Windows Tips: Page 2

More than nine months after Microsoft ended standard support for Windows 10, millions of PCs continue to run the aging operating system. New asset data suggests those holdouts may be carrying considerably more known security exposure than devices running Windows 11.

A major Xbox network outage prevented some players from signing in, viewing their libraries, making purchases, and launching games for much of July 27, 2026. Microsoft restored the affected services at approximately 2:30 p.m. PDT that day.

Microsoft is gradually updating some of Windows 11's oldest interface elements with replacements built using WinUI 3, its current native user-interface framework. The latest preview-build discovery suggests that the familiar File Properties window may be next, although the redesign remains hidden and cannot be enabled through normal Windows settings.

Windows maintains a persistent device identifier on many installations that survives OS updates, cuts through VPN obfuscation, and allows Microsoft to reconnect the same machine across different services, sessions, and IP addresses, according to court filings and PCMag's reporting. Most users have never heard of it. The FBI used it to help build a cybercrime case against an alleged Scattered Spider member, and VPN provider Windscribe's attempt to remove it this week showed just how deeply the...

This guide is for local administrators and technically capable users on unmanaged or lightly managed Windows 11 Pro systems whose executable, batch, or PowerShell script files have stopped running after installation or a feature update. Corporate devices enrolled in Intune or joined to a domain with Group Policy are a different situation those paths are called out explicitly below.

id Software layoffs landed today on the same day the studio shipped a major Doom expansion. Reports emerged within hours that roughly half the staff had been cut, making the release date one of the more jarring juxtapositions the gaming industry has produced in some time. A studio publicly delivering product was simultaneously, and quietly, being reduced by half.

Microsoft has pushed a Windows 11 Start menu redesign to Insider testers, adding section-level visibility controls, explicit sizing options, a consolidated settings page, and taskbar repositioning. The updates are live only in the Experimental Channel, tied to Insider Preview Build 26300.8553, with no stable release date announced.

A new open-source Windows app called YTubic launched today with a genuinely different technical approach to a problem Google has ignored for years: there is no official YouTube Music desktop client for Windows. Developer NUber-dev built the free, GPL-3.0-licensed app to bypass the sluggish webview wrappers that define most third-party alternatives, communicating directly with YouTube's internal API instead of loading the full website inside a desktop shell. Whether that architectural bet pays...

The Microsoft Surface Laptop for Business 8th Edition is built for enterprise IT departments, government procurement teams, and regulated-industry organizations. That context matters before any price discussion, because the $1,949.99 starting point on the 13.8-inch model makes no sense without it. Windows Central confirmed the $500 jump over last year's 7th Edition, with privacy-screen configurations beginning at $2,549.99. The reviewed unit ran $3,299.

Nature has published a peer-reviewed challenge to the evidence behind Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum claims, putting more than a year of scientific skepticism into the formal record.

Microsoft has extended its Windows 10 Extended Security Updates program for personal devices through October 12, 2027, pushing the deadline one year past the program's original October 2026 end date. The change affects home PCs only. Business devices managed through Active Directory, Microsoft Entra, or a mobile device management system are excluded and fall under a separate commercial track. For the millions of personal computers still running Windows 10, the Windows 10 extended security...

Microsoft announced a broad Copilot in Excel update on June 25, adding finance-focused skills, federated data connectors, and workbook change-tracking features for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers. The release targets FP&A analysts, corporate finance teams, and investment professionals who use Excel for forecasting, reporting, valuation, and close-related work.

The Xbox Series X launched at $499 in 2020. It now costs $649.99. Five years into a console generation, that's not a special edition or a new hardware revision it's the same console, $150 more expensive than launch day, per The Verge. Most consumer electronics get cheaper as they age. The Xbox Series price increase has run the opposite direction, and it's happened twice in under six months.

Windows 10 end of support security became a live problem on October 14, 2025, when Microsoft stopped delivering security patches, quality updates, and technical support to standard Windows 10 users. Machines that haven't migrated since then receive no fixes for newly discovered vulnerabilities, and that exposure compounds with every month that passes.

Microsoft has added cheaper Microsoft Surface devices with 8GB RAM to its lineup: a 12-inch Surface Pro at $849 and a 13-inch Surface Laptop at $949. Both keep the same Snapdragon X Plus chip and 256GB of storage as their pricier 16GB counterparts. The only change is the RAM, and that single change disqualifies them from Microsoft's Copilot+ PC category entirely, The Verge reported.

Microsoft has shipped Outlook for Mac version 16.110, bringing a full Liquid Glass visual overhaul and native PST file import to the app. Both changes are live now through the Mac App Store. This Microsoft Outlook for Mac update marks two significant shifts at once: the app finally looks like it belongs on macOS, and it can now directly import email archives that previously required workarounds to access on Mac.

Microsoft's release health page for Windows 11 version 26H1 currently lists no active known issues and no recently resolved ones at the time of this writing. Understanding the difference matters if you manage a Windows fleet, evaluate hardware procurement, or are simply trying to figure out which release health pages are worth monitoring right now.

This guide walks through how to run a ChatGPT PC health check using only the system telemetry Windows already exposes to IT support. No personal files, documents, or passwords involved. Two paths, depending on how deep you need to go.

Microsoft Microsoft lists Build 5.2622.0 of Outlook for Android and iOS under its June 11, 2026, Outlook Mobile release notes, and the changelog for both platforms is limited to one line: "Various fixes to functionality and performance."

Copilot in Microsoft Edge can turn a web page, or a stack of open tabs, into a generated audio podcast. This guide walks through exactly how to do that: what you need before starting, how to write a prompt that produces useful output, and where the feature's limits are.

