — specifically Windows 10 (32‑bit) — on January 1, 2026, a move that will end official Steam client updates and platform support for the tiny fraction of Steam users still running a 32‑bit Windows host. Background Windows 10 support from Microsoft itself reaches an important milestone this autumn: Windows 10 reaches end of support on October 14, 2025, after which Microsoft will no longer provide feature updates or regular...

Google has quietly pushed a Spotlight‑style search experience onto the Windows desktop: an experimental, keyboard‑first Google Search app that summons a floating search bar with Alt + Space and can return results from local files, installed apps, Google Drive, and the web — and it bundles Google Lens and an optional AI Mode for multimodal, conversational answers. Background / Overview Google announced the new Windows experiment through its Search Labs channel as an opt‑in feature intended to...

Roblox’s Shift Lock is a simple-but-powerful camera tool — when it works. For many Windows players the Shift Lock camera either refuses to engage or behaves erratically, leaving third-person movement and precision aiming unusable. The good news: most Shift Lock problems on Windows 10/11 have clear, repeatable fixes. This feature guide condenses confirmed steps, practical troubleshooting order, and safety notes so you can diagnose and fix Shift Lock quickly — and avoid risky workarounds that...

Microsoft has quietly begun inviting some Windows 11 users to a new “Microsoft AI Labs” sign‑up from inside MS Paint, a subtle but significant step in how Microsoft is testing and distributing experimental AI features across the OS — and the rollout is already exposing tough questions about gating, privacy, and the future of on‑device intelligence. Background Microsoft has been steadily integrating AI into Windows 11’s built‑in apps for more than a year, inserting features such as Image...

For years the reflex was simple: buy a third‑party antivirus suite and assume you were safer — but the calculus has shifted. A growing number of users and reviewers now say you can reasonably ditch paid antivirus software and rely on the built‑in protections in Windows Security (Microsoft Defender) — provided you configure it correctly and understand its limits. Recent updates have turned Windows Security from a bare‑bones scanner into a multilayered security platform that includes...

Microsoft’s long‑running habit of quietly modernizing its smallest apps reached a clear milestone this week as Paint, Snipping Tool, and Notepad received coordinated feature updates in Windows Insider builds — features that push these familiar utilities from convenience tools toward real productivity surfaces for creation, capture, and writing. Background Microsoft has been steadily repositioning its built‑in Windows apps as low‑friction entry points for Copilot and on‑device AI over the...

Microsoft’s new handheld-focused Xbox Mode — the full-screen, controller-first Xbox experience layered on Windows 11 — is already being run on a wide range of in-market Windows handhelds, and community ports plus an Insider-channel push mean owners of existing devices can try the experience now rather than wait for the new ROG Xbox Ally family to arrive in stores. Background / Overview Microsoft and ASUS unveiled a coordinated push this year to make Windows handhelds behave more like...

Microsoft Azure customers across Asia, the Middle East and parts of Europe saw increased latency and degraded performance after multiple undersea fiber‑optic cables in the Red Sea were cut in early September, forcing traffic onto longer, congested detours and exposing persistent vulnerabilities in the global network that underpins cloud computing. Background The modern internet — and with it, cloud services such as Microsoft Azure — depends on an undersea skeleton of high‑capacity submarine...

Windows Server 2019 ships with Remote Desktop (RDP) capability turned off by default for safety; enabling it is simple but needs care. This feature piece walks through three reliable methods to enable Remote Desktop on Windows Server 2019 — PowerShell, Server Manager GUI, and the System Properties dialog — then validates the exact registry keys, firewall rules, and ports involved, highlights security hardening you must apply, and gives step‑by‑step verification and troubleshooting guidance...

Microsoft’s deadline to stop patching Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, has moved from a distant calendar item into a full‑blown policy controversy — and Consumer Reports is now publicly calling the company “hypocritical” for promoting Windows 11 as a cybersecurity upgrade while effectively forcing millions of users onto an unpaid, paid‑for, or unsupported path that risks both security and sustainability. Background / Overview Microsoft has formally set October 14, 2025 as the end‑of‑support...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a coordinated set of updates to three of Windows 11’s long‑standing inbox apps — Paint, Snipping Tool, and Notepad — delivering practical workflow improvements for creators and a notable expansion of on‑device AI that’s gated to Copilot+ hardware for now. Background / Overview Microsoft has steadily repurposed its simple, ubiquitous inbox apps into low‑friction surfaces for broader Windows productivity and Copilot integration. What were once tiny utilities are...

ExplorerPatcher’s latest pre-release restores the long-missed File Explorer title bar, patches several Start menu and taskbar regressions, and moves under-the-hood hooking to a new library — but it also ships with a short list of known quirks and a reminder that modifying core shell behavior carries real risk. Background ExplorerPatcher is the community-developed utility that lets Windows power users reclaim classic behaviors in Windows 11: the Windows 10 taskbar, legacy Start menus, File...

Microsoft has started shipping a Notepad update for Windows 11 that brings true on‑device generative AI — including Summarize, Write, and Rewrite — to Copilot+ PCs, and those capabilities can run entirely offline without a Microsoft account or a paid subscription when executed locally on qualifying hardware. Background Notepad’s evolution over the last two years has been gradual but decisive: a humble text editor has grown into a lightweight writing assistant layered with Copilot-style...

Microsoft’s Copilot produced a full Week 3 slate of NFL score predictions for USA TODAY — a tidy, repeatable experiment that reveals as much about modern large language models as it does about football forecasting. Background / Overview USA TODAY ran a simple, repeatable workflow: prompt Microsoft Copilot with the same question for each of the 16 Week 3 matchups — “Can you predict the winner and the score of the X vs. Y NFL Week 3 game?” — then publish the chatbot’s winner, numeric score and...

Nscale’s announcement — made in partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI — marks one of the most ambitious single-country AI infrastructure packages to land in recent memory, promising to put tens of thousands of next‑generation GPUs on British soil, to seed a sovereign compute platform called Stargate UK, and to anchor Microsoft Azure services on a new AI Campus in Loughton designed for extremely high‑density GPU training and inference. Background The mid‑September announcements are...

Windows desktop market-share data flipped twice this summer: after StatCounter showed Windows 11 briefly overtaking Windows 10 in July 2025, August’s snapshot reversed some of that gain and put Windows 11 back under the 50% mark while Windows 10 recovered several points—an unexpected wobble with practical consequences because Windows 10 reaches end of support on October 14, 2025. Background / Overview The summer of 2025 became a telemetry‑war headline: after nearly four years of incremental...

Valve’s Steam platform is slated to stop supporting 32‑bit Windows systems on January 1, 2026, a move reported by multiple outlets and grounded in Steam’s hardware telemetry and past deprecation practice. Background / Overview Steam’s gradual retirement of legacy operating systems is not new: Valve ended official support for Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 in early 2024 after explaining the decision was driven by dependencies such as an embedded Chromium runtime and the need for modern Windows...