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Microsoft Archive

Archives for February 2025

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Windows 11 tests putting an emoji button in the taskbar.

The new button opens up a panel where you can quickly access emoji and GIFs, similar to what you can already do with the Win + . keyboard shortcut.

Microsoft is also testing the ability to trim screen recordings with the Snipping Tool. The changes are rolling out now to the Beta Channel in Preview Build 22635.5015.

Image: Microsoft
Microsoft is shutting down SkypeMicrosoft is shutting down Skype
Tom Warren
Tom Warren
Tom Warren
Microsoft’s Copilot can help you pirate Windows 11.

Redditors have discovered that Copilot will recommend a script to permanently activate copies of Windows and Office. It’s a method that’s been available for a couple of years now, but it’s certainly amusing to see Copilot offer up the exact detailed steps.

Tom Warren
Tom Warren
Microsoft launches next-gen Phi AI models.

Phi-4-multimodal and Phi-4-mini are Microsoft’s latest small language models, both launching on Azure AI Foundry and Hugging Face today. Phi-4-multimodal improves speech recognition, translation, summarization, audio understanding, and image analysis. Phi-4-mini is designed for speed and efficiency situations, and both can be used by developers on smartphones, PCs, and cars.

Image: Microsoft
Wes Davis
Wes Davis
It’ll take more Microsoft Rewards to pay for Game Pass soon.

Microsoft will bump how many points it takes starting April 20th, 2025, writes Pure Xbox. Afterward, those who use the Rewards auto-redeem feature to cover their subscription after accruing enough points will need to set it up again.

Now, it costs level two Rewards members 17,000 (previously 12,000) points for a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, while PC Game Pass takes 10,500 (previously 7,500) points, the outlet notes.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Microsoft’s quantum quandary.

I don’t understand the Majorana particle, topological qubits, or much else about Microsoft’s quantum computing breakthrough, but I am not alone in that. The Wall Street Journal covers the physics community’s questions, quoting one physicist saying, “This is where you cross over from the realm of science to advertising.”

On the other hand, Microsoft technical fellow Dr. Chetan Nayak says to wait for his talk at the APS March Meeting, which will include a discussion of the progress made since submitting their paper a year ago.

Tom Warren
Tom Warren
Indiana Jones now has DLSS 4 support.

Bethesda has updated Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with DLSS 4, Multi Frame Generation, and even FSR 3.1 Frame Gen support. That’s great news if you somehow managed to purchase an RTX 50-series card recently, or if you want to try out AMD’s frame generation tech. Path tracing is also now supported on AMD and Intel GPUs.

Xbox Game Pass was supposed to be the Netflix of gaming — what happened?

Microsoft’s move to win the console war by not playing has had mixed results.

David Pierce