News and Updates about Windows Tips

Most people who see the word "Pro" attached to a piece of software assume it means faster, better, or more capable in some general sense. Run that logic on Windows 11 Home vs Pro, and it falls apart fast. The two editions are, in Engadget's words, "extremely similar," and the gap between them has nothing to do with speed, gaming performance, or day-to-day polish.

Can MS Paint run Doom? Yes, technically, though the honest answer takes some unpacking. Doom is fully playable inside Microsoft Paint right now, complete with sound, music, and a frame rate that hits 35 fps at the game's native resolution (The Verge, today). The project is called DoomPaint, built by Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's CTO and a Technical Fellow (Windows Central, today). It loads the genuine shareware DOOM1.WAD file and sustains Doom's classic 35 tics-per-second cadence at...

Xbox is reportedly preparing to launch its disc-to-digital program this month, converting physical game discs into account-bound digital licenses, according to Kotaku, which cited a leaked roadmap and publisher materials reviewed by The Verge, published yesterday. Microsoft has not confirmed the plan directly, and the reporting is built on leaked documents rather than an official statement.

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).

Connecting certain LG UltraGear monitors to a Windows 11 PC can trigger the automatic installation of adware-like software that displays McAfee subscription ads on every boot, according to reporting from heise, Hardware Busters, and TechSpot. The software arrives through Windows's device-metadata system, which matches peripheral hardware IDs against a catalog and fetches associated software automatically. No prompt. No consent dialog. No click required.

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's July 2026 Xbox reset has revived a question the company has not publicly answered: if Xbox no longer works as a traditional console business, could Microsoft sell it?

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

Starting this month, a Teams meeting with the right license could include a Microsoft Teams AI teammate that nobody explicitly prompted to respond. Facilitator, a new Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium) feature, monitors conversations in real time, detects when a factual question goes unanswered, runs a web search, and posts a response in meeting chat on its own initiative, according to M365 Admin.

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.

Neowin reported that Microsoft has added a registry-based policy giving IT admins direct Windows 11 SSO prompts and admin control on managed devices. When enabled, the policy automatically accepts single sign-on consent dialogs on users' behalf, turning a manual confirmation step into an automatically approved SSO action. The eligibility window is tight: Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 devices only, Entra ID-managed only, and a supported update containing the policy must already be installed.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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."

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 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 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."

Microsoft launched its Xbox Player Voice feedback portal this week, and the top results came in fast. Within hours, the most-upvoted requests pointed in one direction: bring back console exclusives, expand backward compatibility, and drop the subscription requirement for online multiplayer. The Verge and IGN both covered the Xbox Player Voice feedback results today.

Brazil's Anatel regulator published images of what appears to be Microsoft's unannounced successor to the Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, hours after a separate Xbox Cloud Gaming controller surfaced through the same channel. Brazilian outlet Tecnoblog spotted the filings first. The images show a refined design with two new scroll wheels, a pairing button that toggles between local and cloud modes, and a removable battery smaller than the one in the Elite 2.

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...