Articles about Microsoft

Depending on where you are typing, entering an em dash or an en dash can be simple, or a nightmare. In the latest Insider builds of Windows 11, however, it is getting a whole lot easier thanks to keyboard shortcuts being added.

Microsoft has quietly added a couple of new keyboard shortcuts that can be used to type these handy punctuation marks. For now, they are hidden away in the Dev and Beta builds; here is how to access them.

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Next month sees Windows 10 finally reaching the end of (mainstream) support. Microsoft has been pushing people towards Windows 11 for what feels like forever, and it worked – for a while.

The latest market figures show that this is changing. The statistics for August 2025 from statcounter Global Stats show a marked drop in Windows 11’s share of the desktop market.

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Microsoft has admitted that the security updates released for Windows in August caused problems for a lot of users. Affected users experienced a series of unexpected UAC (User Account Control) prompts.

The scale of the issue is large. This is not a problem that is limited to a particular version of Windows – every supported version of Windows that received the August 2025 security update is affected. This means that Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2022 and Windows Server 2025 have all been hit with the UAC prompts.

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Microsoft has released PowerToys 0.94 with the joyous news that the v0.94 release cycle is “focused on new features, stability, optimization improvements, and automation”.

This is a big release – PowerToys 0.94 has a lot of new stuff in it, but there are two things that stand out. The first is a shortcut conflict detection feature which helps track down duplicated keyboard shortcuts. The second is fuzzy search within PowerToys Settings – which is important as the suite of tools is now a colossal collection. But, of course, there is more. Much more.

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Microsoft has gone all in with its embrace of Android and its various moves towards making Windows 11 play nicely with Google’s mobile operating system.

We’ve already seen the Link to Windows app get some serious attention, and most recently Microsoft added a very Apple-like option to resume using a mobile app in Windows. An as-yet unannounced feature is clipboard sharing, and this has been unearthed in a preview build of Windows 11.

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Microsoft is of the opinion that Windows 11 25H2 – the next big update for Windows 11 – is ready for public consumption. Although the update has not yet been given a full, formal release, it is now available as a public preview.

This means that Windows Insiders signed up to the Release Preview channel. However, Microsoft is yet to confirm just when the update will be made available to everyone. At the moment the company is not being any more specific than referring to “general availability later this calendar year”.

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Windows 10 is edging ever nearer towards the end of its support period, which means no more security patches or updates for millions of PCs. Users will either need to run their systems without protection or upgrade to Windows 11, which has more demanding hardware requirements.

For many older laptops and desktops, Windows 11 is not an option, and this is where Linuxfx comes in. Just updated to version 11.25.09 “NOBLE”, the latest version of the Windows-style Linux distribution offers a familiar environment that runs faster on aging machines.

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Anyone who has used Microsoft Word for a number of years will remember the times they have been saved by the autosave feature. The move to the cloud complicated things slightly meaning that many people lost files when Microsoft changed the way the feature worked.

Now the company has announced a significant change to Word that will help to dramatically reduce the risk of documents being lost by accident or because of something like a power outage or hardware failure. All Word documents are now saved  to the cloud by default.

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Microsoft has launched a public preview of a new tool to convert virtual machines between VMware to Hyper-V formats. The VM Conversion tool is available free of charge via the Windows Admin Center, with Microsoft claiming that the conversion process takes just five minutes.

The company says that the aim of the tool is to provide a simple, supported path for organizations to streamline VM conversion to Hyper-V virtualization environments. 

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Most people know by now that October will mark the end of free security updates for Windows 10, but that’s not the only Microsoft product that will stop receiving support. In the same month, the software giant will also pull the plug on Microsoft Office 2016 and Office 2019.

Millions of users still rely on these versions at home and in workplaces, but once support stops, they are left with the choice of upgrading or running software that will become increasingly unsafe. To address this, security firm 0patch has announced that it will provide ongoing security fixes for both abandoned Office versions.

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Every company with a web browser wants you to choose it as your default. Google is no different with Chrome than Microsoft is with Edge or Mozilla is with Firefox.

Microsoft has received a lot of flak for the heavy-handed way in which it has prompted Edge and attempted to get users to switch to it. More than this the company has made it more difficult to set other browsers as default, although this has changed in recent times. Now Google is taking steps to promote Chrome, pushing a one-click-to-switch capability.

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It is a drum that has almost been beaten to death, but the impending end of support for Windows 10 is not a story that is going to go away any time soon. Even when mid-October rolls around – the cut-off date – this is far from going to be the end of news, reminders, and more.

For now, however, there is some form of respite for Windows 10 users. Microsoft is rolling out a way to halt the constant pestering to upgrade to Windows 11. There is, of course, a catch.

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What started off as a simple screen-grabbing tool has evolved into something powerful and impressive. The Snipping Tool goes from strength to strength, and for Windows Insiders Microsoft has a new option to play with.

The feature is an expansion of Snipping Tool’s screen recording capabilities, this time making it possible to limit recording to a specific window.

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Microsoft has been slowly showing more and more love towards Android and its interoperability with Windows 11. This is something that is abundantly clear in the latest builds of Windows 11 released to Insiders on the Dev and Beta channels.

The latest feature to start rolling out is the ability to seamlessly resume apps from Android phones on PC. This is not something that works with all apps – indeed, it is not something you would want or need to work with all apps – but it is an interesting feature which has a lot of potential. For now, however, it is starting small.

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The death of the Control Panel has been slow and painful. The long and drawn out move from the Control Panel to the Settings app started years ago, and it is still an ongoing process in Insider Builds of Windows 11.

It is not really clear why Microsoft is taking so long to migrate options across from the Control Panel to Settings, other than factoring in the idea that it is really not considered a priority. But with the release of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27928 to the Canary Channel this week, the Control Panel continues to be subjected to a death by a thousand cuts.

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