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Windows ships with a tidy set of built‑in utilities that make a PC usable out of the box — but if you’re looking for speed, control, and features that actually match real workflows, the defaults often fall short and quietly slow you down. A recent roundup arguing that Windows’ bundled apps can be replaced with faster, freer tools crystallizes this tension and names six practical swaps that deliver measurable gains in daily productivity. Background / Overview Windows 11’s default apps...

Microsoft’s Copilot Studio has added a near‑real‑time security control that routes an agent’s planned actions through external monitors—allowing organizations to approve or block tool calls and actions while an AI agent runs—and the capability is now available in public preview for Power Platform tenants. Background / Overview Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s low‑code environment inside the Power Platform for building, customizing, and deploying AI copilots and autonomous agents that interact...

Microsoft’s latest update quietly pulls a dramatic change into Excel’s typing box: AI-driven formula completion that suggests, explains, and can even preview formulas the moment you type “=”, folding natural-language Copilot capabilities into one of the oldest—and most error-prone—workflows in spreadsheets. This move blends years of incremental autocomplete improvements with generative AI to speed formula creation, reduce syntax friction, and surface analysis that used to require memorizing...

Microsoft Azure customers experienced measurable slowdowns and higher-than-normal latency after multiple undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were cut, forcing cloud traffic onto longer, congested detours and exposing brittle physical chokepoints beneath modern cloud resilience. Background The global internet is built largely on submarine fiber-optic cables that carry the vast majority of intercontinental data traffic. These physical links — laid on the seabed and terminating at a...

In a story that moved swiftly from Reddit threads to high-traffic YouTube videos and mainstream tech headlines, recent reports blamed Microsoft's Windows 11 updates (notably KB5063878 and KB5062660) for a rash of SSD failures. The picture that has emerged after vendor investigations is more nuanced: Phison, the SSD controller maker at the center of the controversy, says many of the failing drives involved engineering preview firmware and early BIOS versions used in media testing rather than...

Microsoft’s Copilot Studio has added a near‑real‑time monitoring and control layer for AI agents, letting enterprises intercept, evaluate and — when necessary — block agent actions as they execute, and giving security teams a new way to enforce policies at runtime without sacrificing agent productivity. Background Copilot Studio is Microsoft’s low‑code, enterprise‑focused builder for AI copilots and autonomous agents, integrated tightly with the Power Platform, Microsoft 365, Azure services...

Infobip’s integration with Microsoft Azure Communication Services (ACS) through the new Messaging Connect program suddenly makes carrier-grade SMS — including two‑way messaging and partner‑managed local numbers — available to Azure customers in dozens more markets, with Infobip claiming coverage expansion into “100+ additional countries” while Microsoft positions Messaging Connect as a path to reach 190+ markets via partner networks. Background SMS remains one of the most resilient and...

Microsoft and Cerence’s announcement at IAA Mobility 2025 that a voice-first, Microsoft 365 Copilot–powered assistant will run inside vehicles marks a decisive push to turn the car into a secure mobile office — but it also raises urgent questions about safety, privacy, enterprise governance, and competitive control of the in‑car user experience. Background / Overview Automakers and suppliers have been racing to redefine the vehicle cabin as a connected workspace and living space. The latest...

Microsoft’s Copilot can now pull text out of a Word document and drop it into PowerPoint as a ready-to-edit slide — a small-seeming change with outsized implications for productivity, licensing, and IT planning, especially for organizations still on Windows 10 and watching Microsoft’s support calendar. Background / Overview Microsoft has continued to fold generative AI into day-to-day Office workflows, and the latest iteration of Copilot in PowerPoint moves beyond conversational assistance...

Microsoft’s own numbers (and independent testing) make the headline simple: Windows 11 version 25H2 delivers no measurable raw performance gain over 24H2 — it’s an enablement package, not a re‑engineered OS — while modern Linux builds continue to show a meaningful edge in CPU‑bound workloads. Background Windows 11 25H2 is arriving as a lightweight enablement package (eKB) built on the same servicing branch as 24H2. That engineering choice means most of the new feature code was already...

