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Windows 10's support lifecycle ends on October 14, 2025. It's time to migrate.

After launching Office 2024 earlier this month, Microsoft has a Word (get it?) for those still using Office 2016 and Office 2019. These productivity app suites entered their last year of support and are currently on track to reach the end of life on October 14, 2025.

After Steam started reminding its customers they're not actually owning what they buy, GOG comes swinging in like a wrecking ball.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Deadpool & Wolverine' tops the chart, followed by 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice '. 'Hellboy: The Crooked Man' completes the top three.
 
 The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This past week, Microsoft released Patch Tuesday updates for October 2024 for Windows 10 (KB5044273 / KB5044277 / KB5044293 / KB5044286) and Windows 11 (KB5044284, KB5044285, KB5044280). The company also published a new media creation tool update with the latter.

Google's Chrome Web Store is now warning that the uBlock Origin ad blocker and other extensions may soon be blocked as part of the company's deprecation of the Manifest V2 extension specification.
 
"This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions," reads the Chrome Web Store page for uBlock Origin.

In this episode of Microsoft Weekly, we look at the Windows Insider Program celebrating its 10th anniversary, new wallpapers, pretty funny bugs in Word, useful guides for those who want to get to Windows 11 version 24H2, Patch Tuesday updates, and more.

Microsoft's newest OS feature update, Windows 11 version 24H2 has some undocumented bugs and issues with several of them being related to disks. For example, users have expressed annoyance that they have not been able to delete 8.63 GB of data after upgrading their OS. Another problem is that the Windows SFC scan feature has been broken, although Microsoft has confirmed that the issue is being resolved with the upcoming KB5044384 update.
 
Following those, we now have users who are reporting problems on a specific brand of hardware, mainly Western Digital NVMe SSDs, wherein their drives are blue screen crashing after updating to Windows 11 24H2.

Windows 10 and 11 receive updates every month, but this time, things are more special. Microsoft just launched the latest Windows 11 feature update, version 24H2, which packs quite a number of new features and changes. However, you will most likely notice that the update took away a massive chunk of disk space. This might become a serious problem on lower-end systems that do not have a lot of space on a system drive.

A look at some of the changes and odds and ends in this year's Windows release.

The Windows 11 2024 Update, also known as Windows 11 24H2, started rolling out last week. Your PC may have even installed it already!

This week, Microsoft released Patch Tuesday updates for October 2024 for Windows 10 (KB5044273 / KB5044277 / KB5044293 / KB5044286) and Windows 11 (KB5044284, KB5044285, KB5044280).
 
KB5044284 is the first Patch Tuesday update (B-release) for Windows 11 version 24H2, bumping up the build number to 26100.2033. Microsoft has now made this update available via its Media Creation Tool, which can be downloaded from the company's official website (noticed by the German site Deskmodder).

VMware has released a small update for its virtualization software for Windows and Linux. Workstation Pro 17.6.1, with a few important fixes, is now available for download.

Yesterday, we reported on the latest Media Creation Tool (MCT) update which now helps you download and install the first Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 version 24H2. You can find details about that post in this dedicated article.
 
However, an official tool like MCT only works with systems which are supported by Microsoft that fulfill the minimum requirements. The tech giant recently updated a support page where it recommends buying a new PC for those who are looking to upgrade to Windows 11 from pre-Windows 10 since such systems are unlikely to satisfy Windows 11's upgrade criteria.
 
Such users can opt for third-party utilities like Rufus which recently published a workaround for bypassing Windows 11 24H2 system requirements on unsupported PCs. The developer promised that the next release of Rufus would have the workaround baked in.

Initially, Intel Core Ultra 200 Arrow Lake CPUs will launch with unlocked K variants. The new series could perform poorly in games.
After months of speculations and leaks, Intel has finally announced the launch of Intel Core Ultra 200 Arrow Lake CPUs for desktops. Because they are desktop variants, Intel is calling it Intel Core Ultra 200S series.

Since updating Microsoft's latest Windows 11 feature update, version 24H2, several users are reporting that they are unable to perform a Windows Update Cleanup that allows users to free up space. As such, seemingly every user updating to Windows 11 24H2 is finding that they are not able to proceed with deleting 8.63GB of past cumulative updates, a thing that was possible on previous versions of the OS.

YouTube is the go-to video streaming platform for billions worldwide. While there is a huge chunk of people paying for Premium subscriptions to skip ads, there are millions who still prefer watching ads to enjoy YouTube content for free.
 
You usually get the option to skip an ad after a few seconds and continue watching your video. However, some users have accused YouTube of deliberately hiding the ad skip button, forcing them to watch the full ad.

Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.

Now that Google is a monopolist, government lawyers are laying out their plans to deal with the search giant.

Now that Judge Amit Mehta has found Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company’s illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new 32-page filing (included below), they said they are considering both “behavioral and structural remedies.“

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Deadpool & Wolverine' tops the chart, followed by 'Wolfs'. 'The Killer's Game' completes the top three.
 
 The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.
 
Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

Microsoft has released Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 11 24H2, 23H2, 22H2, and 21H2. The 24H2 update is provided via KB5044284, 23H2 and 22H2 update is delivered via KB5044285, while the 21H2 update is KB5044280. You will be on build versions 26100.2033, 22631.4317, 22621.4317, and 22000.3260, respectively, after applying the update.

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 October 2024 on Windows Server 20H2 and Windows 10 for the latest supported versions, 20H2, 21H2, and 22H2.

If you use Word to write your documents, beware of a very odd bug that can ruin your day by deleting a file instead of saving it. Microsoft has issued a warning, acknowledging that Word documents with certain file names might be lost upon saving locally.

Microsoft released the 2024 feature update for Windows 11 last week. The new update is rolling out to eligible devices already. While it will take weeks or months before it is reaching all devices, it is only a matter of time before it lands on the majority of unmanaged devices.
 
The main changes of the update are more AI, Wi-Fi 7 support, Sudo for Windows and several other changes. Microsoft did remove features as well. The most visible one is probably the rich text editor WordPad.

The system requirements for Windows 11 have generally been something that has irked Windows enthusiasts and users. Those on unsupported devices typically rely on unofficial ways to bypass them. For example, popular USB media utility Rufus recently published a Registry bypass hack to workaround Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade issues on systems that are ineligible for upgrade.

Microsoft released Windows 11 version 24H2 earlier this month, and we have already published a guide on how to update without waiting in a long line. However, that guide is only for supported systems that meet Windows 11's hardware requirement. What if you have an unsupported computer, but you still want to try Windows 11 version 24H2? Here are three ways to get it.