Articles about Microsoft

It is not unknown for Microsoft to change the system requirements for its software, and this is something that applies to Windows 11.

Back in June, the company updated the list of processors from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. Now another update to Windows 11 system requirements means that large numbers of Intel CPUs are no longer supported -- 44 models in total.

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Cortana may have been Microsoft's response to Siri, but while Apple's digital assistant prevails, the Windows maker's offering has slipped into insignificance. Never much-loved by users, Microsoft's Cortana has been in its death throes for a while and now the company is finally moving on.

With the release of Windows 11 Build 25921 a few days ago, Microsoft has introduced the option to uninstall the Cortana app, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. The company had already announced plans to stop supporting Cortana in Windows as a standalone app, and that time has now come. A Microsoft Store update is also being used to forcibly deprecate the tool.

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Earlier in the week, Microsoft rolled out a new Insider build for testers in the Dev Channel. Today, arriving just in time for the weekend, it delivers a new flight for those on the Canary Channel.

Windows 11 Build 25921 brings some interesting new features including HDR background support and rich thumbnail previews for cloud files on Start. It also lets users uninstall Cortana.

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Five-hundred-and-fifty-four 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 leaked its internal staging tool for a brief period this week. It works similarly to the open source tool ViVeTool, in that it gives administrators the option to enable or disable Windows features that are not enabled for all users at the time.

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Starting next month, Microsoft is making some significant changes relating to Transport Layer Security (TLS) in Windows 11.

This security protocol has been one of the more controversial system requirements for the operating system, and the company has revealed plans to disable older versions -- specifically TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 -- by default from September. Microsoft has already determined that this will cause problems for a fairly lengthy list of apps, including some of its own.

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Windows 11 is still a relatively young operating system and Microsoft is actively working to improve it and add new features along the way, as is obvious from the insider test builds that get released on a weekly basis.

However, there are still issues and design inconsistencies that ruin the OS for many users. This is where Rectify11 comes in.

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If you've been following news about the Insider builds of Windows 11 over the last couple of years, you're probably aware of the incredibly useful utility ViVeTool; we've referred to it many times here on BetaNews. This handy piece of software makes it possible to unlock Windows 11 features that Microsoft is testing with select groups of users.

It turns out that Microsoft has its own internal tool which works in very much the same way as the likes of ViVeTool. Called StagingTool, it provides access to features and options of Windows 11 that would otherwise be unavailable, and Microsoft has just leaked details of its existence.

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Today is a big day for Windows Insiders. The August 2023 Bug Bash has begun (running through until August 7) and there's a new Windows 11 build for testers in the Dev Channel to get their hands on.

Windows 11 Build 23516 features the usual selection of fixes and improvements, and also improves the screen casting experience that lets users wirelessly extend a display to another nearby PC, TV or other external screen.

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A PowerToys release cycle focused on stability and improvements may not sound terribly exciting, but with the newly hatched PowerToys v0.72.0 Microsoft has delivered significant updates that you won't want to miss out on.

Although there are no brand-new modules to explore, PowerToys Run has new plugins to work with. There are also a huge number of bug fixes and improvements across pretty much all areas of the utility, and a great new feature for Mouse Highlighter. On top of this, Microsoft has managed to dramatically slash the installation footprint of the PowerToys collections.

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When you've spent any amount of time using Windows 11 with two or more monitors, it's hard to go back to a single display setup.

But while working with multiple screens is a great productivity boost, it is far from being a perfect experience. Thankfully, Microsoft feels the pain of Windows 11 users and is bringing some helpful changes to settings that will make the experience far more pleasant.

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With so many apps and websites vying for our attention, notifications and alerts have become part and parcel of being a technology user. For some time, Microsoft has used the Windows 11 system tray to indicate that there are notifications that should be looked at -- but this notification indicator is about to become less useful.

In the latest build of the operating system, the company has made an unusual change that means the system tray no longer shows how many notifications are there, just the fact that there are notifications. It is not clear what prompted the decision to remove notification counts, but is likely to be a polarizing change.

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Five-hundred-and-fifty-three 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 plans to end support for the Mail and Calendar apps for Windows at the end of 2024. The new Outlook for Windows application will replace the apps and users will be migrated automatically to the new application starting in August 2023.

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Today is a big day for Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev Channel as the software giant releases a new test flight, Build 23511. The main highlight in this release is a big improvement to Windows Spotlight.

Microsoft has previously tried out various treatments for Spotlight and has now settled on a single experience that the company says "includes previewing images at full screen, multiple opportunities to learn more about each image and a minimized experience."

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After promising to bring a dark mode option to Bing, Microsoft has started the rollout slightly earlier than previously suggested.

The company is in the process of introducing the option of a darker visual look in both Bing Search and Bing Chat. As is usually the case with apps and websites, the dark mode offered by Bing can be enabled or disabled so it is in line with system settings, but there is also the option of opting for light or dark mode regardless of the system-wide settings that are in place.

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As part of this month's batch of update previews, we've already seen the KB5028245 update for Windows 11 21H2. For those who are running the more recent Windows 11 22H2, however, there is now the KB5028254 update.

There are many, many similarities between the KB5028245 and KB5028254 updates, and this should come as little surprise. The cumulative update for Windows 11 22H2 does have differences, though, including boosting the accuracy of brightness settings.

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