Microsoft
News related to Microsoft.
Open-source USB tool unlocks Nvidia's half-speed GPU AI limiter on Windows
A new open-source UEFI tool boots from USB and unlocks significant extra tensor performance on RTX 20, 30, and 40-series desktop and laptop GPUs, making the half-speed AI throttle hack a whole lot easier to try on Windows. No VBIOS flash or patched driver needed: the tool runs from a FAT32 stick before the Nvidia driver loads at every boot, and then voila, the developer’s own laptop RTX 4060 hit 65% higher FP16…
Blizzard Is Getting Our Hopes Up Again For World Of Warcraft On Xbox
It's got to happen, right? One of Xbox's biggest releases of 2026 isn't actually releasing on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S - it's Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Forever , which is still a PC exclusive launching on November 5th. That said, we've seen signs that Blizzard might be pushing towards a native Xbox release in the future, as they've implemented native controller support for WoW: Forever meaning it'll be…
Three Xbox Games Are Shutting Down Their Servers In November & December 2026
A few notable delistings on the way as well. November has officially arrived, and therefore we thought we'd bring you our latest roundup of games getting delisted over the next few weeks, with this roundup specifically focusing on November and December 2026. The good news is that there's not much to talk about! Call of Duty: Warzone is undoubtedly the most notable of the bunch here, which has been set to go offline…
Forza co-creator Dan Greenawalt is reportedly leaving Microsoft
<p>Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, <a href="https://zedgamesau.net/tag/jody-macgregor" target="_blank">Zed Games</a>. He's written for <a…
4 important features you should know if you use Microsoft Teams
A wealth of not-so-well-known features on Microsoft Teams make the experience easier and more stress-free than you may have previously thought.
Xbox manager says AI is already being used in game development
Brandon Stirrup deleted his comments from X a day after saying that AI usage is widespread in the gaming industry.
Celeste and TowerFall have delisted from Xbox's digital storefronts to support BDS boycott
Earlier this month, Big Walk developer House House explained why their co-op puzzle adventure wouldn't be available for sale on Xbox : Microsoft's gaming division is a priority target of the the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which names the tech giant in general as a pressure target alongside Google, Amazon, and a host of other companies . House House isn't alone in taking this…
id Software co-director says the Doom developer is 'working more closely with MachineGames than ever' after Xbox laid off 'about half of our studio'
Id Software has tightened its relationship with fellow shooter specialists MachineGames according to studio co-director Marty Stratton, after Xbox laid off roughly half of the Doom developer's employees earlier this year. Stratton was asked how the studio was doing following Xbox's massive job cuts at a recent press event for Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC (via IGN ) and he was keen to assure everyone that…
Windows 11 tries new shortcuts for Xbox gaming mode and search
The latest Windows 11 Insider build adds some powerful new search features and quick settings while in Xbox mode. The Xbox shortcuts let you control things like Bluetooth, WiFi, and power settings without having to exit gaming mode. The search improvements are quite comprehensive. You can now filter results for files, actions, or web results. You can also use the search box to perform actions like changing the…
Microsoft really wants you to sell that Xbox you're not using
Microsoft wants owners to trade in their unused Xbox Series X and S consoles. Here's what's behind the push, and what to know before you take the deal.
These 30+ Games Are Coming To Xbox Next Week (November 2-6)
A new month begins! Welcome to your Xbox games roundup for November 2-6 ! We've got some very interesting releases over the next few days including Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, Zero Parades: Director's Cut and Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive, while Xbox Game Pass is treating us to at least five games across multiple days! Here's what's coming to Xbox next week: Read the full article on purexbox.com
This Microsoft 365 Family plan cloud storage change may leave you frustrated
Your Microsoft 365 Family plan will transition to a new (smaller) shared storage model when you renew it.
