Microsoft is quietly testing a small but notable convenience feature in Windows 11: a one‑click internet speed test shortcut embedded directly in the network flyout and taskbar context menu — a shortcut that, for now, simply launches Bing’s online speed‑test widget rather than running a native...
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...
Winaero Tweaker can turn Windows 11 from a one-size-fits-most OS into a personalized desktop with one-click rollbacks of Microsoft’s design choices — and the six changes described in the XDA piece are a solid starter pack for reclaiming control.
Background
Winaero Tweaker is a well-established...
ads suppression
background apps
context menu
customization tools
desktop customization
desktop stickers
driver updates
enterprise it
group policy
os personalization
power users
privacy
registry tweaks
security
system tweaks
telemetry
ui customization
winaero tweaker
windows 11
Windows 11’s ongoing preview updates are delivering modest but meaningful changes this month: Microsoft has quietly applied reliability fixes to the taskbar’s auto‑hide behavior and is experimenting with surfacing Copilot suggestions inside the Start menu’s Recommended area. These two items —...
ai in os
auto-hide
copilot
enterprise it
group policy
insider preview
intune
launch rollout
microsoft 365 copilot
monetization
preview builds
recommended
start menu
taskbar
telemetry
ui polish
user experience
windows 11
Windows 11’s latest Insider preview flight doubles down on Copilot: a new, inline prompt box appears inside the Click to Do context menu, Start shows example Copilot prompts, and Microsoft continues to weave on‑device AI into everyday workflows — all while shipping accessibility fixes, Emoji...
accessibility
click to do
copilot
copilot hardware
copilot-plus
emoji 16.0
enterprise it
group policy
hibernation fix
insider preview
insider-preview
on-device ai
phi-silica
start menu
telemetry
ux polish
windows 11
windows-11
Microsoft’s latest Microsoft Store update for Windows Insiders quietly widens the gateway between the Store, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and publishers’ app ecosystems—adding Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents to the Store’s AI Hub and making it easier to launch and manage apps that are “provided and...
ai hub
app launch
app updates
copilot agents
data privacy
enterprise it
governance
insider preview
microsoft 365 copilot
microsoft store
publisher apps
publisher onboarding
telemetry
win32
windows 11
windows store
Kaspersky’s telemetry snapshot lands like a warning siren: in their sampled dataset just weeks before Microsoft’s cut-off, roughly 53% of monitored devices were still running Windows 10, only 33% had migrated to Windows 11, and a measurable tail — about 8.5% — remained on Windows 7, while...
cloud pc
cybersecurity risk
data backup
end of life
end of support 2025
endpoint management
enterprise it
esu
hardware lifecycle
it governance
kaspersky
os migration
patch management
security updates
telemetry
windows 10
windows 11
windows 365
windows compatibility
windows readiness
Microsoft’s latest packaging of its agent-building tools — now split into Copilot Studio Lite and the Copilot Studio Full Experience — is less a rename and more a strategic reframe: the company is clarifying who these tools are for, where they run, and how enterprises should govern them. The...
Microsoft confirmed a regional outage that left Outlook and Exchange Online users in North America struggling with login failures, server-connection errors and delayed mail delivery, then rolled back changes and applied optimizations to restore service — while choosing not to publish full...
admin center
authentication failures
cloud outage
cpu utilization
exchange online
incident
incident response
login issues
mail delivery delays
message trace
microsoft 365
north america
optimization
outage
outlook
outlook outage
restoration
rollback
service health
telemetry
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...
activity history
ad tracking
advertising id
app permissions
bitlocker
camera access
cross-device
data privacy
find my device
group policy
location
mdm
microphone access
privacy audit
privacy settings
telemetry
tpm
windows 11
windows security
Microsoft's cloud-scale DDoS service is no longer an optional add-on for large enterprises — it's a foundational element of modern application resilience, and the recent RedmondMag Q&A with Azure MVP Aidan Finn underscores why. The conversation distills how Azure DDoS Protection uses per‑address...
PC “optimizer” apps promise a magic fix: one click to clean junk files, repair the registry, free RAM and make Windows run like new — but in practice some of the most popular tools have done the opposite, introducing privacy risks, background bloat, and even security incidents that worsened the...
Microsoft has opened public preview for Azure Service Groups, a tenant-level abstraction that lets organizations create flexible, cross‑subscription groupings of resources for visibility, observability, and lightweight management without changing RBAC or policy inheritance across the resource...
Microsoft's fix for the Windows 10 October 2018 update fiasco was less a single patch than a two‑part response: an immediate halt and guidance to affected users, and direct recovery assistance via Microsoft support technicians who were equipped with specialized recovery tools to attempt to...
Microsoft today shipped a small but targeted cumulative update to Windows Insiders in the Release Preview Channel: Windows 11 Build 22631.5982 (KB5065790) for devices running Windows 11, version 23H2 (Build 22631). The release is a focused quality update that addresses several practical...
Microsoft’s September 2025 Patch Tuesday delivers a heavy, operationally important security payload: this cycle addresses roughly 80 CVEs across Windows, Office, Azure, Hyper‑V and related components, including several critical remote‑code‑execution (RCE) and elevation‑of‑privilege (EoP) flaws...
Microsoft’s long‑running UI mismatch — the glaring white or legacy‑colored copy/move progress window that interrupted Dark Mode sessions for years — is finally being updated in Insider builds, and enthusiasts have noticed a small but symbolic tweak: the familiar green progress bar is being...
Dave Plummer’s off‑hand confession that his Windows NT port of the beloved 3D Pinball: Space Cadet rendered “as fast as it could” and eventually spiked into the thousands of frames per second is a compact engineering parable: a tiny timing assumption left unchecked, harmless on 1990s hardware...
3d pinball
busy loop
cross architecture
dave plummer
fixed timestep
frame rate
framerate cap
legacy code
performance
power management
pragmatic triage
raymond chen
space cadet
telemetry
windows nt
Microsoft’s decision to fold Anthropic’s models into Office 365 represents a deliberate, high-stakes recalibration of its AI supply chain — one that pares dependence on a single vendor, broadens technical options inside Copilot features, and reshapes enterprise risk calculations for productivity...
Phison has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by...