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You can catch up on all of this week's news right here!

From hedgehogs on Microsoft's Redmond campus to Phil Spencer surprising us with a major Final Fantasy announcement at this year's Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival, it's been an eventful week.

Thankfully for anyone wanting to catch up on Microsoft, Xbox, and Windows news, we have a roundup of the biggest stories.

Pete Batard, creator of the Rufus app, has released a new feature update in the stable channel. Earlier this month, version 4.2 arrived as beta, and now it is ready to offer the latest improvements for all users.
 
Although Rufus 4.2 does not contain groundbreaking new features, it offers several notable changes, improvements, and fixes. For example, the app can warn users about revoked UEFI bootloaders.
 
This feature is related to changes in the Windows Boot Manager that will cause specific media to stop booting after Q1 2024 (find more information in the official documentation). Also, Rufus now supports ZIP64, allowing you to extract images larger than 4GB.
 
Finally, there is support for saving and restoring the current drive to or from compressed VHDX and FFU images, plus a bunch of bugfixes.

By Susan Bradley (AKA 'The Microsoft Patch Lady')
 
If you haven’t updated to Windows 10/11 22H2, now is a good time because I’m lowering the MS-DEFCON level to 4.
 
This month’s updates have now settled down to the point that I don’t anticipate any issues for the vast majority of readers, nor have I seen any surprises in my testing on Windows 10 or Windows 11.
 
22H2 is now my recommended version of Windows for both Windows 10 and Windows 11 for all editions and all types of users — with the single exception of gamers.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'The Flash' tops the chart, followed by 'Transformers: Rise of the Beasts'. ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3' completes the top three.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends.

All data are gathered from public resources.

Choosing the right VPN can be a tricky endeavor. There are hundreds of VPN services out there promising to improve users' privacy, but some are more private than others.

To help you pick the best one for your needs, we asked dozens of VPNs to detail their logging practices, how they handle torrent users, and what else they do to keep you as anonymous as possible.

In this episode of Microsoft Weekly, we take a look at the long-rumored Xbox Live Gold replacement called "Xbox Game Pass Core" and its features; Windows Insiders get new builds with Windows 11 23H2 features, energy improvements, and more; plenty of apps get plenty of changes in the latest updates; Microsoft announces Bing Chat for enterprise with a hefty price-per-user; and we recall Microsoft's first attempt to disrupt the mobile market with a cordless mobile phone.

Intel moved to a hybrid x86 CPU design for its 11th generation of Core processors (Alder Lake). Not only that, but the company also made several other changes to other components too, dubbed the "Uncore" portion of the processor, also referred to as the System Agent, which includes the Northbridge. One such change is apparently causing various latency issues and sluggish performance in general on Intel's hybrid chips according to a report by YouTuber Tech YES City (TYC).

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' tops the chart, followed by 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3'. ‘John Wick: Chapter 4' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

Keyboard shortcuts are an extremely powerful productivity-boosting feature. Sadly, Windows has no built-in shortcut guide, so I decided to list my eleven favorite shortcuts without which I cannot use my computer.

If colours are not looking as they should on the screen, it's probably because the device isn't using the correct colour profile. Here's the fix on Windows 11.

On Windows 11, similar to any operating system, accurate colour rendering on the screen is critical, even more for those professionals working on video editing, photography, or gamers. As a result, in this guide, you will learn the steps to set the correct colour profile for your monitor. 

Towards the end of last month, Nvidia released a firmware update tool for DisplayPort (DP) 1.3 and DP 1.4. The green team explains in its support document that users who are running such display specifications without the necessary firmware can experience black screen until the OS is able to load. Aside from black screening, hang while booting can also occur. Essentially, what this tool does is detect if the GPU requires a newer firmware to properly run DP 1.3 and DP 1.4. Hence, the firmware update is meant to address compatibility issues. Turing (RTX 20-series/GTX 16-series) and newer GPUs already feature the updated firmware. Hence, your DP issues may be unrelated.

In this episode of Microsoft Weekly, we take a look at FTC losing the Microsoft-ABK merger case, Microsoft confirming Windows 11 version 23H2, a new Office font to replace the 13-year-old Calibri, Patch Tuesday updates, a new way to remove the half-dead Cortana from Windows 11, Windows Update-like ransomware, and new features to test in Windows 11's latest preview build.

The Event Viewer can help you to monitor and troubleshoot issues on Windows 11, and here's how.

The Event Viewer on Windows 11 is an application that collects system and app event logs on a friendly interface that you can use to monitor and troubleshoot problems. Also, it can come in handy to track the performance of your computer.

