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Snap two windows side by side in Windows 11, drag the shared border to resize one, and in many cases the other window resizes too, whether you wanted it to or not. Microsoft currently documents a checkbox for controlling that behavior under Settings > System > Multitasking > Snap windows. Some users nevertheless report that the checkbox is missing on their installations, so this guide covers both the documented setting and the available workarounds.

"My webcam mic has background noise" sounds like one problem. It rarely is. Treat it instead as a troubleshooting question with several possible answers: is Windows processing the signal too aggressively, is the app running on top of that doing its own processing, is the device itself missing or misconfigured, or, in rarer cases, has something gone wrong with the whole system's audio and the webcam just happens to be where it showed up first? Working through how to fix webcam microphone...

A console with a game disc inserted should, by most players' intuitions, be able to run that game. During Sunday night's Xbox outage, that assumption failed. The Xbox outage blocked disc games alongside digital titles for roughly 15 to 16 hours, not because the discs were unreadable, but because a backend licensing service that Xbox depends on stopped working.

A writer at Eurogamer traded in a PS2 and more than 100 games the day after a single session with Halo 3 at a colleague's apartment. Not gradually. Overnight. That is what a system-seller looks like: not a game that rewards console ownership, but one that creates it from nothing.

One Windows 11 user says the "Turn on virus protection" notification arrives with strange precision: 4 minutes and 13 seconds after every sign-in, never once after waking the PC from sleep, even though, in the poster's own words, Defender "keeps working all the time and never turns off" (Microsoft Community Hub, last week). That kind of specificity is exactly what makes the alert hard to dismiss and hard to trust. Anyone seeing the Windows 11 "Turn on virus protection" notification pop up after...

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Ask three different people what "Microsoft Copilot" does and there's a good chance you'll get three different answers, and all of them will be partially right. That's the problem. Microsoft Copilot isn't one product, it's a family of surfaces, and each one sees a different slice of your data. Mixing up Copilot Chat with Microsoft 365 Copilot, or a Teams meeting assistant with the standalone Researcher agent, is a common reason people asking how to use Microsoft Copilot for research end up with...

A large photo library stops being something anyone scrolls through to find one shot. OneDrive Photos has a Favorites feature built for exactly that problem: mark the images worth keeping close, then pull every favorited photo into one filtered view inside Gallery. This guide covers how to add or remove favorites in the OneDrive Photos app on Windows 11, using Microsoft's documentation, with one clearly labeled comparison to the separate Windows Photos app.

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday August 2026 release landed yesterday with a Windows kernel-level zero-day already being exploited in the wild. The Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2026 zero-day drawing the most attention is CVE-2026-68820, a use-after-free flaw in the WinSock driver, confirmed under active attack and the clear must-patch item in a release that touches Azure, Exchange, SharePoint, and GitHub Copilot alongside the usual Windows and Office components (Security Affairs).

Microsoft's Copilot Podcasts feature is being discontinued, with previously generated podcasts set to become inaccessible when the feature goes offline. Microsoft says Copilot Podcasts will be retired on August 18, 2026, after which previously generated podcasts will no longer be accessible.

Microsoft has crossed a meaningful threshold in how AI operates inside Excel. The latest update to editing with Copilot in Excel turns Copilot from a suggestion engine into an agent that can act directly inside a live workbook, creating PivotTables, generating forecasts, and executing multi-step tasks from a plain-English prompt, without a user clicking through each step.

Microsoft began testing a less cluttered Windows 11 Search experience on July 13, 2026. The redesigned home panel puts recent searches at the center while removing distractions such as trending searches, quizzes, game recommendations, and Microsoft's image of the day.

The scariest version of Windows Recall is not the one that shipped.

A stable-channel update to Outlook for Mac broke font selection during email composition, and as of The Register's July 9 report, no fix had reached affected users. The Outlook for Mac font bug is straightforward to describe: pick any non-default font in the formatting toolbar, and the app ignores the choice entirely, continuing in the default typeface as though nothing happened. A forum moderator acknowledged the problem two days before The Register's coverage without a patch following.

How Windows 11 Wi-Fi problems are easier to fix when you start with the symptom. A missing Wi-Fi toggle, a "No Internet, Secured" warning, random drops, and post-update connection failures all point to different causes. Use the section that matches what you see, then try the targeted fix.

