Software & Apps - Page 9

Microsoft's seemingly never-ending quest to migrate features from the legacy Control Panel to the Settings app in Windows 11 has taken another few small steps forward with a new preview release.

This is build 26200.5742 in the Dev channel, which has witnessed Microsoft shoving over a bunch of time and language settings, alongside keyboard-related bits and pieces which are arriving in the Settings app.

That includes the ability to change the format of the date and time (in the system tray), as well as the time server, and also to add additional clocks (in the notification center, off the taskbar), and a host of more niche tweaks.

Windows 10 turned 10 years old on July 29, marking the birthday of the extremely popular operating system ahead of its official decapitation.

In celebration of Windows 10's 10th birthday, Microsoft reminded users that it will be officially cutting off support for the operating system in October this year, which means it will no longer receive vital security updates.

Machines that don't upgrade to Windows 11 will be exponentially at risk of security breaches. Moreover, some hardware manufacturers are going to be cutting off driver support and security support for their components around the time of the operating system's severing from Microsoft.

Microsoft first introduced its controversial AI-powered Recall feature as an exclusive and key selling point for its new range of Copilot+ PCs in 2024. With an on-board NPU, Recall essentially takes screenshots of everything you do, stores all of that data in an indexable database that can then be called on with natural language as a powerful search tool that can tap into your Windows usage history.

Naturally, this brought up a whole range of security and privacy concerns, especially when it was discovered that the initial version of Recall was taking snapshots and screenshots of sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, and banking information. Microsoft then delayed the launch of Recall, retooled it for security and privacy, before launching it as an opt-in experience in late 2024.

One of the new features introduced with Microsoft's updated Recall was a "Filter sensitive information" setting enabled by default, which is designed to block sensitive information such as credit card numbers and passwords from being captured and recorded. A new investigation by The Register has discovered that even this is flawed, with Recall still capturing sensitive data.

Windows 11 is getting an accessibility feature that was previously spotted in testing, but was abandoned - a year and a half ago, in fact.

It's a useful ability whereby the position of the mouse cursor is highlighted by a large crosshair covering the whole screen, so those with low vision can see where the pointer is.

PhantomOfEarth spotted the return of this functionality with build 27913 in the Canary Channel, although it wasn't originally mentioned in Microsoft's blog post for that preview.

Microsoft has made another change in Windows 11 which is for European users only, moving away from the practice of promoting Edge - and we wish these nuances would be more widely deployed to the US and elsewhere.

Windows Latest reports that in the European Economic Area (EEA), the widgets board in Windows 11 now opens links in the default browser, rather than overriding that preference to use Microsoft's own Edge app.

So, if you've set Chrome - or Firefox, Opera, or whatever alternative - as your default web browser, links from the widget panel will open in that browser, as they should do.

Windows 11, version 24H2, is the latest version of Microsoft's operating system. It introduces a wide range of new features and optimizations alongside changing the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) to Black. More than a color change, this update is part of Microsoft's Windows Resiliency Initiative, designed to help users and admins recover from "disruptions" faster, and with more control.

According to Microsoft, its change to the error and crash screen reduces the time spent on the screen from 40 seconds to 2 seconds, with enhanced error information, diagnostic tools, and options. Naturally, you can't help but wonder if all this talk about what you see once your PC crashes and needs a full restart kind of makes Windows 11 sound, well, unreliable.

It's a lot better now, with Microsoft's Monika Sandhu stating, "Windows 11 24H2 is our most reliable version of Windows yet. Compared to Windows 10 22H2, failure rates for unexpected restarts have dropped by 24%."

FurMark 2.9 has been released with the popular GPU tool supporting a bunch of new GPUs including the GeForce RTX 5050 and Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards.

GPU companies aren't the biggest fans (pun intended) of FurMark 2.9 as it is often referred to as a "GPU virus" because it puts graphics cards under extreme GPU loads that games and benchmarking don't usually do. It's nothing out of the ordinary, as other benchmarking tools do similar things to your PC hardware (like Cinebench punishing your CPU loading every core and thread).

FurMark v2 is a Vulkan-based GPU tool that works on both Windows and Linux, with special versions in the wild that also support Arm-based hardware. The latest FurMark 2.9 release supports new graphics cards like NVIDIA's just-released GeForce RTX 5050 and the workstation-based AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700.

