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The short version: the recent wave of reports that Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) was “bricking” NVMe SSDs has been reframed by community investigators and vendor labs — the immediate trigger appears to have been pre‑release engineering firmware on a small subset of drives, not the retail Windows update itself. This new understanding narrows the problem from an operating‑system regression affecting millions to a supply‑chain and firmware‑provenance failure that can still...

The Debian Project published the first point release for Debian 13 (codename Trixie) on September 6, 2025 — a conservative, safety-first refresh that bundles security patches and important bug fixes into updated installation images and repository snapshots rather than changing the distribution’s core feature set. Background / Overview Debian’s point releases are designed to consolidate fixes that have accumulated since a stable release, enable smoother new installs, and reduce the volume of...

Microsoft’s August Windows 11 patch is no longer the prime suspect in the recent wave of “vanishing” NVMe drives — mounting evidence points to pre‑release controller firmware and supply‑chain provenance, not the KB5063878/KB5062660 updates themselves, as the root trigger in the cases investigated so far. Background / Overview In mid‑August, social posts and a small number of high‑visibility community tests claimed that the Windows 11 24H2 August cumulative update (commonly tracked as...

Microsoft’s Copilot has stopped being an optional curiosity and is rapidly becoming the default AI companion inside the apps people already use to get work done, and that shift matters for businesses deciding whether to bolt AI onto workflows or let it live inside them. Overview Businesses and professionals aren’t choosing Copilot because it’s the flashiest chatbot on the block; they’re choosing it because Copilot is embedded where work already happens. For organizations that run on...

Microsoft has quietly extended Copilot from the browser into the Windows desktop, letting eligible Microsoft 365 subscribers summon AI help directly from File Explorer and the OneDrive taskbar flyout to summarize documents, ask questions, auto-generate FAQs, and compare multiple files — all without opening Office or a web browser. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Copilot has been rolling through the Microsoft 365 stack for more than a year, appearing first in apps and on OneDrive’s web...

Microsoft has warned customers that parts of Azure may show higher‑than‑normal latency after multiple undersea fiber‑optic cables in the Red Sea were reported cut on 6 September 2025, forcing traffic onto longer detours while carriers and cloud operators reroute and rebalance capacity. Background / Overview The global internet’s east–west backbone depends heavily on a handful of high‑capacity submarine cable corridors; the Red Sea and the approaches to the Suez Canal form one of the most...

Lenovo’s newest laptop concepts fold familiarity into a tiny act of mechanical theater — a 14‑inch ThinkBook that rotates from landscape to portrait and a motorized docking stand that follows your face — but the company’s bravado raises a practical question: are these clever engineering demos useful enough to survive the brutal economics of mainstream PC sales, or will they remain admired curiosities on the IFA stage? Overview Lenovo unveiled two headline-grabbing proofs of concept at...

Borderlands 4’s PC system requirements have landed and they mark a clear shift toward a modern‑PC baseline: expect an 8‑core minimum CPU, 16 GB of RAM as the lowest supported memory, and a 100 GB SSD install, with recommended builds pushing to 32 GB RAM and RTX 3080 / RX 6800 XT‑class GPUs for a comfortable experience. This set of requirements — reported and summarized across developer storefront and support pages and echoed by the press — signals that Gearbox is targeting current‑generation...

Microsoft’s latest preview releases reveal a clear — and continuing — pattern: on identical high-end hardware, Ubuntu 25.10 is holding or extending Linux’s multi-threaded lead while Windows 11 25H2 remains highly competitive in single-threaded and platform-specific workloads, particularly where proprietary drivers or Windows-only APIs are involved. Background The headline stems from a fresh set of side-by-side CPU benchmarks run on the same AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop hardware using clean OS...

Microsoft’s latest Beta-channel Insider preview pushes three changes that matter for day-to-day Windows users: on-device “fluid dictation” for Voice Access, Windows Studio Effects for alternate cameras on Copilot+ PCs, and a small but potentially divisive Ask Copilot option added to File Explorer’s Home hover menu—each arriving in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.5790 (KB5065779). Background Windows 11’s Copilot era has been defined by two parallel strategies: move latency-sensitive AI...