Microsoft announced the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at Build this week, positioning it as a dedicated machine for developers running sustained AI workloads locally. Three numbers define the device: a 100W sustained thermal envelope, up to 128GB of unified memory, and approximately 1 petaflop of AI compute from Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, per The Verge and Engadget. Microsoft describes it as built for "long-running training jobs, agentic AI pipelines, and local model fine-tuning," according to...

Microsoft's most revealing Microsoft Android hardware decision of the past decade had nothing to do with Windows. By choosing Android as the operating system for its dual-screen productivity device, Microsoft was making an explicit admission about what had killed Windows Phone and betting it could do something different this time. The bet worked technically. It failed commercially. And the gap between those two outcomes traces almost entirely to a single unresolved question: what, exactly, was...

Satya Nadella opened Microsoft's annual Build developer conference this week by leading with Windows. Not Azure. Not Copilot. Not Teams. The Verge noted it couldn't remember the last time Build kicked off that way. The Microsoft Build 2026 Windows AI strategy, as the keynote framed it, rests on a specific claim: Windows is no longer the legacy platform Microsoft tends while building elsewhere. It's the on-device layer of Microsoft's AI stack, the place where local agents run, where developer...

Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra a few days ago, and while the device won't reach stores until later this year, its default wallpaper is already out. Someone extracted the high-resolution asset from pre-release materials, and Neowin is hosting both it and an unofficial light variant. To download the Surface Laptop Ultra wallpaper and apply it to your Windows 11 desktop, the whole process takes under a minute.

Microsoft Voluntary Buyouts: Who Qualifies and What the Offer Covers

Microsoft has made two distinct bets on how Office work should start and progress. The first: users should generate documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from a chat interface before they ever open an app. The second: once inside Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, Copilot should edit files directly rather than queue up suggestions for a person to apply. Both are now live, moving Copilot from a sidebar assistant toward both file creation in chat and direct editing inside apps. Access is broad, but...

Microsoft says its agentic capabilities for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint reached general availability on April 22, 2026, after a scheduled PowerPoint rollout that began on the web in mid-March and was expected to finish across Windows and Mac by the end of April. For PowerPoint specifically, the update replaces a static suggestion panel with a conversational editing mode that rewrites, restructures, and translates slides directly through chat.

Microsoft today launched the Surface Laptop for Business with two features new to the Surface lineup: an integrated privacy screen on select 13.8-inch configurations, and an OS-level haptic touchpad tied to Windows 11 interactions. The Surface Laptop for Business privacy screen is the more immediately useful of the two. Neither feature is an AI story, and both carry a price that Windows Central described as "outrageously expensive."

Two settings changes are all it takes. Set the lid-close action to Do Nothing and disable the inactivity sleep timer. Both live in Settings > System > Power & Battery and take about three minutes to configure.

The May 2026 Patch Tuesday update is failing to install on a subset of Windows 11 machines, stalling mid-reboot at roughly 35–36% completion and rolling back with error code 0x800f0922. Microsoft says the issue occurs on devices with limited free space on the EFI System Partition, especially when the ESP has 10 MB or less available; The Register covered Microsoft's disclosure on May 18, 2026. Both Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 are affected.

OpenAI published its most detailed technical account yet of how the Codex coding agent runs inside a Windows 11 sandbox this week, following months of documented complaints about the earlier implementation. The redesigned OpenAI Codex Windows sandbox uses separate execution identities, OS-level network isolation, and DPAPI-scoped credentials, according to WinBuzzer's coverage of OpenAI's safety post published six days ago. Whether the redesign resolves the original complaints is a separate...

Microsoft is adding a Windows 11 automatic driver rollback feature that can replace a bad driver update without any action from the user or the hardware vendor. Called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, it works through the existing Windows Update pipeline and is currently being tested with hardware partners, with broad rollout targeted for September 2026 (The Verge, today; Digital Trends, today).

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority has today opened a formal investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem, examining whether Microsoft holds strategic market status in that sector and whether it can use that position to limit customer choice. The probe will also consider whether Microsoft's software licensing practices are reducing competition in cloud services and how AI competitors are able to integrate with Microsoft's business software, according to the CMA's...

Microsoft this week pushed a significant update to Edge: the Microsoft Edge Copilot tabs update gives Copilot permission to read every tab you have open and pull answers from across all of them at once. Ask it to compare five product pages, surface a spec from an article you opened an hour ago, or condense a stack of research tabs it draws from your full open set without requiring you to paste or switch. That puts it in a different category than a sidebar chatbot waiting to be addressed.

Microsoft has disclosed internal engineering data showing File Explorer launches faster after being migrated to a newer UI framework, part of a structured initiative called Windows K2. The company hopes to push the changes out of development testing "soon," XDA Developers reported yesterday, covering Microsoft's own engineering disclosures. The Windows 11 performance improvements are real and measurable though independent benchmarks have not yet verified how the numbers translate across...

Xbox Mobile Store Not Dead: Why It Still Hasn't Launched

Enable Xbox Full Screen Mode on Any Windows 11 PC

Discord launched Nitro Rewards today, and the headline feature is free access to the base tier of Xbox Game Pass bundled into the existing $9.99/month Nitro subscription. The Discord Nitro Xbox Game Pass bundle covers more than 50 PC and Xbox games and 10 hours of monthly cloud streaming, TechCrunch reported at launch. For Nitro subscribers who don't already pay for Game Pass, that's a genuine addition. It's also a deliberately constrained one.

Turn On or Off File and Printer Sharing in Windows 11: Full Guide

Windows 11 Dev Build Secure Boot Monitoring Lands in All Insider Channels