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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...

Google’s experiment quietly drops a compact, Spotlight‑style search bar onto the Windows desktop — summonable with Alt + Space — that unifies local files, installed apps, Google Drive and the web, and layers in Google Lens and an optional AI Mode for conversational, multimodal answers. Background / Overview For years Windows users have relied on disparate tools to find things: the Start menu and Windows Search for local items, a browser tab for web research, and a phone or separate app for...

I stopped treating my Windows 11 PC like a personal to-do list and let five small automations do the boring, repetitive work — the result felt like a genuine speed boost in my daily flow. Overview Windows 11 is fast when it’s doing the heavy lifting, but it’s the tiny, repeated tasks — opening the same apps, tidying the desktop, inserting boilerplate text, managing temporary files, and flipping display modes — that add friction to every workday. The five automations covered here convert...

Microsoft’s Paint has quietly taken a meaningful step toward becoming a lightweight, session‑aware image editor: the latest Insider update (app version 11.2508.361.0) adds editable project files using a new .paint container and introduces a per‑tool opacity slider for the Pencil and Brush tools, both now rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels. Background / Overview Paint has been on a steady evolution from a nostalgic utility to a more capable, low‑friction creative...

Microsoft has quietly begun shipping a coordinated set of updates to three of Windows 11’s oldest built‑in utilities — Paint, Snipping Tool, and Notepad — turning small, familiar tools into more capable, workflow‑friendly apps and proving once again that Microsoft is using inbox apps as a proving ground for hybrid AI and practical UX improvements. Background / Overview For the past two years Microsoft has steadily repositioned lightweight inbox apps from throwaway utilities into entry points...

Microsoft’s handheld gambit has quietly moved from concept to something you can try on your own device: a controller‑first, full‑screen “Xbox” experience built into Windows 11 is rolling out as part of the platform’s handheld work, and enthusiasts are already using the new handheld view and compact Xbox UI to make non‑Ally devices behave like the ROG Xbox Ally — provided the system runs Windows 11 and you’re willing to tweak settings and accept tradeoffs. Background Windows has long been a...

Microsoft’s Fabric platform just widened its berth for enterprise data: Fabric now supports mirroring from Oracle and Google BigQuery into OneLake, and it adds a native graph database built on technology from LinkedIn to model relationships at scale. The mirroring capability creates a Delta Lake–formatted snapshot of external warehouses and keeps that replica synchronized in near real time, while the new Graph workload overlays directly on OneLake to let analysts and AI agents reason about...

Steam will stop supporting Windows 32‑bit installations on January 1, 2026, a move that, if confirmed and implemented as reported, will leave the vanishingly small number of users still running Windows 10 in its 32‑bit form without client updates, security fixes, or official Steam Support help — and will underline a wider, industry‑level retreat from 32‑bit desktop software support. Background: what changed (the short version) Reports published September 18, 2025 say Valve/Steam will end...

The community has already started peeling back the seams of the ROG Xbox Ally’s new “Xbox Mode,” and hobbyist modders have managed to run the console-style, full‑screen Xbox experience on a range of other Windows handhelds — a development that short-circuits manufacturer timelines, accelerates hands‑on testing, and raises urgent questions about compatibility, security, and what Microsoft’s “handheld first” vision for Windows actually means for owners of existing devices. Background /...

Workday and Microsoft’s new integration aims to let organisations manage human employees and AI agents from a single, auditable plane — registering Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry agents into Workday’s Agent System of Record (ASOR) and giving each agent a verifiable Microsoft Entra Agent ID so it can be governed, monitored, budgeted and, where appropriate, handed off to human workflows. Background / Overview Workday’s Agent System of Record (ASOR) is a deliberate extension of the...

NVIDIA and a coalition of partners have announced what they describe as the United Kingdom’s largest coordinated push to build onshore AI supercomputing capacity: an industrial-scale programme of “AI factories” and sovereign compute zones that promises up to £11 billion of investment and as many as 120,000 NVIDIA Blackwell‑class GPUs across UK data centres, alongside complementary megaprojects from Microsoft, Nscale, CoreWeave and OpenAI. This package pairs large-scale hardware allocations...

Microsoft has set a firm deadline: routine security updates, quality patches and standard technical support for mainstream Windows 10 editions will end on October 14, 2025 — forcing households, businesses and public-sector IT teams to choose between upgrading, buying temporary protection, or continuing to run an increasingly risky, unsupported operating system. Background / Overview Windows 10 launched in 2015 and has remained one of the most widely deployed desktop operating systems of the...

Microsoft’s handheld push has taken a new turn: the Xbox-style, full‑screen “Xbox Mode” that will ship as the default experience on the ROG Xbox Ally family is already appearing on other Windows 11 handhelds — in community builds and hacks — ahead of the Ally’s retail launch, forcing a rapid reappraisal of how Windows can behave as a console-first platform. Background Windows has long tried to be everything to everyone: desktop productivity, creative workstations, and a capable gaming...

Microsoft's blunt new messaging has put hundreds of millions of Windows users on edge: do not upgrade hastily, and if your PC can’t run Windows 11, get ready to decide whether to pay for temporary security patches, buy a new machine, or adopt another path. The cascade of announcements this month — Microsoft’s reaffirmation of strict Windows 11 minimum requirements, a consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program with limited scope and duration, and visible “trade-in or recycle” links...

Microsoft’s Windows 365 just added a major twist to its Cloud PC story: administrators can now publish individual, cloud‑hosted applications — Outlook, Word, OneDrive, Edge, PowerPoint and line‑of‑business apps — without provisioning a full Cloud PC for every user, with the feature opening as a public preview. Background / Overview Windows 365 launched as Microsoft’s managed Cloud PC service: a per‑user, Azure‑hosted Windows instance streamed to devices so IT could centralize OS, apps and...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a coordinated set of updates to three of Windows 11’s oldest built‑in utilities — Paint, Snipping Tool, and Notepad — to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels, delivering a mix of practical workflow improvements and strategically important on‑device AI capabilities. Background Microsoft has steadily repurposed its inbox apps from tiny utilities into lightweight, production‑friendly surfaces for Copilot and hybrid AI experimentation. These latest...

Microsoft has quietly begun rolling out an opt‑in testing channel called Windows AI Labs, a program that invites selected users to try experimental AI features inside built‑in Windows 11 apps — first observed in Microsoft Paint — and which appears designed to gather structured feedback and telemetry while keeping unfinished features behind an explicit consent wall. Early appearances of the program show an in‑app prompt that opens a Settings card and a programme agreement, but clicking the...

Microsoft’s latest update reshapes the Xbox PC app from a Game Pass storefront into a unified, controller‑friendly hub that aggregates installed games from multiple PC storefronts, adds a dedicated My Apps shelf for quick launcher access, and promises cross‑device play history and cloud continuity — changes designed to cut launcher hopping, speed time‑to‑play on Windows PCs and handhelds, and deliver a more console‑like experience across devices. Background / Overview For years PC gaming has...

Speaker Mike Johnson’s announcement at the Congressional Hackathon that the U.S. House will begin a staged pilot giving thousands of House staffers access to Microsoft Copilot marks a dramatic reversal of last year’s ban and opens a high‑stakes test of how a legislative body adopts generative AI under institutional guardrails. Background For more than a year the House barred use of the commercial Microsoft Copilot chatbot after the Office of Cybersecurity and the Chief Administrative Officer...