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If you just unboxed a new Windows 11 laptop, there are five settings you should consider turning off right away to tighten privacy, reduce distractions, and reclaim background resources for the tasks that matter most. Background / Overview Windows 11 ships with a range of convenience features enabled by default: telemetry, personalized suggestions, widgets, search highlights, and various tips and promotional notifications. For many users — especially those on entry-level or mid-range laptops...

Google is quietly bringing its signature search experience to the Windows desktop with an experimental app that unifies results from your PC, Google Drive, installed applications and the web — all summoned with a simple Alt + Space shortcut. Background Google has long treated search as a web-first product, relying on browsers and mobile apps as the primary user surfaces. That stance has shifted subtly over the last year as the company expanded AI Mode, integrated Google Lens across more...

Microsoft’s Windows 11 Insider previews for early September 2025 widen the operating system’s AI footprint and polish long‑standing UI rough edges, but they also underline the strategic tradeoffs Microsoft is making as AI features move deeper into the OS: more convenience and on‑device intelligence for Copilot+ PCs, paired with an increasingly dense layer of AI prompts and context menus that administrators and privacy‑minded users will need to manage carefully. Background: what these...

Microsoft has quietly posted official Windows 11 ISO images for Insiders, giving testers, OEMs, and IT teams the first gated chance to perform clean installs and full out‑of‑box experience (OOBE) validation for the upcoming Windows 11 feature update — the 25H2 Release Preview build family (Build 26200.x). Background / Overview Microsoft has shifted its update delivery model in recent Windows 11 releases, using an enablement package (eKB) to flip features already present on patched disks...

Gears of War: Reloaded landed as a high‑polish remaster that aims to modernize visuals and frame‑rates, but for some players the experience was undermined by aggressive camera motion — a problem the Windows Central reviewer solved by turning off a single setting: camera shake. Background / Overview Gears of War: Reloaded is positioned as a canonical remaster of the 2006 classic, released across modern platforms with clear technical ambitions: Day‑one availability on Game Pass, remastered...

Curated for You and Microsoft have activated a first‑of‑its‑kind, lifestyle‑led AI fashion experience inside Microsoft Copilot, putting visually composed, shoppable outfit recommendations into natural conversations and surfacing curated, head‑to‑toe looks from participating retailers when users ask styling questions. Background / Overview Curated for You (CFY), an Austin‑based AI lifestyle commerce platform, publicly announced an operational integration with Microsoft Copilot on September...

Windows engineers quietly keep a short, secretive compatibility table inside the Bluetooth stack to fix one particularly stubborn relic: the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 — a 2006-era device that shipped its Bluetooth name using the wrong character encoding and forced Windows to treat its reported name as invalid unless the OS applied a targeted workaround. Background The Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 was introduced by Microsoft in 2006 as a hybrid: a compact...

Open‑source software today offers Windows users a practical way to reclaim control, improve privacy, and boost productivity — and ZDNET’s compact roundup of “10 open‑source apps I recommend every Windows user try — for free” is a useful starting kit that does exactly that. Background ZDNET’s list collects ten well‑established, free projects that map neatly to common Windows user needs: productivity, local search and launch, backup, file sync, messaging consolidation, UI polish, format...

Consumer Reports has formally asked Microsoft to keep delivering free security updates for Windows 10 consumers beyond the company’s announced October 14, 2025 end‑of‑support date, arguing that the announced one‑year consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) bridge and the paid options that follow create unfair security, privacy, and environmental harms for households, schools, and small organizations. Background / Overview Microsoft’s public lifecycle calendar sets October 14, 2025 as the...

Google has quietly shipped an experimental Windows desktop application that puts Google Search, Google Lens and its conversational AI Mode a single keystroke away — a Spotlight‑style overlay that searches your PC, installed apps, Google Drive and the web without switching windows. Background / Overview For years Google’s desktop presence has been browser‑first: Search lived in a tab, Lens lived in mobile and Chrome, and document editing relied on web apps. The newly announced Google App for...

