Author: n Andrew Cunninghamn

Microsoft releases update-fixing update for update-eligible Windows 10 PCs

A bug was keeping Windows 10 PCs from enrolling in Microsoft’s ESU program.

Officially, Windows 10 died last month, a little over a decade after its initial release. But the old operating system’s enduring popularity has prompted Microsoft to promise between one and three years of Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for many Windows 10 PCs. For individuals with Windows 10 PCs, it’s relatively easy to get an additional year of updates at no cost.

Or at least, it’s supposed to be. Bugs initially identified by Windows Latest were keeping some Windows 10 PCs from successfully enrolling in the ESU program, preventing those PCs from signing up to grab the free updates. And because each Windows 10 PC has to be manually enrolled in the program, a broken enrollment process also meant broken security updates.

To fix the problems, Microsoft released an update for Windows 10 22H2 (KB5071959) this week that both acknowledges and fixes an issue “where the enrollment wizard may fail during enrollment.” It’s being offered to all Windows 10 PCs regardless of whether they’re enrolled in the ESU program “as it resolves an issue that was preventing affected customers from receiving essential security updates.”

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Review: New Framework Laptop 16 takes a fresh stab at the upgradeable laptop GPU

New components make it more useful and powerful but no less odd.

The original Framework Laptop 16 was trying to crack a problem that laptop makers have wrestled with on and off for years: Can you deliver a reasonably powerful, portable workstation and gaming laptop that supports graphics card upgrades just like a desktop PC?

Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 16 (2025)
OS Windows 11 25H2
CPU AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 (4 Zen 5 cores, 4 Zen 5c cores)
RAM 32GB DDR5-5600 (upgradeable)
GPU AMD Radeon 860M (integrated)/Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Mobile (dedicated)
SSD 1TB Western Digital Black SN770
Battery 85 WHr
Display 16-inch 2560×1600 165 Hz matte non-touchscreen
Connectivity 6x recessed USB-C ports (2x USB 4, 4x USB 3.2) with customizable “Expansion Card” dongles
Weight 4.63 pounds (2.1 kg) without GPU, 5.29 pounds (2.4 kg) with GPU
Price as tested Roughly $2,649 for pre-built edition; $2,517 for DIY edition with no OS

Even in these days of mostly incremental, not-too-exciting GPU upgrades, the graphics card in a gaming PC or graphics-centric workstation will still feel its age faster than your CPU will. And the chance to upgrade that one component for hundreds of dollars instead of spending thousands replacing the entire machine is an appealing proposition.

Upgradeable, swappable GPUs would also make your laptop more flexible—you can pick and choose from various GPUs from multiple vendors based on what you want and need, whether that’s raw performance, power efficiency, Linux support, or CUDA capabilities.

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Lego boldly goes into the Star Trek universe with $400, 3,600-piece Enterprise-D

Kit includes the ship and accessory-toting minifigs of the Enterprise crew.

Star Trek fans who have long envied the Star Wars franchise’s collaboration with Lego are finally getting something to celebrate: Lego is introducing a version of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, specifically the Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Because we don’t live in the post-money utopian society of the 24th century, the kit will cost you, and unfortunately, it’s priced well into the for-superfans-only zone. The 3,600-piece starship and collection of minifigs will run you $400 when the set officially leaves spacedock on November 28.

Though the Enterprise-D is far from our favorite Enterprise, it does make sense as a starting point for the Lego Group. The Next Generation‘s seven-year run in the late ’80s and early ’90s represents a creative and cultural peak for the franchise, and a 2010s-era remaster that painstakingly re-scanned and upgraded all of the original footage and effects for high-definition TVs has kept the old episodes looking fresher than other ’90s Trek shows like Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

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How to declutter, quiet down, and take the AI out of Windows 11 25H2

A new major Windows 11 release means a new guide for cleaning up the OS.

It’s that time of year again—temperatures are dropping, leaves are changing color, and Microsoft is gradually rolling out another major yearly update to Windows 11.

The Windows 11 25H2 update is relatively minor compared to last year’s 24H2 update (the “25” here is a reference to the year the update was released, while the “H2” denotes that it was released in the second half of the year, a vestigial suffix from when Microsoft would release two major Windows updates per year). The 24H2 update came with some major under-the-hood overhauls of core Windows components and significant performance improvements for the Arm version; 25H2 is largely 24H2, but with a rolled-over version number to keep it in line with Microsoft’s timeline for security updates and tech support.

But Microsoft’s continuous update cadence for Windows 11 means that even the 24H2 version as it currently exists isn’t the same one Microsoft released a year ago.

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Apple releases iOS 26.1, macOS 26.1, other updates with Liquid Glass controls and more

New updates include a small but noteworthy batch of fixes and features.

After several weeks of testing, Apple has released the final versions of the 26.1 update to its various operating systems. Those include iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and the HomePod operating system, all of which switched to a new unified year-based version numbering system this fall.

