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Microsoft has pushed the September 2025 cumulative for Windows 11 version 23H2 — KB5065431 (OS build 22631.5909) — and the update is available both through Windows Update and as an offline .msu installer from the Microsoft Update Catalog. This release is a targeted quality-and-security rollup rather than a feature pack: it addresses recent regressions that affected streaming (NDI), tightens SMB handling, and restores expected behavior for Installer/UAC workflows introduced by the August...

Microsoft’s productivity stack is entering a new, more plural era: after years of deep integration with OpenAI’s models, Microsoft is reported to be adding Anthropic’s Claude — specifically the Sonnet model family — into Office 365’s Copilot workflows, creating a multi‑model orchestration that routes tasks to the model best suited for each job. Background / Overview For most of the past three years Microsoft and OpenAI were effectively inseparable in the public mind: Microsoft provided the...

More than a third of New Zealand’s retail investors now report using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to inform investment decisions — and a substantial majority of those users say they are satisfied with the results — a shift that is reshaping how ordinary investors research, validate and execute portfolio ideas while exposing fresh governance and market‑integrity risks. Background The findings come from Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand’s (CA ANZ)...

Dave Plummer’s confession that his port of 3D Pinball for Windows — the Space Cadet table so many of us grew up with — once drew frames “as fast as it could” and reportedly hit roughly 5,000 FPS on newer hardware has resurfaced a powerful, funny and instructive moment in Windows engineering history. The anecdote reveals how a tiny design choice in an era of constrained hardware turned into a conspicuous CPU-hogging oddity as processors and system architectures evolved, and how a pragmatic...

The countdown to October 14, 2025 has turned what once felt like a routine product lifecycle event into a corporate boardroom dilemma: continue to run a mature, widely deployed operating system with mounting security and compliance risks, or expend capital and operational bandwidth to migrate fleets to Windows 11 (or alternative platforms) before Microsoft stops shipping routine security updates. Microsoft’s official notice sets the deadline in stone and lays out ESU and migration options...

For millions of Windows users the familiar, maddening moment when music or game sound collapses into muffled, mono telephone audio the instant a Bluetooth headset’s microphone is used may finally be ending — Microsoft has integrated Bluetooth LE Audio support into Windows 11 and introduced a super‑wideband stereo routing mode so compatible headsets can deliver stereo media and high‑quality microphone audio at the same time. Background / Overview For nearly two decades PC Bluetooth audio has...

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s three‑month pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot delivered a familiar but important paradox: users reported real and concentrated time savings—especially on written work and meeting summaries—but the evaluation could not find robust evidence that those measured time savings translated into improved departmental productivity during the trial period. Background / Overview The pilot ran from October to December 2024 and provided around 1,000 M365 Copilot...

Microsoft’s September 2025 Patch Tuesday delivers a heavy, operationally important security payload: this cycle addresses roughly 80 CVEs across Windows, Office, Azure, Hyper‑V and related components, including several critical remote‑code‑execution (RCE) and elevation‑of‑privilege (EoP) flaws that should move immediately to the top of enterprise patch lists. The release also comes with two calendar items that change risk calculations for IT teams: Windows 10 reaches end of support in...

Five years after Microsoft shipped the Surface Duo, the company’s boldest pocketable experiment—a dual-screen Android handset that briefly promised to reshape mobile productivity—stands as a study in ambition undone by rushed execution, poor communication, and mismatched expectations. Background The Surface Duo arrived in a crowded moment for smartphone form factors: folding glass panels were just starting to enter the mainstream, and makers were wrestling with whether a single, foldable...

Microsoft’s latest Insider activity shows a subtle but telling change: the long‑standing green progress indicator in the File Explorer copy/move dialog has been replaced with a blue variant when the system is in Dark Mode, and several legacy file‑operation dialogs are now honoring the OS dark theme in preview builds. This is a small visual tweak on the surface, but it signals an important shift in Microsoft’s ongoing effort to finish a decade‑long dark‑mode cleanup across Windows 11’s legacy...