Windows 11 is now giving people the ability to let Copilot peer into their desktop and help them with whatever task might be in progress, if only in testing for now.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced that the Copilot app is getting this new ability via an update from the Microsoft Store for Windows Insiders.

The new feature is called 'Desktop Share' for Copilot Vision, and it allows you to share your desktop with the AI, or a single browser or app window if you prefer.

Tech companies are always looking for ways to improve the value of their ecosystem, and these improvements typically come in the form of new features intended to reduce the time spent on menial tasks. In a nutshell, convenience upgrades.

Apple has filed a new patent that resembles one of these upgrades, and it involves letting users perform secure voice commands through Siri, which includes granting the AI the ability to send money to other people, or even private data. Here's how it works. A locked iPhone, or any other applicable Apple device, such as an Apple Watch, is listening for natural language input. Siri is then triggered and detects a request similar to this, "Pay Mike $30".

Siri determines if this prompt is a sensitive task by performing a series of checks. If the checks are passed, Siri will then run a pre-authenticated connected accessory through a set of criteria, which includes measuring proximity, recent verification of the device, and secure pairing with the device. If all criteria are met, Siri will then carry out the sensitive task without requiring the user to perform a FaceID scan or enter a passcode. Once the task is completed, Siri provides confirmation via a voice or visual output prompt.

OpenAI is on the verge of releasing its own web browser in a bout to challenge the market-dominating browser, Google Chrome.

A new report from Reuters claims to have obtained information that OpenAI will be releasing this new browser within the "coming weeks," and that it will directly integrate OpenAI services such as ChatGPT in an effort to fundamentally change how people browse the internet. Why does OpenAI want its own web browser? All artificial intelligence tools need data to be trained on, and one of the biggest troves of user data is in web browsers, particularly Google Chrome.

According to the report, OpenAI's web browser will be Chromium-based, meaning it's built on the foundations of Google Chrome. By doing this, OpenAI will be getting direct access to Google's user data, and if the 400 million weekly active users of ChatGPT transition over to the new browser, it will take a significant chunk out of Chrome's 3.45 billion monthly users.

Compared to the previous version of Windows, Windows 11 comes with quite a lot of unnecessary software that users who care about having a clean PC, free of any unneeded applications, need to spend time removing when installing a fresh version of the operating system.

Unfortunately, this can be a time-consuming process, and removing specific applications, such as Microsoft Edge or OneDrive, can even require the user to delve into PowerShell, a command-line program. Getting into this territory of Windows can be daunting for some users, which is why many users wanting to remove Windows bloatware typically look for third-party software specifically designed to remove it from a new installation of Windows. An example of this, and something I use regularly, is Talon. Check that out here.

However, there now appears to be a new way to remove Windows 11 bloat, and it's designed by Microsoft itself. Windows Insiders have discovered a feature in Windows 11 version 25H2 that allows users to remove pre-installed apps. The setting is called Remove Default Microsoft Store Packages, and is located under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > App Package Deployment. The apps are removed after the user selects which ones they want to keep and which ones they want to discard from the installation.

The "attention economy" has reached new heights in China, and as pointed out by YouTuber Louis Zhao in a recent video, a phenomenon has emerged where hundreds of streamers are taking to the streets at night to create content.

Some streets and even the underpasses of bridges in China are being swarmed with livestreamers, as hundreds of content creators compete for viewers' attention. Zhao explains that this phenomenon is occurring for a multitude of reasons, with the primary one being the low barrier to entry for livestreaming and macroeconomic problems in China, such as the rising cost of living.

Zhao discusses why this is happening at night, the Chinese monetization model, and the role influencer agencies are playing in the influx of creators taking to the streets. Why the streets, or public places in general? In a nutshell, the content is more interesting when filmed in a public place, as there is chaos or a random element at play.

With only three months left on the clock for Windows 10 support, it seems Google's Chrome browser is now peeking at whether PCs running the older Microsoft operating system are eligible to upgrade to Windows 11.

Yes, Windows Latest picked up on Google's Chromium commit outlining this capability, which reads: "Adding a metric for determining Win11 upgrade eligibility. This metric is recorded at startup for Chrome running on Win10. Records a boolean histogram that represents if the hardware is capable of being upgraded to Win11."

According to Windows Latest's detective work, this change is already live in the web browser.

Windows 11 already does a fair bit of recommending apps and the like (or indeed promoting Microsoft's services), and we're apparently going to see a bit more of that behavior - this time with the lock screen.

