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Samsung’s new IFA lineup lands as a careful, incremental push to make flagship features more attainable: the Galaxy S25 FE tightens the S-series value proposition, the Galaxy Tab S11 family presses thinner and lighter into tablet territory, and the Galaxy Buds3 FE brings a Buds3‑style audio experience down to FE price points — all with One UI 8 and a heavier emphasis on Galaxy AI. This early hands‑on reveals sensible engineering choices, a few surprising trade‑offs, and clear signals about...

Microsoft revealed a compact but meaningful set of Cost Management updates for July and August 2025 that aim to reduce friction for partners, trim logging costs, simplify multi-cloud migrations, and strengthen the programmatic access story for Enterprise Agreement (EA) indirect partners—changes that matter for FinOps teams, MSPs, and IT leaders trying to keep Azure spending predictable and under control. Background / Overview Azure cost control continues to evolve from simple billing...

Microsoft’s August security hardening that patched a Windows Installer flaw has closed a real attack vector — but it also introduced a compatibility headache that is prompting UAC credential prompts and outright failures in environments that rely on per‑user MSI repair and advertising flows. The result is that many standard (non‑admin) users now see unexpected User Account Control (UAC) dialogs or experience installer errors such as MSI Error 1730 when launching otherwise correctly installed...

Mozilla’s decision to keep Firefox 115 ESR alive for older machines is the latest twist in a multi-stage, pragmatic approach to supporting users who remain on end-of-life operating systems — the Extended Support Release for Firefox 115 will now be maintained for Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 and macOS 10.12–10.14 through March 2026, with Mozilla promising a re-evaluation in early 2026. (ghacks.net, wiki.mozilla.org) Background When Mozilla shipped Firefox 115 in July 2023 it also designated that...

Microsoft’s PowerToys is about to solve one of Windows 11’s longest-running little annoyances: a Theme Scheduler that can automatically flip between Light and Dark modes on a timetable, and the feature is being shipped as a new PowerToys module in the update cycle following the v0.94 release. This change was explicitly teased by the PowerToys team in the v0.94 announcement and has been picked up by multiple outlets reporting that the scheduler is expected to arrive as part of the v0.95...

Microsoft is quietly testing a Windows 11 feature that pushes whatever you copy on a PC directly into a linked Android phone’s keyboard — making paste-ready text appear almost instantly in Gboard, Samsung Keyboard and other Android IMEs. Background Microsoft has been expanding clipboard capabilities in Windows for several releases: clipboard history (Win + V), cloud-backed sync tied to a Microsoft account, and an earlier Android pathway driven by Microsoft SwiftKey’s Cloud Clipboard. The new...

Satya Nadella’s five-line AI playbook — the short, repeatable Copilot prompts he says power his day — is less a CEO flex and more a practical blueprint for how enterprise copilots can rewire leadership, compress decision cycles and shift where human judgment is applied. Background In late August 2025 Microsoft publicly positioned a next-generation Copilot as a “new layer of intelligence” across Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and Windows, and shortly afterward Satya Nadella demonstrated five...

Satya Nadella’s short public playbook — five repeatable prompts he says he uses inside Microsoft 365 Copilot — is more than a CEO productivity trick: it’s a clear demonstration of how next‑generation copilots can become an executive’s persistent, context‑aware chief‑of‑staff. Background Microsoft’s rollout of GPT‑5 into the Copilot family in August 2025 marks a major platform shift: rather than a single conversational model, Copilot now routes requests across a family of GPT‑5 variants and a...

Samsung’s Vision AI Companion converts the television from a passive entertainment appliance into an active, conversational hub that can identify what’s on screen, translate dialogue in real time, tune picture and sound, and surface cloud‑backed generative answers and third‑party agents — all from a single, remote‑invoked interface. Overview Samsung used its IFA 2025 stage to unveil Vision AI Companion, a consolidated AI experience that folds the company’s on‑device perceptual features and...

Microsoft has started letting organizations turn on Trusted Launch for many existing Azure virtual machines and scale sets without rebuilding images or redeploying workloads — a move that lowers the operational bar for platform-rooted boot security while introducing a set of important prerequisites, compatibility checks, and rollout processes IT teams must follow. Background Trusted Launch is Azure’s combine‑and‑harden approach to protecting the VM boot chain: Secure Boot, a virtual Trusted...

WAVLINK’s entry-level 10GBase‑T PCIe card — sold under model WL‑NWP004 and branded across marketplaces as a “WAVLINK 10G Base‑T PCIe Network Card” using an AQC113 controller — promises a low‑cost gateway to 10Gbps Ethernet for desktop builders, but a closer look at the hardware, drivers and the wider ecosystem shows important caveats that buyers must understand before installing one in a Windows 11, Windows 10 or Linux PC. (amazon.in, wavlink.com) Background / Overview WAVLINK and several...

The FileCoAuth.exe application error — the kind of pop‑up that interrupts work on a shared document or breaks OneDrive/Office co‑authoring — is often resolvable with a short set of practical repairs, but it can also be a symptom of deeper system or security problems that deserve careful diagnosis. This feature dissects the common causes, validates the fixes Windows Report recommends, and adds a rigorous troubleshooting roadmap and safety guidance so you can fix filecoauth.exe errors quickly...

Microsoft has acknowledged a compatibility regression introduced by the August 12, 2025 cumulative Windows updates that can cause unexpected User Account Control (UAC) elevation prompts and MSI Error 1730 failures for non‑administrator users when applications trigger Windows Installer (MSI) repair or per‑user configuration flows. Microsoft links the behavior to a security hardening that enforces UAC elevation for certain MSI repair operations (a mitigation for CVE‑2025‑50173), and it has...

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...