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When a compact, industrial-strength receipt printer like the BIXOLON SRP‑275III refuses to print on a Windows 10 PC, the result is immediate friction at the point of sale — lost orders, annoyed customers, and frantic searches for a manual or the “right” driver. This feature unpacks the SRP‑275III’s specifications and common failure modes, verifies manufacturer claims, and walks through a disciplined, Windows‑friendly troubleshooting path that separates marketing from mechanics. It also...

Microsoft has confirmed a new compatibility problem that emerged after the August 12, 2025 cumulative security updates: a Windows Installer hardening intended to close a privilege‑escalation hole (tracked as CVE‑2025‑50173) is now triggering unexpected User Account Control (UAC) prompts for standard (non‑administrator) users during certain MSI repair and per‑user installation flows. The change, shipped as part of the August 2025 Patch Tuesday rollups (notably the KB5063878 bundle for some...

Microsoft's warning that Azure users could face increased latency after multiple subsea cables were reported "cut" in the Red Sea has thrust a quiet but critical piece of global infrastructure into the headlines: the fibre-optic arteries on the ocean floor that carry the world's internet traffic. The disruption, first reported on 6 September 2025, affected routes that transit the Middle East and prompted cloud operators, telcos, and governments to scramble for mitigation while repair and...

Windows 11 has just hit an unexpected speed bump: after briefly overtaking Windows 10 in global usage during July, official analytics show Windows 11 slipped in August while Windows 10 regained ground, a reversal that underlines how jagged, fragile, and politically charged operating system transitions can be. The wobble matters because Windows 10 reaches its end of support on October 14, 2025, and the choices users and organisations make now — upgrade, pay for Extended Security Updates...

Microsoft Defender SmartScreen in Microsoft Edge acts as a live reputation and content filter that warns users about phishing pages, malicious downloads, and suspicious sites before they can do harm. (support.microsoft.com, learn.microsoft.com) Background Microsoft Defender SmartScreen began as a browser-based filter to block known phishing and malware sites and has evolved into a reputation-driven service integrated across Windows and Microsoft Edge. It combines dynamic blocklists...

Microsoft Azure customers were warned of higher‑than‑normal latency after multiple undersea fiber‑optic cables in the Red Sea were reported cut, forcing international traffic onto longer, congested detours and exposing the physical fragility beneath cloud‑era resilience. The incident — first detected on 6 September 2025 — prompted an Azure Service Health advisory, confirmed measurable slowdowns across parts of the Middle East, South Asia and Europe, and triggered an industry‑wide scramble to...

Microsoft Edge’s September update lands as a significant security-and-productivity release: Edge 140 (stable build 140.0.3485.54) ships a local AI-powered Scareware blocker, an HTTPS‑first upgrade path, automatic persistence for Tab Groups, expanded Copilot/GPT-5 integrations and media-creation tools, plus a patch for a Microsoft‑specific security bypass tracked as CVE‑2025‑53791. These additions tighten Edge’s safety posture while extending its AI-assisted features, but they also introduce...

Microsoft confirmed that parts of its Azure cloud footprint experienced noticeable disruptions after multiple undersea fibre‑optic cables in the Red Sea were cut, forcing engineers to reroute traffic and apply emergency traffic‑engineering measures while carrier repairs were planned. Background: why a Red Sea cable cut becomes an Azure story The modern internet — and the public cloud that rides on top of it — depends on physical infrastructure: submarine fibre‑optic cables, cable landing...

Multiple undersea fibre‑optic cables in the Red Sea were severed in early September, producing widespread slowdowns for Internet users and measurable latency for cloud customers — a disruption that exposed how the physical backbone of the Internet can become a single point of failure for modern cloud‑dependent services. Background The global Internet runs on three physical layers: terrestrial fiber, satellite links, and the vast network of submarine (subsea) fibre‑optic cables that link...