As leaker PhantomOfEarth on X noticed (see the above post), there's a new 'discover widgets' ability inbound for Windows 11, although not officially at this stage (it is hidden in testing right now).

This will add suggested widgets to the lock screen presumably based on your past usage, and that'll happen 'periodically' according to the blurb describing the feature.

According to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey results, which were released last week, Windows 11 remains the dominant operating system for the PC gaming platform. With 59.8% of PC gamers using Windows 11, it has comfortably held the lead over Windows 10 for quite some time.

However, this is strictly related to PC gaming and Valve's Steam platform. When it comes to the global Operating System market, encompassing all systems, from office computers to those used by students and general at-home users, Windows 11 adoption has been relatively slow.

According to the latest StatCounter results, which have been tracking the Windows OS market share for years, Windows 11 has finally surpassed Windows 10 as the dominant operating system among PC users.

MSI's awesome Afterburner tool doesn't officially support AMD Radeon RX 9000 series "RDNA 4" graphics cards, but now it unofficially does.

MSI Afterburner developer "Unwinder" posted on the Guru3D forums to talk about the launch of the new beta of MSI Afterburner, which has AMD RDNA 4 GPU architecture support. MSI doesn't make or sell any Radeon RX 9000 series "RDNA 4" graphics cards, with Unwinder saying "so support for this GPU family inside the application is completely unofficial".

Not only do we have unofficial RDNA 4 GPU support, but the new MSI Afterburner beta also supports "future" NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, which means it could be the RTX 5050 for both desktop and laptop.

The latest CPU-Z v2.16 update includes support for more AMD RDNA 4 and NVIDIA RTX 50 series GPUs, as well as multiple new AMD Ryzen CPUs.

CPU-Z v2.16 is a popular hardware monitoring tool that has had multiple new components added to its database, including the Navi 44-based Radeon RX 9060 XT that launched last month, which is AMD's latest RDNA 4-based GPU in both 8GB and 16GB configurations. CPU-Z v2.16 also updates its database with support for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 series, supporting both the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5060, as well as support for the just-launched GeForce RTX 5050.

On the CPU side of things, CPU-Z v2.16 brings support for AMD's new Ryzen Z2 APUs including the Ryzen Z2 and Ryzen Z2 Extreme, both of which are custom Strix Point APUs for gaming handhelds with up to 8 cores and 16 threads of CPU power with RDNA 3.5 integrated GPUs.

If you're fed up with modern versions of Microsoft's desktop OS, then it might be refreshing to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, with a classic take on Windows that's a combination of old and new.

We should point out upfront that Windows Classic Remastered isn't an actual operating system - it's just a concept video created by a YouTuber (who has done plenty of these sorts of efforts in the past) - but it's intriguing nonetheless.

Check it out in the video clip above (which Betanews discovered) and you'll see that it's along the lines of Windows 95 meets Windows 11 (or 10), featuring a blend of Microsoft's contemporary interface configuration with a classic (read: dated, and it really is) GUI.

Microsoft has fixed a nasty bug with OneDrive, though you may need to perform the age-old tech trick of 'switch it off and on again' to restore full functionality to the cloud service on your device.

You may recall that the bug, which popped up in June, meant that some users - across all platforms except Mac (so that includes mobile and the web) - had search broken for them in OneDrive.

Whatever they searched for in the cloud storage locker wouldn't show up in the results presented (even though the files still existed - it was just that search wasn't registering them). Or worse still, the search result would just be entirely blank.

If you are one to get somewhat spicy over FaceTime, those days are now coming to an end as Apple has updated the feature to automatically stop video and audio if any nudity is detected.

The new stipulations for using FaceTime were discovered in the iOS 26 beta. Apple did mention last month when it unveiled iOS 26 that new features were coming to child accounts, but now it appears some of those features are making their way over to adult accounts as well. 9to5Mac reports that as part of the expansion of features, "Communication Safety expands to intervene when nudity is detected in FaceTime video calls, and to blur out nudity in Shared Albums in Photos."

What happens when FaceTime detects nudity? The video and audio of the call both freeze, and then the app will show the following message: "Audio and video are paused because you may be showing something sensitive. If you feel uncomfortable, you should end the call." There are two options to select from in this screen, "Resume Audio and Video" and "End Call". Presumably, users can simply resume the call and carry out their spicy activity.