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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...

Valve’s SteamVR beta has quietly added a major usability safety net: SteamVR Beta 2.13.1 will automatically prefer and install the community-built Oasis driver when it detects a Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headset running on Windows 11 versions that no longer support Microsoft’s WMR runtime, restoring SteamVR functionality for many orphaned headsets. Background / Overview Windows Mixed Reality debuted in 2017 as Microsoft’s runtime and Portal app for a family of OEM PC VR headsets from Acer...

Microsoft Word for Windows has quietly shifted a fundamental assumption of desktop productivity: new documents now default to being created and saved in the cloud with AutoSave enabled from the first keystroke, unless users explicitly change the setting. Background For decades, Microsoft Word followed a simple, local-first model: open a blank document, type, and then press Save (or rely on AutoRecover) to persist the file to disk. That model left a single fragile moment—before the first...

USA TODAY's decision to run every Week 1 matchup through Microsoft Copilot produced a tidy, headline-friendly slate of predictions — and a revealing window into how modern large language models reason about sports: they reward established quarterbacks, prize defensive strength and coaching pedigree, and stumble when roster news or late injuries fall outside their knowledge window. Background What USA TODAY did and why it matters USA TODAY Sports fed Microsoft’s Copilot a simple, repeatable...

ESET Research revealed that a previously undocumented threat actor, which the company calls GhostRedirector, compromised at least 65 Internet‑facing Windows IIS hosts and deployed two custom native components — a C++ backdoor named Rungan and a malicious IIS module called Gamshen — to run a hybrid campaign that mixes long‑term server persistence with stealthy search‑engine manipulation aimed at boosting third‑party gambling sites. Background / Overview ESET’s telemetry shows activity...

Microsoft’s recent push to harden Azure Linux with a new “OS Guard” capability marks a notable shift in how cloud providers are thinking about host-level protections for container workloads, combining run‑time immutability, code integrity checks, and mandatory access control into an opinionated, hardened container host. This initiative—announced in detail by Microsoft and already visible as an experimental image and Image Customizer options—wraps dm‑verity, interpreter/process integrity...

If you’re staring at a Windows 10 machine that won’t upgrade to Windows 11 — and facing Microsoft’s October 14, 2025 end‑of‑support deadline — the old reasons for avoiding Linux are collapsing faster than ever. What was once true only in the server room or among hobbyist tinkerers is now an everyday‑user reality: modern Linux desktops are polished, gaming compatibility is dramatically better, and sensible migration paths exist that do not require buying new hardware. The ZDNet piece that...

More than half of the world’s personal computers remain on Windows 10 with just weeks to go before Microsoft’s scheduled end-of-support date, according to a dataset Kaspersky shared via a Technology For You write-up — a situation that tightens the window for safe, budgeted migrations and forces IT teams and home users to make concrete choices now. The headline figure — 53% of devices still running Windows 10, with only 33% on Windows 11 and 8.5% lingering on Windows 7 — reflects Kaspersky’s...

Microsoft’s Windows 11 is quietly testing a new clipboard pathway that can push whatever you copy on a PC straight into a linked Android phone’s keyboard — and early reports show it will make pasting laptop text onto Galaxy phones (and other Android devices) noticeably easier, faster, and keyboard‑agnostic. Background / Overview For several years Microsoft has expanded the Windows clipboard from a single buffer into a cross‑device productivity surface. Features such as Clipboard History (Win...