If a Seagate external hard drive suddenly fails to appear in File Explorer or Disk Management, the immediate reaction is panic—especially when the drive holds irreplaceable photos, documents or a backup. The good news: this is a common, solvable class of problems. The bad news: rushing into repairs without first rescuing data or understanding the failure mode can make recovery harder or impossible. This feature unpacks the real root causes behind “Seagate external hard drive not showing up”...

A cluster of community test benches and vendor statements now point to a supply‑chain firmware issue — not a Windows code regression — as the most plausible explanation for the mid‑August reports of NVMe drives “vanishing” during large sequential writes after the Windows 11 August cumulative update (commonly tracked as KB5063878). Independent reproductions showed a repeatable failure window under sustained writes of roughly 50 GB on drives already substantially used, Phison’s lab program ran...

Microsoft Azure customers experienced measurable performance degradation after multiple undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were reported cut on September 6, 2025, forcing transit traffic onto longer detours and producing higher-than-normal latency for flows that traverse the Middle East corridor. Background The global internet’s long-haul backbone rests on a relatively small number of high-capacity submarine cable systems. A narrow maritime corridor through the Red Sea and the...

Microsoft quietly edited its Release Preview announcement for Windows 11, version 25H2 to note that the official ISO installation media are “delayed and coming soon,” even as the release itself is rolling to Release Preview Insiders as a lightweight enablement package that flips features already staged on 24H2 devices. Background / Overview Microsoft has placed Windows 11, version 25H2 into the Windows Insider Release Preview channel as a near‑final build (reported as Build 26200.5074), and...

Samsung used IFA in Berlin to make the living room more than a screen — it announced Vision AI Companion, a unified, multimodal AI layer for its 2024–2025 TVs and smart monitors that folds advanced on‑device vision and audio features together with cloud‑backed generative agents such as Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, promising to reduce the reflexive habit of “grab your phone to look that up” by letting viewers ask the TV directly and receive large, glanceable visual answers on screen...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud experienced measurable slowdowns after multiple undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were cut on 6 September 2025, forcing traffic onto longer, congested detours and prompting Microsoft to reroute and rebalance traffic while carriers and cable operators plan maritime repairs. Background The internet’s global backbone is largely physical: hundreds of thousands of kilometers of submarine fiber-optic cable carry the bulk of intercontinental traffic. A narrow...

Microsoft issued an urgent alert on Saturday after multiple undersea fibre-optic cables in the Red Sea were discovered cut, triggering increased latency for Azure customers and underscoring how fragile the physical backbone of the global internet remains. Overview The disruption — first detected in the early hours of September 6, 2025 (UTC) — affected several major subsea systems in the Red Sea corridor, with operators and internet-monitoring groups reporting damage near Jeddah, Saudi...

Microsoft’s Azure customers experienced measurable performance degradation after several undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were cut, forcing traffic onto longer, congested detours and prompting an urgent rerouting and capacity‑rebalancing operation by Microsoft and regional carriers. Background / Overview The global internet and major cloud providers rely on a relatively small number of high‑capacity submarine (subsea) fiber‑optic cables to carry the bulk of intercontinental data. A...

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ServiceNow’s latest beat-and-raise quarter has refocused the market debate: is the stock priced for perfection or is the company quietly building an AI-first moat that justifies its premium? Recent criticisms — high price-to-sales multiples, competitive pressure from hyperscalers and CRM titans, and a noisy regulatory backdrop — are real and deserve scrutiny. Yet the company’s June 2025 results, product launches, and expanding ecosystem show a different reality: ServiceNow is executing on an...

OpenAI's announcement that it will build an AI-powered jobs platform and a linked certification program marks a decisive expansion from conversational agents into workforce services — an initiative that could directly challenge Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, reshape hiring economics, and accelerate the shift to skills-first hiring driven by AI proficiency. Background / Overview OpenAI says it will launch the OpenAI Jobs Platform, a matching service that uses large language models to connect...