News and Updates about Windows Tips

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.

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...

Microsoft announced its new Xbox disc-to-digital program on August 26, with testing opening to Xbox Insiders on August 31. The feature lets owners of "most" Xbox One and Xbox Series X discs unlock a digital copy of a game simply by inserting the disc and launching it.

Microsoft will begin switching on Memory Integrity, along with Virtualization-based Security where it isn't already running, on eligible Windows 11 machines through next month's Patch Tuesday update. That's according to Peter Waxman, a group program manager at Microsoft, whose comments on the rollout were reported by The Verge yesterday, with the October timing confirmed by OC3D yesterday.

Microsoft has turned passwordless sign-in from a security-conference talking point into a configurable admin setting. Anyone searching for how to use passkeys with a Microsoft account is usually dealing with one of two different systems: a personal account for Outlook.com, Xbox, or consumer OneDrive, or a work or school account tied to Microsoft Entra ID.

Is Microsoft 365 down right now? Mostly recovered, not fully closed. As of Wednesday morning, Microsoft's own telemetry shows service availability holding stable above 99%, though the company has kept the incident open while it finishes remediation work (NHSmail Support, today).

Starting in October 2026, Windows 11 quality updates will begin automatically enabling Memory Integrity, a kernel-level security feature, on eligible PCs where it isn't already active.

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 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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 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...

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.