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Azure Arc gives Hyper‑V administrators a new, cloud‑centric management plane that complements — not replaces — established tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Windows Admin Center (WAC), Hyper‑V Manager and PowerShell, and this guide walks through practical onboarding, VM‑level integration, and the operational trade‑offs you need to know before you run Arc across your virtualization estate. Background / Overview Azure Arc is a hybrid management platform designed to...

Microsoft has pushed a major real‑time audio milestone into the Azure stack: gpt‑realtime, a speech‑to‑speech (S2S) model optimized for low‑latency, natural‑sounding conversational agents, is now generally available on Azure AI Foundry and accessible through the Real‑time API for developers and enterprises. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry and the Realtime API have been evolving rapidly over the past year to support “speech in, speech out” experiences that avoid the...

Microsoft has quietly pulled the plug on the long-running Microsoft Answers/Support Community at answers.microsoft.com and folded its content and users into the Microsoft Learn Q&A platform, redirecting the old domain to the new Q&A home and pushing AI‑assisted workflows as the primary discovery and response mechanism. Background: from Newsgroups to a single Microsoft Q&A hub Microsoft’s public support ecosystem has long been a patchwork of overlapping forums and communities. Over the last...

Windows 10’s end‑of‑support countdown is no longer abstract: October 14, 2025 is the date Microsoft will stop issuing security updates and technical support for Windows 10, and that reality has reignited a practical question for everyday users and road warriors alike — is a tablet (paired with a keyboard and cloud services) now the better choice than buying or upgrading to a modern Windows laptop? The short answer: for many people a tablet is a compelling, often superior secondary device...

Microsoft’s PowerToys is about to plug one of Windows 11’s most persistent annoyances: a built‑in way to automatically switch between Light and Dark modes on a user-defined schedule — delivered as a PowerToys module rather than via the core Settings app. Background / Overview For years Windows users have lived with a small but niggling gap in personalization: while Windows 11 exposes Light and Dark themes, it has not offered a straightforward, system‑level scheduler to toggle those themes...

Microsoft’s decision to end mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 has forced many CIOs and IT leaders to treat the calendar as a hard deadline: pay for time-limited Extended Security Updates (ESU), migrate to Windows 11, or accept growing operational and security risk — and the headline math behind a potential multi‑billion dollar bill is simultaneously simple and misleading. Background Microsoft’s lifecycle policy for Windows 10 (version 22H2 and related editions) is fixed...

Microsoft’s renewed public‑sector push in South Africa is more than a sponsorship line on an events page — it’s the visible axis of a multi‑year strategy that mixes heavy infrastructure spending, deep skilling partnerships, and product‑level integrations that together aim to reshape how government services are delivered, governed and secured in the country. This piece examines Microsoft South Africa’s announced commitments around GovTech 2025, cross‑checks the claims against available...

Microsoft’s AI unit has shipped two first‑party foundation models — MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview — marking a clear acceleration of in‑house model development even as the company continues to integrate and promote OpenAI’s frontier models such as GPT‑5 across its product stack. The launches are deliberate: one model targets expressive, high‑throughput speech generation while the other is a consumer‑focused instruction following language model intended to anchor select Copilot experiences and...

Microsoft's new in‑grid COPILOT function for Excel promises to eliminate tedious text work inside spreadsheets, yet Microsoft itself explicitly warns that the feature is not suitable for any task that requires accuracy, reproducibility, or regulatory compliance — a tension that will shape adoption plans for analysts, IT teams, and compliance officers. Background Excel has long been the backbone of business analysis, prized for its determinism: formulas compute the same result every time...

Free security updates for many editions of Windows 10 end on October 14, 2025, and a raft of new vendor guidance and vendor-priced Extended Security Updates (ESUs) means companies that can’t—or won’t—move are facing a material, avoidable bill. A back-of-the-envelope model circulated by Nexthink and picked up by multiple outlets puts first‑year ESU exposure for commercial Windows 10 devices at roughly $7.3 billion, based on a combination of Microsoft device counts, market-share estimates and...