During a pre-briefing the night before Build 2026, a Microsoft developer instructed an AI agent to delete all the files on his desktop. The agent appeared to comply. The desktop looked clean. "That's a lie," the developer said the files were fine because, as he explained, "the container won't allow it," according to VentureBeat's coverage of the briefing. That demonstration captures the promise of Microsoft Execution Containers for AI agents in one clean image. It also raises the question worth...

A Windows 11 bug has been quietly consuming storage on some machines for roughly a year, with a single system database log file capable of swelling from a few megabytes to as much as 500GB. Microsoft released KB5095093 as a preview optional update to address it last month, with the fix expected to roll into the next security update, likely the July 14, 2026 Patch Tuesday.

Run powercfg /hibernate on in an elevated terminal, then go to Control Panel and check the Hibernate box under power button settings. That's it. Many guides stop after the command or the Control Panel step this one covers both, in order, with the gotchas called out where they matter.

One of the first Steam Machine Windows 11 vs SteamOS benchmarks is out, and the headline result is closer to a draw than a verdict. ETA Prime's testing across three titles shows the two operating systems within a few frames of each other, with SteamOS holding the largest single-game lead. What the benchmarks don't show is where that parity breaks down. Prior Ars Technica testing on comparable 8GB AMD hardware documented a separate, more serious problem: once a game pushes past the GPU's VRAM...

Microsoft released the Windows 11 July preview update this week, pushing builds 26100.8968 and 26200.8968 to Windows Insiders in the Release Preview channel on versions 24H2 and 25H2 respectively. The update spans File Explorer, Search, Voice Access, Windows Hello, touchpads, battery settings, and the Start menu, according to PCWorld.

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.

If you only want the key to open something else, PowerToys is enough. If you need it to act like Right Ctrl, skip straight to AutoHotkey. That's the whole decision, and getting it wrong means spending an hour on a remap that half-works.

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...

Satya Nadella told investors on Microsoft's Wednesday earnings call that the company will begin bringing Copilot's chat, coding, task-delegation, and autonomous-agent capabilities together in one Microsoft Copilot super app this quarter. It's the clearest confirmation yet that Microsoft's sprawling Copilot lineup is heading toward a single, unified Copilot app.

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 is spinning off four Xbox game studios today and cutting roughly 3,200 jobs across its gaming division. Buried inside that restructuring is something worth separating out: Double Fine and Compulsion Games are leaving with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games, according to the Xbox Wire memo. That deal structure is unusual enough in games industry M&A to warrant a closer look at what it actually means and what the reporting hasn't confirmed yet.

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...

Most guides skip straight to the download link. That's the problem. Unofficial mirrors and repackaged Tiny11 images circulate widely, and there's no reliable way to audit what's been added to them. This guide is about getting a verifiable ISO either by confirming the source before downloading, or by building the image yourself from a clean Microsoft-distributed file.

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 shipped Windows 11 build 29617.1000 to the Experimental (Future Platforms) channel last Thursday, pairing a structural change to how Windows handles monthly updates with a new display accessibility tool called Screen tint. Both changes share the same logic: reduce the friction of using Windows day to day, one at the servicing layer, one at the display layer.

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.

Microsoft has extended the free Windows 10 Extended Security Updates program by a full year, pushing the consumer deadline from October 2026 to October 12, 2027. No press release, no blog post just a quietly updated support page. BleepingComputer confirmed the change yesterday, with The Verge following this morning.

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.

Smart App Control can now be turned on or off directly from Windows Security settings, without reinstalling Windows. That wasn't true until the April 2026 cumulative update (KB5083769) changed it. Before that update, disabling SAC was permanent: the only way back was a full reset or clean install.

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 pushed Windows 11 Insider Preview build 28120.2315 to Experimental (26H1) channel testers last Thursday, carrying two documented fixes: a Live Captions style responsiveness improvement and a reliability update to the inbox HD Audio driver. The release lands two weeks after Microsoft restructured its 26H1 pre-release program, and the contrast between what Experimental and Beta testers received this cycle tells you something about how the new structure is working.