News and Updates about Windows Tips

Is Microsoft Copilot becoming an operating system, or is Microsoft just borrowing OS-like language for a new layer of AI tools? The company has started describing its overhauled Copilot as a unified "AI workspace" that routes chat, coding, and autonomous agent work through one system. That framing sounds like Microsoft Copilot as an operating system in the making, but it's not the same as replacing Windows, and the gap between the two matters if you're wondering whether your Windows 11 PC is...

A reader shuts their laptop down every night, yet Task Manager still shows three days of uptime the next morning. Another keeps hitting a graphics glitch that survives shutdown after shutdown, no matter how many times the machine gets powered off. Neither is broken. Both come down to a single Windows setting that quietly changes what "off" actually means.

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...

Uninstall a Microsoft Store app, wait for the progress bar to finish, then check your storage. The number barely moves. If you're wondering why Windows 11 storage does not change after uninstalling apps, the answer depends on where the app came from: MSIX-packaged apps and traditionally installed desktop software can fail to free up space for two entirely different reasons. For a Store app, that result can be normal even when removal from your account went through without a hitch.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for September 2026 shipped fixes for 973 vulnerabilities, including 113 rated Critical, making it the largest Patch Tuesday on record, according to Automox. Cisco Talos counts the same 973 CVEs and 113 Critical bugs. Rapid7 puts Microsoft's own tally slightly higher, at 974, and counted 999 vulnerabilities total once it added 25 non-Microsoft CVEs reviewed in the same release. None of the three publications explain the small gap between their counts.

Reviewed by: Y. Garcia

Microsoft has introduced a Windows platform framework that lets apps request an age signal tied to the person currently using the PC.

Microsoft has until Oct. 31, 2026, to explain why a June 2013 internal presentation called "Second-Hand Software" was not identified and disclosed earlier in its long-running antitrust dispute with ValueLicensing.

"Excel multiple values in one cell" can mean two completely different things.

In December 2017, Microsoft and Qualcomm pitched a new category of Windows Always Connected PCs that would behave more like smartphones: instant wake, long battery life, and cellular connectivity without hunting for a hotspot.

Microsoft has turned Copilot in Excel from a chat-based assistant into a tool that can edit workbooks directly. That change matters more in shared files, where multiple people may be changing formulas, formatting, charts, and data at the same time.

Microsoft released the Windows 11 KB5124010 update on September 22 as an optional non-security preview for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2.

Microsoft released Visual Studio Code 1.139.0 to the Stable channel on September 23, 2026, replacing the sparse Insiders page that had appeared earlier in the month.

Vivaldi shipped a fifth minor update for Desktop 8.2 on September 18, 2026, just one day after minor update 4 landed.

Microsoft's next Surface generation, a 13-inch Surface Pro alongside 13.8-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop models built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Plus and X2 Elite chips, is confirmed for sale in three markets so far. Microsoft first documented availability in Switzerland on June 17, with Surface Pro pricing starting at CHF 1,349 (Microsoft EMEA, three months ago). Thailand and Malaysia were both scheduled to begin sales on July 23, 2026, a date now roughly two months in the past; Microsoft's...

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.

Hideo Kojima's Physint has moved to Xbox after Sony ended its involvement in the project, according to statements reported today by VGC and Variety. Xbox will now work with Kojima Productions on the game, replacing PlayStation Studios as its publishing partner.

Microsoft confirmed yesterday that Activision is taking over Halo, with the Call of Duty publisher developing the next flagship game in the franchise through a team built specifically for that job. Halo Studios, the current caretaker of the series, isn't building that next game and instead shifts into a support role for existing titles. The confirmation came from an internal memo by Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, shared by The Verge.

Ask "what is Microsoft Copilot" and you'll still get several different correct answers, because Microsoft uses the Copilot name across a unified chat app, AI features inside Word and Excel, a class of Windows PCs, work-account licenses, and tools for building custom agents.

Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Copilot app now goes by a different name: Microsoft Copilot. That's not just cosmetic. As part of the same round of Microsoft 365 Copilot app updates, Microsoft is merging existing Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot installations into one client on Windows and Mac devices.

If you searched for "Microsoft Teams unable to make or receive calls," the real picture is narrower than that phrase suggests. BleepingComputer reported two separate problems on Sept. 4, not one sweeping outage: some Windows users couldn't get the Teams desktop client to open, and separately, some Mac users were blocked from joining calls and meetings.

Xbox Insiders testing the platform's new disc-to-digital feature have reported that it also issues digital licences for games long removed from the Xbox Store. Testers cite successful claims for Deadpool, delisted in 2017, and Minecraft: Story Mode, delisted in 2019, within days of the feature going live. The supplied reporting does not identify an official Microsoft compatibility list, so the Xbox disc-to-digital compatible games list circulating among fans right now is built entirely from...

Mozilla added three new features to Firefox Smart Window on Tuesday, its AI-powered browsing mode, aimed at cutting down the friction of juggling tabs, searches and browsing history. The update brings live web answers with cited sources through a new partnership with Exa, smarter tab organization that groups related tabs and kills duplicates, and visual previews of browsing history, according to Mozilla's launch post.

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.

If you've shopped for a Surface Pro 11 in the past year, you've probably seen it pitched as an AI-first camera device, complete with a high-resolution sensor and a chip that's supposed to make video calls smarter. That's the real story behind Microsoft Surface camera innovation on this generation of hardware, and it's worth separating what Microsoft added from what's actually been verified. The short version: the front camera carries a genuinely high 12.2MP resolution, a fast neural processor...

Microsoft is turning predictive text off by default in Word and Outlook, changing the default for a feature it began rolling out across its productivity apps in 2020.

Microsoft formally introduced Project Zenith today, building on the developer-optimized Windows 11 experience it previewed at Build 2026. Zenith is a preconfigured "ready-to-code" setup that ships with coding tools and developer-tuned settings built in. It launches first on AMD's Ryzen AI Halo platform, and AMD showed the first Project Zenith device, a mini PC, on stage at IFA earlier today.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is getting a cap for the first time since it launched. Starting in November, Game Pass Essential, Premium, and Ultimate subscribers will each get a fixed number of cloud streaming hours per month, ending unlimited access across all three Game Pass tiers. Ultimate has offered uncapped cloud gaming since 2020, while Premium and Essential gained it less than a year ago.

The downsides of switching from MacBook to Windows are narrower than the horror stories suggest, but they're real enough to plan around before you buy. The hardest part usually isn't the new hardware. It's relearning shortcuts, losing part of the iPhone integration Mac owners take for granted, and discovering that "Windows laptop" describes machines with substantially different battery life, build quality, and app compatibility depending on which one you pick, according to Engadget.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.