Microsoft’s quietly popular PowerToys is about to solve one of Windows 11’s longest-running little annoyances: automatic theme switching. The PowerToys v0.94 release confirmed a planned follow-up (v0.95) that will include a Theme Scheduler capable of switching Windows between Light and Dark modes on a schedule — a feature macOS and mobile platforms have shipped for years and many Windows users have long requested. Background Windows has long offered two primary appearance modes — Light and...

As Windows 10’s official support window narrows, a small-but-growing community of tools and scripts is offering a lifeline for millions of aging PCs — and Flyoobe, the rebranded successor to Flyby11, sits at the center of that movement by combining an installer‑level hardware bypass with a full Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) customizer and debloat toolkit that makes installing Windows 11 on unsupported machines practical for enthusiasts and small IT environments. Background / Overview...

A single, determined engineer has quietly reversed the fate of a generation of Windows Mixed Reality headsets by releasing a native SteamVR driver that restores full headset and motion-controller functionality on Windows 11 builds that Microsoft left unsupported — but the fix comes with important caveats and lasting implications for how PC VR hardware is supported and preserved. Background Microsoft introduced Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) in 2017 as a platform that blended VR and AR...

Samsung’s IFA announcement in Berlin marks a decisive step toward an “open agent” vision for consumer AI: the company is bringing multiple third‑party AI agents — Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Perplexity — onto its displays and broader device family through its new Vision AI Companion, while accelerating Galaxy AI coverage across hundreds of millions of phones and tablets. Background Samsung’s Vision AI Companion is the centerpiece of its IFA 2025 showcase, presented as an...

Microsoft quietly expanded the Bing interface this summer by adding keyword suggestions adjacent to a floating Copilot search box, a small-looking tweak with outsized implications for how users discover, refine, and are nudged toward conversational search—an experiment first surfaced by industry observers and quickly discussed across search and Windows communities. Background Since Microsoft rebranded and rebuilt its AI-assisted search into Copilot Search in Bing, the company has been...

Microsoft has confirmed and mitigated a compatibility regression introduced by the August 12, 2025 security update KB5063878 that caused unexpected User Account Control (UAC) prompts and failed repairs for applications using Windows Installer (MSI), with the Windows Server 2025 release-health page marking the MSI repair problem as mitigated on September 3, 2025. This incident—paired with a separate WSUS deployment failure that surfaced around the same cumulative update—exposed a difficult...

The City of Montréal has quietly turned a classic municipal pain point—finding timely information on services, schedules and rules—into a 24/7 conversational surface by deploying a virtual agent built with Microsoft Copilot Studio that now answers citizen questions across the city’s public website and connects directly to key backend systems. Background Montréal is a dense, bilingual metropolis with complex municipal services that range from waste collection and library hours to tax payments...

Microsoft’s recent push to make Trusted Launch easier to adopt across Azure virtual infrastructure is a practical — and overdue — step toward raising the cloud security baseline for many organizations, but the rollout contains important caveats that IT teams must understand before flipping the switch. The capability to enable Secure Boot, virtual TPM (vTPM), and Boot Integrity Monitoring on existing virtual machines and scale sets without full re-deployments reduces operational friction and...

Redaction automation is quietly becoming one of the most consequential — and immediately practical — AI use cases in government, and Simpson Associates’ RedactXpert is now a textbook example of how targeted AI can deliver measurable operational gains while fitting inside existing Microsoft cloud ecosystems. Background / Overview Public-sector agencies are under simultaneous pressure to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and strengthen data protection. These pressures have thrust AI from...

Microsoft’s October 14, 2025 deadline for Windows 10 support has turned what was a predictable lifecycle milestone into a full‑blown tech and policy story: PC manufacturers HP and Dell warn that roughly half of active machines still run Windows 10 and that the migration to Windows 11 will be slow and uneven—likely stretching well into 2026—while consumer‑ESU options, public petitions, and repair groups race to limit the environmental and security fallout. Background / Overview Microsoft will...