Microsoft’s latest Canary-flight experiment stitches small, familiar conveniences into a broader push to make generative AI an everyday part of the Windows shell: right‑click inside File Explorer and you may now see an AI actions submenu that offers visual search and one‑click image edits, Settings gains a Text and image generation privacy surface to show which apps have recently invoked on‑device generative models, and the Notification Center can again display a larger clock that includes...

Microsoft has set a hard cutoff for Windows 10: free mainstream support and monthly security updates stop on October 14, 2025, but a one‑year safety net — the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program — gives eligible Windows 10 users a bridge until October 13, 2026. Background / Overview For a decade Windows 10 has been the backbone of home and business PCs, but Microsoft is shifting its engineering and security efforts to Windows 11. The official lifecycle notice states that after...

Flyoobe’s newest update continues the project’s rapid evolution from a niche requirements-bypass utility into a full-featured Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) toolkit — and the 1.10 line promises a clearer, more polished workflow for disabling AI surfaces, adding community-driven PowerShell extensions, and decluttering Windows 11 during first boot. The release is being positioned as a usability and capability milestone: a bottom-first navigation model, a dedicated OOBE view for AI-related...

Microsoft’s Copilot Studio has moved from built‑in guardrails to active, near‑real‑time intervention: organizations can now route an agent’s planned actions to external monitors that approve or block those actions while the agent is executing, enabling step‑level enforcement that ties existing SIEM/XDR workflows directly into the agent decision loop. Background Copilot Studio sits inside the Power Platform as Microsoft’s low‑code environment for building, customizing, and deploying AI...

Multiple undersea fibre-optic cables in the Red Sea were cut on 6 September 2025, triggering measurable slowdowns and intermittent connectivity across South Asia and the Middle East and forcing major cloud and carrier operators — most visibly Microsoft Azure — to reroute traffic, warn customers of higher latency, and begin contingency and repair operations. Background The global Internet runs on an undersea skeleton of high‑capacity fibre‑optic cables that carry the vast majority of...

Nobara’s newest release lands as a practical, gamer-friendly variation on Fedora that removes the usual post-install friction for players — but it does so by making deliberate trade-offs that every new user should understand before switching. Background Fedora has long been respected for its clean upstream alignment, rapid updates, and close relationship with Red Hat engineering. That pedigree makes it a favorite among developers and power users, but it also means Fedora intentionally omits...

Microsoft’s latest Canary‑channel experiment pushes intelligence deeper into the Windows shell: a new AI actions submenu in File Explorer lets you right‑click images to run Bing Visual Search, blur or remove backgrounds, and erase objects — all without opening a full editor. This context‑aware shortcut set is appearing in Insider previews reported around Build 27938, and it signals Microsoft’s intent to make micro‑edits and visual lookup native file‑management actions rather than tasks that...

Microsoft’s latest Dev‑Channel flight, Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.5790 (KB5065779), brings a focused set of Copilot+ features—most notably Fluid Dictation in Voice Access—along with wider Windows Studio Effects support for additional cameras, new Copilot‑driven File Explorer hover actions, a clutch of stability fixes, and a handful of hardware‑gated rollouts and known issues Insiders should weigh before upgrading. Background / Overview Microsoft released Build 26220.5790 to the...

Microsoft’s latest Insider experiments have restored a small but widely requested convenience: the Notification Center can once again show a larger clock with seconds—and that option is appearing alongside a broader set of AI-focused trials in the Canary channel. Background / Overview Windows 11’s development over the past two years has mixed big, AI-driven features with a steady stream of quality‑of‑life restorations that long-time users asked for after the jump from Windows 10. The...

Microsoft Azure customers experienced measurable performance degradation after multiple undersea fiber‑optic cables in the Red Sea were cut, forcing traffic onto longer, often congested detours and exposing persistent structural vulnerabilities in the global internet backbone. Background / Overview The internet is a physical network as much as it is a logical one. A dense web of submarine fiber‑optic cables laid on the ocean floor carries the overwhelming majority of international data...