In 2021, Microsoft announced it was planning to replace Calibri as the default font for its Office productivity apps. It presented the public with five competing fonts (Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview) and asked them to vote for their favorite via Twitter polls, online feedback, and more. Today, Microsoft Design announced the winner.
 
On its Medium page, Microsoft Design stated that the winning font was . . . Bierstadt! However, Microsoft decided to give the winning font a name change, so the new default Office font is now called . . . Aptos!

Microsoft has been working on version 23H2 of Windows 11 for a very long time. We got the first tidbits of it back in 2022 when evidence of WDDM (Windows Display Driver Module) 3.2 surfaced in leaks. More recently, in 2023, VBScript removal was something on the menu for Microsoft, following MSDT deprecation.
 
A couple of months ago, it was reported that 23H2 is not going to be a major update over 22H2 and that it would be delivered via an enablement package (EKB) or a Cumulative Update (C.U.). Microsoft, today confirmed such reports in a Tech Community blog post titled "Windows client roadmap update: July 2023".

Officially Windows 11 requires at least 4GB of RAM to run on a laptop, tablet, or desktop PC. However, "NTDEV", the developer behind the popular Tiny10 and Tiny11 Windows OS mod projects, has posted proof that he got a version of Tiny11 to run on a PC with below 4GB of RAM.

Microsoft has just released the July Patch Tuesday update KB5028185 for Windows 11 users, taking it up to OS Build 22621.1992. Interestingly, this update comes with quite an extensive list of features.

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which means it's Patch Tuesday time again. As such, today Microsoft is rolling out the monthly security update (also called "B release") for July 2023 on Windows Server 20H2, and Windows 10 for the latest supported versions, 21H2, and 22H2. The new updates are being distributed under KB5028166, bumping up the builds to 19044.3208 and 19045.3208.

Microsoft warned customers today that multiple editions of Windows 11, version 21H2, will reach the end-of-service (EOS) in three months, on October 10, 2023.
 
This applies to Windows 11 21H2 editions released in October 2021: Home, Pro, Pro Education, and Pro for Workstations.
 
"These editions will no longer receive security updates after October 10, 2023," Microsoft announced Monday.
 
"Customers who contact Microsoft Support after this date will be directed to update their device to the latest version of Windows 11 to remain supported."

Retro-computing fans can download the final updates released for '90s-era OSes.
 
If you have any interest in retro-computing, you know it can be difficult to round up the last official bug fixes and updates available for early Internet-era versions of Windows like 95, 98, and NT 4.0. A new independent project called "Windows Update Restored" is aiming to fix that, hosting lightly modified versions of old Windows Update sites and the update files themselves so that fresh installs of these old operating systems can grab years' worth of fixes that aren't present on old install CDs and disks.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3John Wick: Chapter 4' tops the chart, followed by 'Knights of the Zodiac'. ‘Fast X' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

If you like your Linux a little more Red Hat flavored, here's how to get started.

 
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is an incredible tool that puts real Linux on top of the Windows 10 or 11 PC you already know and love. Setting up is simple, but out of the gate the default Linux distribution (unless you specify otherwise) will be Ubuntu. 
 
But the choice does not end there. While there are a number of distributions available through the Microsoft Store, you're not even limited to just those. In the case of Fedora, it sort of is. 

The 27th week of 2023 is over, so it is time for another issue of our Microsoft Weekly series. In this episode, we talk about Windows 12 concepts, newly discovered hidden features in Windows 11, malware-like behavior by Microsoft Edge, Windows 11's continuous growth among gamers, and more.

The Windows 11 Moment 3 update will roll out to everyone via July's Patch Tuesday release.
Toward the end of May 2023, Microsoft held its annual conference for developers, Build 2023, where it made many announcements, including integrating Bing into OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT, Windows Copilot, and more. 
 
Alongside the long list of announcements, the tech giant indicated it was gearing up to ship Windows 11's second feature drop, also known as "Moment 3." Microsoft had already tested some of the features that are part of the update with Windows 11 Insiders and was now ready to ship it to broad availability. 

Windows 10 and 11 have plenty of built-in screenshot-making tools. However, unlike most modern operating systems, Microsoft's desktop OS takes screenshots in complete silence without giving any confirmation (unless you use the Snipping Tool app). As it turned out, Windows 10 and 11 have a hidden setting that lets you set a sound to play when you use the PrintScreen key to take screenshots. Here is how to enable it.