What's New

Microsoft has released a lot of hardware throughout the years. Prominent examples are the company's Surface line of Windows devices, but also peripherals and other hardware.

The United States Department of Justice may force Google to sell Chrome. The news comes a few months after the company was found guilty of maintaining an illegal search monopoly.

Well, this is not completely unexpected, I had mentioned this in my previous coverage of the antitrust lawsuit.

I have visited Athens and Rome in the past couple of months and took a laptop with me to work from there. I refuse to use open Wi-Fi access points at airports, coffee shops, hotels or other locations.

The main reason for that is security and privacy. It is too easy to get attacked or your data snagged away. For that reason, I have switched to using my Android device as a mobile hotspot provider whenever I need to access the Internet, but do not have Ethernet or private Wi-Fi available.

Gmail users had an easy, but mostly superfluous, alias system at their disposal from the very beginning. I mentioned the trick in 2006 for the first time here on this blog. All you have to do is add +text to the username of the email address.

OpenAI has released the official ChatGPT app for Windows for all users. The company had released the desktop app for macOS in June 2024, before following it up with a Windows version that was released about a month ago.

Weak passwords continue to be a problem on today's Internet. It seems that many users continue to pick weak passwords that were weak 20 years ago and continue to be the weakest of the weak. It is probably part convenience and part not-knowing-better that play a role here.

VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion are now free for all users. Didn't Broadcom make them free already in March 2024?

Windows users who use a browser like Chrome on their devices as the main daily driver may be targeted by Microsoft's latest attempt at persuading them to switch to Edge.

The details:

• Microsoft Edge suddenly starts on system start on the devices.
• It displays a prompt that advertises the benefits of Edge.
• This prompt includes an option to import data from other browsers; checked by default.

When Edge launches on start, it displays the "Enhance your browsing experience with Copilot in Microsoft Edge" prompt.

Microsoft released the November 2024 security updates for all supported client and server versions of its Windows operating system. Security updates are also available for other company products, including Microsoft Office.

Our overview of the November 2024 update helps system administrators and home users make sense of the releases. It offers actionable information, including what has changed and whether there are known issues.

Links provide easy access to official support pages and there is an assortment of information and more to be found below.

With last month's scheduled security update for Windows 10 and 11 came another update that Microsoft installed on select systems.

KB5001716: Update for Windows Update Service components, was installed on Windows 10 or 11 devices that are already no longer in support or about to reach end of support.

Usually, when you share a link from an Android device, you should get an option to share the actual link. If you want to share a Ghacks page, you should see https://www.ghacks.net/ in the beginning.

Some services change that. They may use their own URL shorteners or services. The main reason for that is that they get more control over the sharing. Whenever a user clicks on the link or shares it, they get information about it.

For the last few days. usage of links beginning with search.app have skyrocketed.

Microsoft has introduced an AI feature in Notepad that can help you rewrite text. Say hello to Rewrite, let's take a deep dive into it.

Microsoft has released a new build to the Windows 11 Insider channels Dev and Canary. These introduce new AI capabilities in the classic Windows apps Paint and Notepad.

The details:

The Windows Control Panel has been an essential part of the Windows operating system. When Microsoft released Windows 10, it announced that the Control Panel would be replaced by the Settings app eventually.

While some Control Panel applets moved to the Settings in the almost ten years that followed, Microsoft never removed the Control Panel entirely from Windows.

Windows users have quite a few tools at their disposal that let them customize Windows installations or bypass the system requirements of the Windows 11 operating system.