Tiny11’s new release turns the DIY Windows 11 rebuild into an explicit counterpunch against Microsoft’s in‑box AI push, giving enthusiasts and admins the tools to create a stripped, 25H2‑ready Windows 11 ISO that omits Copilot, the new Outlook client, Teams, and a long roster of inbox apps while using LZX/recovery compression to shrink image size. Background / Overview The Tiny11 project — maintained by NTDEV — has long offered a community‑driven route to a leaner Windows 11 by rebuilding an...

Microsoft’s Copilot has evolved from a curious chatbot experiment into a sprawling, multi-surface productivity platform that now sits in Windows, Edge, mobile apps, Microsoft 365 and Azure tooling — and its capabilities span conversational drafting, multimodal image and audio generation, in‑app document assistance, and even limited autonomous task automation. The most important recent shift is that Copilot is no longer a single “Bing Chat” personality: Microsoft now routes queries to an...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud experienced measurable performance degradation after multiple undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were cut, forcing traffic onto longer detours and exposing how physical shipping lanes and seabed cables remain a critical, fragile layer beneath cloud-era resilience. Background / Overview The Red Sea corridor is one of the planet’s most important east–west conduits for internet traffic, carrying a disproportionate share of connections between South and East Asia...

Windows will often eat tens of gigabytes over time: updates, restore points, index databases and caches can quietly bloat a C: drive, and preinstalled “trial” apps make matters worse — a problem that’s acute on 128 GB laptops and devices with soldered storage. The practical fixes range from safe, built‑in cleanup tools to aggressive image‑level strip‑downs and filesystem compression; each step has trade‑offs between space, stability and updateability, so treat this as a tiered toolkit rather...

StatCounter’s August 2025 snapshot produced a deceptively simple headline — Windows 11 slipped below 50% of desktop Windows installations while Windows 10 regained ground — but the data behind that headline, and what it means for users and IT teams as Windows 10 support ends in October, require careful unpacking. The month‑end figures show a mature, messy migration in progress: Windows 11 is widely adopted but not yet ubiquitous; Windows 10 remains entrenched on a large installed base; macOS...

Microsoft’s August 2025 security rollup hardened Windows Installer to close a privilege‑escalation hole, but the change has also begun prompting unexpected User Account Control (UAC) credential requests and breaking app installations for standard (non‑administrator) users across many Windows client and server builds. Background / Overview Microsoft delivered the August 12, 2025 cumulative updates as combined Servicing Stack Updates (SSU) and Latest Cumulative Updates (LCU). For several...

Last month’s Windows 11 patch KB5063878 triggered a flurry of alarm among power users and IT pros after a narrow set of SSDs began disappearing under heavy write conditions — a regression serious enough that some users experienced irrecoverable data loss. This feature walks through a practical, safe workflow to remove KB5063878 when necessary, explains why the problem occurred, and offers measured guidance for recovery, blocking the faulty package, and restoring system stability while...

When a talented concept designer reimagines Windows as a glossy, translucency-first OS, the result is visually striking — but the work of turning a mood board into a production-ready operating system is a far bigger engineering challenge than a nine‑minute video suggests. The AR 4789 “Windows 12.2: The Next Evolution” concept has reignited debate about what a future Windows could look like, borrowing heavily from Apple’s recent Liquid Glass aesthetic while also nodding to Windows’ own design...

Windows 11’s keyboard ergonomics just picked up a quiet but genuinely useful polish: Insider builds now include system-level shortcuts that insert the en dash (–, U+2013) and em dash (—, U+2014) directly from the keyboard, removing the need for Alt-codes, app-specific autoformatting, or the Emoji & Symbols panel. Early reporting and community tests show the shortcuts map to Win + Minus (-) for an en dash and Win + Shift + Minus (-) for an em dash, and the functionality appears in recent Dev...

Microsoft Azure experienced measurable increases in network latency after multiple undersea fibre cuts were detected in the Red Sea, forcing cloud traffic between Asia, Europe and the Middle East onto alternate, longer paths and exposing brittle points in the world’s physical internet backbone. (reuters.com, cnbc.com) Background The Red Sea is one of the planet’s most trafficked subsea communications corridors, carrying a large portion of the fibre-optic links that connect Europe and the...