Veteran Microsoft engineer makes his own RAM from scratch using AI
Dave Plummer, former Microsoft engineer and wizard of Task Manager, Windows Pinball, and now TMOG, has an interesting project in his hands once again. After seeing exactly how many zeros were in the price tag for a megabyte of memory for his vintage PDP-11, he decided to take matters into his own hands and conjure up a new RAM board. The PDP-11 is from 1970, and later models could fit in as much as four megabytes of…
Microsoft offers a quarter of its workforce voluntary severance while shielding AI-critical teams
Microsoft is offering voluntary severance packages to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, in the second such program this year. The company's headcount has held flat at around 223,000 since 2022 even as it plans to spend about $170 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. The article Microsoft offers a quarter of its workforce voluntary severance while shielding AI-critical teams appeared…
Meet Factory Droid 1.0: A Model-Independent Coding Agent Harness Built on Script Mode
Factory has released Droid 1.0 , the largest update yet to the Factory Droid agent harness. The main change is programmatic tool calling, now on by default. The model writes a program that runs its tools. One model request can now drive hundreds of tool calls. TL;DR Size: Base prompt is 13,055 input tokens, down 37% from 20,887. Only 2 tool definitions ship up front, down from 11. Runs on: macOS and Windows desktop…
Google joins OpenAI and Anthropic in promising new scraping controls
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft pledge to support a new common signal for robots.txt that blocks scraping for AI training.
Vercel Labs Open-Sources agent-desktop for Agent Computer Use
Vercel Labs has released agent-desktop , an open-source CLI for AI agent computer use on macOS, Windows and Linux. agent-desktop reads each app through the operating system’s accessibility tree, not through screenshots. An agent gets a JSON snapshot with a ref for every element it can act on. Version 1.0.2 shipped on October 30, 2026, under Apache-2.0. For developers, any shell-capable coding agent can now drive…
Tech sleuth claims to have found the oldest GUI application that still works with Windows 11 — CDPLAYER.EXE from Windows NT in November 1992 wins the prize
A technology enthusiast claims that the oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 is CDPLAYER.EXE from November 1992. The app had to run on Microsoft’s newest consumer OS without modifications or emulation involved to be chosen as the ‘winner’ of their experiment. Blogger Enlyth expected something from the early NT era, as Windows 11 doesn’t support 16-bit apps , despite its strong backwards…
The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable . With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually. The shared "policy token" signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at…
Rumours Persist That Xbox Spent $500 Million On Gears Of War: E-Day, Despite Some Objections
Update: Bloomberg reporter chimes in. Ever wondered how much money went into Gears of War: E-Day 's release this year? Well, we don't have any official figures on this, but a "source" for Kotaku has claimed that Xbox put over $500 million into it. Their report claims that it's a "source familiar with Xbox’s business", and that the $500 million figure doesn't actually include marketing for the game either. Microsoft…
Three Special Football Jerseys Go On Sale To Celebrate Xbox's 25th Anniversary
Including a very limited edition bundle. I've always been a big fan of wearing sports merch - you'll find me sporting a Vancouver Canucks hoodie or jacket most days of the week! However, when I was looking around for some kind of Xbox jersey in preparation for the Xbox FanFest event in London last month, I was disappointed to find basically nothing except old Seattle Sounders shirts. That's all changed this week, as…
Meet TokenEconomizer: Microsoft’s Plugin That Cuts Coding Agent Costs by Up to 30.9%
A team of researchers from Microsoft Research and UC Berkeley have released TokenEconomizer , an open-source cost controller for coding agents. TokenEconomizer is a plugin that learns from past sessions in a repository to cut waste in later ones. It works with Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot CLI and Pi. It does not touch model weights or agent code. On 277 SWE-Bench tasks, it lowered mean cost by 18.4% to 30.9%…
OpenAI CEO says it's 'quite terrible' for your PC to have RAM — Sam Altman says data centers offer better utilization
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has data centers full of memory, but seemingly it's the 32GB of RAM in your desktop that's the problem. In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible." Go deeper with TH Premium: AI and data centers (Image credit: Microsoft) The data center cooling state of play…
Kojima's Xbox-Published OD KNOCK Gets A New Game Poster
What is she looking at? Keeping up with Kojima and what he's working on is always a fun task, as we never really know what he's up to, how far along it is, when we'll hear from him again, and all that jazz. Hideo Kojima's OD KNOCK was announced at The Game Awards in 2023, and yet we know hardly anything about the game. Last night, Kojima returned to provide us with another bump of his Xbox published OD, with a…