Curated for You and Microsoft have quietly activated a first-of-its-kind, lifestyle‑led AI fashion experience inside Microsoft Copilot, delivering visually composed, shoppable outfit recommendations in response to natural‑language styling prompts and linking those looks directly to participating retailers. Background / Overview Curated for You (CFY), an Austin‑based AI lifestyle commerce platform, announced that its curation engine is now live inside Microsoft Copilot, enabling users to ask...

Nscale’s announcement that it will expand UK AI infrastructure in collaboration with Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI marks a significant acceleration in the country’s bid for sovereign, large-scale AI compute — a move that blends private hyperscale investment with geopolitics, national industrial strategy and a raft of technical trade-offs that will shape how British organizations and developers access advanced generative AI services. Background The UK’s tech policy pivot over 2025 has...

Google has quietly dropped an experimental, Spotlight‑style search app for Windows that aims to make web, cloud and local file search a single keystroke away — summoned by Alt + Space by default — and bundled with integrated Google Lens and an optional AI Mode powered by Google’s generative models. The feature is being distributed as a gated experiment through Search Labs, currently targeted at personal Google accounts in the United States and supported on Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines...

Microsoft’s decision to end mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 — paired with a one‑year “consumer Extended Security Updates” (ESU) option that costs roughly USD 30 or requires a Microsoft account to enroll — has sparked widespread consumer frustration, industry scrutiny, and a heated debate about digital longevity, privacy, and fair access to security updates. Background Windows 10 was first released in 2015 and has powered an enormous installed base over the past decade...

Microsoft has given Windows 10 users a clearly signposted escape hatch: Extended Security Updates (ESU) will let eligible PCs continue to receive critical and important security patches for up to three years after the operating system reaches end of support on October 14, 2025. The program splits into two tracks — a consumer-facing enrollment wizard with free and paid options for one extra year, and a commercial Volume Licensing purchase for organizations that want up to three years of...

Google has quietly pushed a compact, Spotlight‑style search overlay to Windows as an experiment — a one‑keystroke gateway that stitches together web results, Google Drive, installed apps and local files while folding in Google Lens and an AI Mode for conversational answers. Background Google’s official announcement frames the release as a Search Labs experiment intended to reduce context switching: press a shortcut, get an answer, and stay in the flow. The client installs on Windows 10 and...

Google is quietly rolling a new Windows-native search experience into its Labs program that brings the company’s web search, Google Lens, and its AI-powered AI Mode onto the desktop — reachable instantly with an Alt + Space hotkey and designed to search your local files, installed apps, Google Drive, and the web without switching windows or breaking your flow. Background Over the past two years, Google has aggressively integrated multimodal AI and visual search across mobile and web...

Microsoft is quietly testing a one‑click internet speed test in Windows 11 Insider builds that places a “Perform speed test” / “Test internet speed” control directly in the Taskbar’s network menu and Wi‑Fi quick settings — for now the control launches Bing’s web speed‑test widget in your default browser rather than running a native measurement inside the OS. Background Windows 11’s Insider channel has become the primary proving ground for small but practical UX improvements that can ship to...

VeriPark is reported to have been named to Microsoft’s elite Inner Circle for AI Business Solutions for the 2025–2026 cycle, a recognition that — if confirmed — would mark a continuation of the company’s long-running partnership with Microsoft and its steady profile in financial‑services-focused Dynamics 365 and AI deployments; however, automated verification of the specific Malaysian Reserve story was unsuccessful and independent confirmation of VeriPark’s inclusion in the 2025/26 Inner...

Microsoft has begun embedding a persistent, context‑aware Copilot Chat pane directly inside the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote — and is making that conversational AI experience available to qualifying Microsoft 365 subscribers at no additional charge. This move keeps Microsoft’s two‑tier Copilot strategy intact — a broadly available, web‑grounded Copilot Chat for general productivity and a paid, tenant‑aware Microsoft 365 Copilot seat...