Articles about Microsoft

Whilst Microsoft's Surface devices have been around for a few years and have many features that make them attractive for business users, there's never been a version aimed specifically at businesses… Until now.

With the launch of Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business the company is targeting the business market with features including improved performance and battery life, more ports, better security and custom, durable anti-reflective displays.

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While Microsoft is keen on deprecating features and apps, it has also been engaged in injecting new life into legacy apps in recent years -- just look at how Paint has evolved, for instance. The company has also been slowly but surely updating another software stalwart, Notepad.

Having already added a tabbed interface, an auto-save feature and, of course, a dash of AI, Microsoft is a now set to add a spell checking. It does not end there, though. In addition to a highly customizable spell checker, there will also be an autocorrect feature -- and considerations have been made for developers and coders.

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Microsoft has quietly announced plans to deprecate TLS server authentication certificates using RSA keys with key lengths shorter than 2048 bits.

The change means that it will not be possible to use 1024-bit keys, although Microsoft is yet to reveal exactly when the changeover will start. This is important information for companies using aging hardware and software as it will mean weaker keys can no longer be used for authentication.

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Microsoft announced the migration of the Microsoft Edge built-in PDF reader to Adobe PDF technology last year. The change would allow Edge users to view PDF documents using Adobe's engine.

Microsoft and Adobe promised back then that this would improve things by providing "a unique experience" with "higher fidelity for more accurate colors and graphics, improved performance" and even stronger security and better accessibility.

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Microsoft is deepening its partnership with NVIDIA to harness the power of generative AI, cloud computing, and accelerated computing for the healthcare and life sciences sectors. This collaboration aims to merge Microsoft Azure's extensive capabilities with NVIDIA DGX Cloud and the NVIDIA Clara suite to spur innovation and enhance patient care in these fields.

The collaboration is set to provide healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device developers with the tools to rapidly innovate across various domains, including clinical research and drug discovery, with increased efficiency and effectiveness.

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It is a rare month in which Microsoft releases an update for Windows that doesn't cause problems, and March sees the company maintaining this habit. The KB5035853 update released last week was supposed to fix a number of issues, including a persistent 0x800F0922 error, but it seems to have introduced problems of its own.

The KB5035853 update is a security update so it is being automatically installed for the majority of Windows 11 users, and this means that the issues associated with it are hitting a lot of people. Among the problems users are experiencing are BSoDs, slow boot times and reduced system performance.

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Microsoft has announced that the next subscription-free version of its Office suite will launch later this year. A commercial preview of Office LTSC 2024 will be available from next month, with a full launch scheduled for later in the year.

The Office Long-Term Servicing Channel is supported for five years, and it holds great appeal for the many businesses that are not keen on the idea of software subscriptions. There will also be a consumer-focused version of the suite, Office 2024, available via a traditional "one-time purchase" model.

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Microsoft is preparing to discontinue support for Windows 10 in the near future, giving users the option to either upgrade to Windows 11 or wait for the anticipated successor, Windows 12.

We’re not expecting to see the arrival of the next-gen operating system this year -- Microsoft is focused on adding more AI functionality to Windows 11 at the moment -- but we do have an idea of what Windows 12 could look like.

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Five-hundred-and-eighty-six in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft is rolling out improved versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 to users in the European Economic Area. These give users more customization options, such as the ability to remove Microsoft Edge or Bing Web Search entirely from the operating system.

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A major frustration for users of Microsoft Teams has been the need to use different versions of the app for different accounts. It has not been possible, for instance, to use a personal account and a work account in the same app. But this is changing.

With the release of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26080 to the Canary and Dev Channels, Microsoft has announced that a preview version of a unified Teams app is to be made available very soon. A single Teams app will be able to handle multiple accounts, including different types of account, and it will be possible to easily switch between them.

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Windows 10 users have a new security update to install in the form of the KB5035845 update. In addition to addressing a number of security issues, this mandatory update also kills the Windows Backup app for many people and introduces various other changes.

One of the most interesting additions to be found in the KB5035845 update are improvements to Windows share. There are also fixes for various issues in Windows 10 including Windows Hello problems.

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In three short months, Microsoft is ending support for various editions of Windows 10 21H2. This means that not only will there be no more new features or bug fixes, there will also be no more security updates released for the operating system.

Running any version of Windows that is not in receipt of security updates is a bad idea, but as this latest announcement includes numerous Enterprise and Education versions of Windows 10, the impact could be huge.

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March 6 was an important day in the European Union as it marked the date on which the Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into force. The new legislation places numerous requirements on "gatekeepers" (defined as "large digital platforms providing so called core platform services"), and this has already seen Apple roll out a different version of iOS to the EU than to the rest of the world.

The DMA affects a lot of tech firms, including the likes of Google and Microsoft. With the new legislation having come into force, Microsoft has implemented compliance measures, and this includes rolling out DMA compliant versions of Windows 10 and 11 to users in the EU. The company has started this process and has explained what changes and differences this includes.

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Five-hundred-and-eighty-five in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft announced that it is retiring the Windows Subsystem for Android next year. The company did not reveal why it made the decision. Rumors suggest that it did not generate the revenue that Microsoft hoped it would to become sustainable.

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Microsoft has released a new update for Windows 10 users in the form of KB5001716. While the company is promoting this as an update that refreshes the UI for Windows Update, there is rather more to it than that.

The release notes point out that after installing this update "you may see a notification informing you that your device is currently running a version of Windows that has reached the end of its support lifecycle ". In other words, expect Windows 11 upgrade nags. Oh, and if the slightly predictable underhand tactics were not enough, the installation of the KB5001716 update is proving problematic for some users, with numerous instances of 0x80070643 errors.

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