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Artista Pirata has quietly become one of the most visible Spanish‑language hubs where users can find “full” copies of commercial Windows and macOS applications, pre‑patched installers, language‑tailored builds and one‑click activators — a distribution model that mixes convenience with significant legal and security hazards for anyone tempted to use it. Background Artista Pirata (and a family of mirror domains operating under the same brand name) publishes categorized download pages —...

Borderlands 4’s PC system requirements are out, and they raise the bar for midrange rigs: Gearbox and 2K list an RTX 2070 or RX 5700 XT as the minimum GPU, an Intel Core i7-9700 or Ryzen 7 2700X CPU, 16 GB of RAM as the baseline, and a 100 GB SSD install, while the recommended spec jumps to an RTX 3080 / RX 6800 XT and 32 GB of RAM — a clear signal that this entry expects modern hardware or smart use of GPU upscaling to get the best experience. (store.steampowered.com...

Lenovo’s budget-friendly V15 family is back in the headlines after a third‑party listing surfaced claiming a specification set that reads more like a custom workstation than an entry-level 15.6‑inch business laptop — a configuration that includes 32GB of RAM, a 1TB PCIe SSD, and an “Intel Quad‑core” CPU bundled with Windows 11 Pro and a WOWPC recovery USB. A closer look at official and retail specifications shows a different picture: the V15 line most commonly ships with low‑power Intel...

Knowing who is logged into a Windows Server at any given moment is an admin’s basic toolkit — it helps you troubleshoot resource contention, track unauthorized access, and clean up idle or orphaned Remote Desktop sessions quickly and safely. Background Windows Server exposes multiple, complementary ways to discover who is logged on: built‑in command‑line tools, Remote Desktop / RDS utilities, Event Log auditing, WMI/CIM queries, and trusted third‑party utilities such as Microsoft...

Microsoft’s Azure platform warned of higher-than-normal network latency for traffic traversing the Middle East after multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea forced rerouting of international traffic beginning at 05:45 UTC on 6 September 2025. (backup.azure.status.microsoft, reuters.com) Background The Red Sea is an essential digital chokepoint: a concentrated corridor where several high-capacity subsea systems cross between Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. On 6 September 2025...

Microsoft’s terse Service Health advisory on September 6, 2025 — warning that “network traffic traversing through the Middle East may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea” — was the first public signal of a disruption that quickly rippled through global cloud traffic and exposed brittle physical chokepoints beneath the modern internet. Background The modern internet is often described in abstract terms — “the cloud,” “edge,” “peering” — but it still depends...

Microsoft’s long-running legal battle with UK reseller ValueLicensing has reopened at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, and this time the dispute centres not just on alleged anti-competitive conduct but on a provocative legal contention from Microsoft: that reselling pre‑owned copies of Office and Windows may be unlawful because copyright in non‑program elements of the software (for example, graphical user interfaces) places those elements outside the Software Directive’s exhaustion rule and...

Tiny11 is the latest reminder that the Windows upgrade debate has moved far beyond marketing slogans: while Microsoft insists many older PCs are unsupported for Windows 11, independent projects like NTDEV’s Tiny11 are actively proving the opposite — and forcing a much more uncomfortable conversation about security, sustainability, and user choice. Background / Overview Microsoft has scheduled the end of free support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. After that date, mainstream security...

Factory-resetting a Windows 11 PC is no longer a mysterious or risky proposition — it’s a built-in recovery path that can fix persistent software problems, prepare a machine for resale, or simply give you a clean start; this guide walks through every practical option (including how to reset without logging in), explains the trade-offs of Keep my files vs Remove everything, and details the preparatory steps and pitfalls you must address before you click Reset. Background Windows 11 exposes a...

Flyoobe’s latest update crystallizes a tension that has been building across the Windows ecosystem: community-driven control versus vendor-enforced defaults, now amplified by the arrival of integrated AI features in Windows 11 and strict hardware gates that leave many functioning PCs on the outside looking in. Background / Overview The Flyoobe project began as a small, pragmatic community utility—originally known as Flyby11—whose first mission was simple: let willing users install Windows 11...

Microsoft has given Windows 10 users a narrow, conditional lifeline: if you want to keep receiving security updates after the platform’s official end-of-support date, there’s a single, time-sensitive action you must complete — enroll the eligible PC in Microsoft’s consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program before October 14, 2025. Background / Overview Microsoft set a firm end-of-support date for Windows 10: October 14, 2025. On that date Microsoft will stop delivering routine feature...

Microsoft’s OpenAI tie-up is large and strategically important, but the argument that Microsoft has become irrecoverably dependent on OpenAI is overstated — and Google and Amazon catching up quickly enough to displace Microsoft’s AI advantage is more complicated than headlines suggest. Background The recent commentary that set off investor chatter argued that Microsoft’s market narrative — powered by its deep partnership with OpenAI and rapid AI monetization through Azure and Microsoft 365...

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 producing higher‑than‑normal latency for customers whose data traversed the affected Middle East corridor. Background / Overview The global internet is a physical network: thousands of kilometers of submarine fiber carry the bulk of intercontinental traffic, and a narrow maritime corridor through the Red Sea and the...

Kiosks are no longer novelty appliances tucked into lobbies — they’re mission-critical touchpoints for retail, healthcare, hospitality, and education, and choosing the right kiosk software in 2025 can be the difference between a seamless self-service experience and a costly operational headache. The industry roundup that follows takes the widely circulated six-vendor shortlist (three Android-focused and three Windows-focused) as a starting point, verifies each product’s capabilities and...

When I first started using the command line on Windows, the Command Prompt felt like a utility drawer: useful for a handful of quick tasks but cramped, inflexible, and increasingly outclassed by modern tooling — which is precisely why switching to Windows Terminal has become a practical, productivity-driven decision for many power users and developers. The move is not just cosmetic; it changes how you work: tabs and split panes for true multitasking, unified profiles for every shell you rely...

On a cool April afternoon in Raleigh, a student stood on the steps of the North Carolina State Capitol holding a Bible in one hand and the weight of a promise in the other — a scene that captures both the hopeful drama and practical purpose behind a nearly century-old experiment in student self-government and bipartisan civic practice. Background The essay published in EdNC chronicles a personal moment that ties into a larger argument: civic life in North Carolina and across the United...

Infobip’s expanded integration with Microsoft Azure Communication Services (ACS) opens native global SMS delivery to enterprises in more than 100 additional countries, promising to simplify carrier management, strengthen compliance workflows, and scale mission-critical messaging across geographies previously out of reach for many Azure customers. Background Infobip is a global cloud communications platform and communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) provider that claims extensive...

Microsoft Azure users and large swathes of internet users across Asia, the Middle East and parts of Europe experienced measurable slowdowns and elevated latency after multiple undersea fibre‑optic cables in the Red Sea were cut on September 6, 2025, forcing cloud and carrier engineers to reroute traffic over longer, often congested paths while repair operations and forensic investigations proceed. Background / Overview The global internet depends on an interwoven physical network of...

Phison has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by pre‑release engineering firmware installed on development or non‑retail units — not by the retail firmware shipping on consumer drives. This admission shifts the narrative from a platform‑wide Windows...

Internet traffic between Asia, the Middle East and Europe slowed to a crawl this week after multiple subsea fibre-optic cables in the Red Sea were severed, triggering widespread service degradation across India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and parts of the Middle East — and forcing major cloud operators, including Microsoft Azure, to reroute traffic and warn customers of increased latency while repairs and contingency measures were deployed. Background: why a few cables in the Red Sea...