privacy settings

Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot has arrived in Windows 11’s Game Bar as a beta overlay that promises an AI “personal sidekick” for players — offering voice-first queries, screenshot-aware troubleshooting, achievement tracking and on‑the‑fly recommendations — but its early rollout has exposed thorny...

Zorin OS 18’s public beta and rapid follow‑on release stake a clear claim: make leaving Windows 10 painless, keep existing hardware useful, and give Microsoft 365 users a familiar desktop bridge — all timed to the calendar that made migration a practical problem in the first place. Background /...

Windows 11 looks polished out of the box, but a handful of default settings quietly trade performance and privacy for convenience—here’s a practical, step‑by‑step guide to the essential Windows 11 settings you should change today to make your PC faster, less noisy, and more private. Overview...

Windows still ships with a surprising amount of friction — from hidden recommendations and taskbar clutter to AI features that show up where you least expect them — and a few deliberate, low-risk tweaks can make a fresh install feel calm, fast, and private again. Overview Microsoft has been...

Windows 11’s single, OS‑level Location Services toggle is the privacy switch you should flip today if you want to stop Windows and most apps from constantly reporting your precise coordinates to Microsoft and the wider app ecosystem. Turning it off closes the most direct pipeline for on‑device...

Microsoft has quietly reworked the Xbox app on Windows 11 into a genuine one‑stop hub for PC gaming, and the implications reach well beyond a refreshed launcher: the app now aggregates installed titles from multiple storefronts, lets you launch non‑Microsoft games without opening third‑party...

If you just unboxed a new Windows 11 laptop, there are five settings you should consider turning off right away to tighten privacy, reduce distractions, and reclaim background resources for the tasks that matter most. Background / Overview Windows 11 ships with a range of convenience features...

When you unbox a new Windows 11 laptop the out‑of‑the‑box experience is deliberately full‑featured — but many of the conveniences Microsoft enables by default trade away privacy, clarity, and system headroom. A short, safe checklist of five settings you should disable right after setup can...

Windows 11 ships with a modern interface and convenient cloud features, but out of the box it also shares more about you than many users expect—location, diagnostic telemetry, an advertising ID and synced activity history are all enabled by default and deserve a careful review. A handful of...

Microsoft is quietly restoring a piece of the Windows 10 experience many users missed: a larger, in-your-face clock with seconds in the Notification Center — and it’s arriving alongside a set of AI shortcuts in File Explorer and new transparency controls for generative AI access in Windows 11’s...

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...

Google’s decision to replace the long-serving Google Assistant on Nest and Google Home devices with a Gemini-powered assistant — branded Gemini for Home and launching into early access on October 1, 2025 — is one of the most consequential shifts in the smart‑home assistant market in years...

Set Up and Optimize Voice Typing & Speech Recognition in Windows 10/11 Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 15 minutes Voice typing and speech recognition can dramatically speed up typing, improve accessibility, and let you control Windows hands‑free. This tutorial walks you through...

The small open‑source utility ecosystem that helps people install or upgrade to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware has taken another evolutionary step: a popular requirements‑bypass project has become a fuller Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) toolkit, adding a smarter debloat/removal option and...

Audit and Lock Down App Permissions & Privacy Settings in Windows 10/11 Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 15 minutes Introduction Apps asking for access to your camera, microphone, location, files, and other data can be convenient — but they’re also a privacy and security risk if left...

If your Windows 11 PC stalls or shows a small error window while shutting down, and the culprit in Task Manager is LogTransport2.exe, you’re not alone — that background Adobe component is commonly responsible for shutdown hangs, and the fix is usually to stop Adobe’s telemetry from trying to...

Samsung and Microsoft have agreed to bring Microsoft Copilot — the company’s generative AI assistant — to Samsung’s 2025 TVs and Smart Monitors, folding natural‑language AI into large displays via Samsung’s new Vision AI framework and a Copilot web experience built into the screens. This move...

Windows 10’s clock is counting down to end of support, and with it comes a hard choice for privacy‑minded users: pay to keep an aging platform patched, accept newer versions of Windows with tighter cloud hooks, or make a clean break to something else entirely. The argument gaining traction is...

Flyoobe, the unofficial successor to the Flyby11 patcher, has quietly added a notable new convenience to its Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) toolkit: the ability to set a default browser immediately after installation and even fetch and install a third‑party browser during first run. This addition...

Microsoft’s messaging around the Windows 10 Creators Update has been clearer than some secondary reports suggest: the update (version 1703, build 15063) was scheduled for a phased public rollout beginning April 11, 2017, with manual install options opening a few days earlier — and not on April 4...