Point B’s announcement that it has been named a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure) and awarded the Analytics on Microsoft Azure specialization signals a deliberate deepening of the firm’s Azure analytics practice—and it arrives at a moment when Microsoft’s partner credentials carry more operational weight than ever. Background Point B, the Seattle‑based business and technology firm founded in 1995, issued a press release stating the company has been recognized by Microsoft for...

Google has moved to eliminate a key friction point for organisations running workloads across multiple cloud providers in Europe and the UK, announcing that its Data Transfer Essentials service will be available at no cost for customers processing workloads “in parallel” across two or more clouds — a step that goes beyond the EU Data Act’s minimum “at cost” requirement and arrives just as the new rules take effect. Background What changed and why it matters The European Union’s new Data Act...

Flyoobe’s latest preview shifts the debate about Windows 11 on legacy hardware from a grisly game of installer hacks to a full-featured, user‑centric installer and Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) customizer — and it arrives with an explicit promise: install Windows 11 on devices Microsoft considers “incompatible,” and let you opt out of the AI surfaces like Copilot during first boot. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Windows 11 hardware requirements—TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, supported CPU families...

Abdi’s “Brilliant Windows 12” concept doesn’t just re‑dress Windows in a shinier skin — it surfaces a coherent, user‑first playbook for how Microsoft could fix the things people actually complain about in Windows 11, and the timing could not be more consequential as Windows 10 support winds down and upgrade choices proliferate. Background / Overview Microsoft has set a firm end‑of‑support date for Windows 10: as of October 14, 2025, Windows 10 will no longer receive mainstream security and...

Microsoft’s SSMS tooling quietly stepped into its next chapter this week with the public appearance of SSMS 22 Preview 1 — a preview build that brings a modernized settings experience, refreshed theming, results-grid zooming, and deeper alignment with SQL Server 2025 and Microsoft Fabric. Early adopters will be able to run the preview side‑by‑side with existing SSMS installs, while Microsoft continues to gate certain integrations (notably SSIS and some Copilot experiences) for later...

Microsoft’s Office productivity stack is entering a deliberate, workload‑focused transformation: Redmond will begin routing select Copilot and Office 365 features to Anthropic’s Claude models — notably the Sonnet 4 family — alongside continued use of OpenAI and Microsoft’s own models, a pragmatic shift toward multi‑vendor, task‑optimized AI that prioritizes the best model for each job. Background / Overview Microsoft’s integration of generative AI into the Microsoft 365 suite since 2023...

Microsoft has quietly rewired the rules of the workplace inside one of the world’s largest technology companies: in a coordinated set of moves, Microsoft has tightened moderation of internal communications, hardened campus access after on‑site protests, and announced a phased return‑to‑office baseline that requires many employees who live near an office to be on site at least three days each week. Background For much of the pandemic and its aftermath, Microsoft was the public face of hybrid...

Microsoft's September cumulative for Windows 11 has landed and, rather than being a quiet maintenance release, it mixes visible UI polish, a handful of useful quality fixes and a fresh batch of staged, hardware-gated AI features — with one very practical sting in the tail: the cumulative installers are unusually large because Microsoft is shipping on-device Copilot model binaries inside the package. Background Microsoft issued the September 2025 Patch Tuesday cumulative for Windows 11 as...

Microsoft’s choice to omit the x86 HLT (halt) instruction from Windows 95’s shipped idle path was not a bug or oversight — it was a deliberate, conservative engineering decision taken to avoid a catastrophic failure mode that, in lab and field tests, could leave some laptops effectively bricked. Veteran Windows engineer Raymond Chen has recounted that early Windows 95 builds exercised HLT successfully, but a wide-enough range of OEM hardware exhibited unrecoverable behavior when the CPU...

Unicode 17.0 is now final: the standard published its stable code-point set on 9 September 2025, and with it Emoji 17.0 has been formally recommended for vendor implementation. The release formalizes thousands of new Unicode characters and a sizeable emoji update that vendors will begin turning into platform artwork and keyboard entries over the coming months. The headline technical facts are simple but important: Unicode 17.0 adds roughly 4,803 new characters to the Standard (including four...