This isn’t the first update that these operating systems have gotten since they were released in September, but it is the first to add significant changes and tweaks to existing features, addressing the early complaints and bugs that inevitably come with any major operating system update.

One of the biggest changes across most of the platforms is a new translucency control for Liquid Glass that tones it down without totally disabling the effect. Users can stay with the default Clear look to see the clearer, glassier look that allows more of the contents underneath Liquid Glass to show through, or the new Tinted look to get a more opaque background that shows only vague shapes and colors to improve readability.

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AMD says that it’s not pulling driver support for older Radeon GPUs afterall

Re-using old silicon means that dropping “old” GPUs can affect “new” products.

Last week, AMD released version 25.10.2 of its Adrenalin driver package for Radeon GPUs. It seemed like a relatively routine driver release with a typical list of bug fixes and game performance improvements, except for one accompanying announcement: AMD said at the time that it would be moving support for Radeon RX 5000-series and 6000-series GPUs (and their RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 architectures) to “maintenance mode.” That meant that a bunch of GPUs, including some dedicated graphics cards launched as recently as 2022, would no longer get fresh fixes and performance optimizations for newly launched games.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, AMD released several clarifying statements to address the ensuing backlash, saying that these older GPUs would still get “new features, bug fixes, and game optimizations” based on “market needs.” That must not have quieted the complaints, because AMD then made an entirely separate post to confirm that the 25.10.2 driver release “is not the end of support for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2,” and that integrated and dedicated GPUs based on these architectures would continue to receive “game support for new releases,” “stability and game optimizations,” and “security and bug fixes.”

AMD did confirm that these older GPU architectures had been moved to a separate driver path, but the company says this is meant to keep fixes and features intended for newer RDNA 3 and RDNA 4-based GPUs from inadvertently breaking things for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs.

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Windows 11 Task Manager bug makes the app’s “close” button do the exact opposite

Bug affects Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 users using the October update preview.

One reason to use the Task Manager in Windows is to see if any of the apps running on your computer are misbehaving or using a disproportionate amount of resources. But what do you do when the misbehaving app is the Task Manager itself?

After a recent Windows update, some users (including Windows Latest) noticed that closing the Task Manager window was actually failing to close the app, leaving the executable running in memory. More worryingly, each time you open the Task Manager, it spawns a new process on top of the old one, which you can repeat essentially infinitely (or until your PC buckles under the pressure).

Each instance of Task Manager takes up around 20MB of system RAM and hovers between 0 and 2 percent CPU usage—if you have just a handful of instances open, it’s unlikely that you’d notice much of a performance impact. But if you use Task Manager frequently or just go a long time between reboots, opening up two or three dozen copies of the process that are all intermittently using a fraction of your CPU can add up, leading to a potentially significant impact on performance and battery life.

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Affinity’s image-editing apps go “freemium” in first major post-Canva update

Updated app is “free forever,” but perpetually licensed Affinity apps are gone.

When graphic design platform-provider Canva bought the Affinity image-editing and publishing apps early last year, we had some major questions about how the companies’ priorities and products would mesh. How would Canva serve the users who preferred Affinity’s perpetually licensed apps to Adobe’s subscription-only software suite? And how would Affinity’s strong stance against generative AI be reconciled with Canva’s embrace of those technologies.

This week, Canva gave us definitive answers to all of those questions: a brand-new unified Affinity app that melds the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps into a single piece of software called “Affinity by Canva” that is free to use with a Canva user account, but which gates generative AI features behind Canva’s existing paid subscription plans ($120 a year for individuals).

This does seem like mostly good news, in the near to mid term, for existing Affinity app users who admired Affinity’s anti-AI stance: all three apps’ core features are free to use, and the stuff you’re being asked to pay for is stuff you mostly don’t want anyway. But it may come as unwelcome news for those who like the predictability of pay-once-own-forever software or who are nervous about where Canva might draw the line between “free” and “premium” features down the line.

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Affinity’s image-editing apps go “freemium” in first major post-Canva update

Updated app is “free forever,” but perpetually licensed Affinity apps are gone.

When graphic design platform-provider Canva bought the Affinity image-editing and publishing apps early last year, we had some major questions about how the companies’ priorities and products would mesh. How would Canva serve the users who preferred Affinity’s perpetually licensed apps to Adobe’s subscription-only software suite? And how would Affinity’s strong stance against generative AI be reconciled with Canva’s embrace of those technologies.

This week, Canva gave us definitive answers to all of those questions: a brand-new unified Affinity app that melds the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps into a single piece of software called “Affinity by Canva” that is free to use with a Canva user account, but which gates generative AI features behind Canva’s existing paid subscription plans ($120 a year for individuals).

This does seem like mostly good news, in the near to mid term, for existing Affinity app users who admired Affinity’s anti-AI stance: all three apps’ core features are free to use, and the stuff you’re being asked to pay for is stuff you mostly don’t want anyway. But it may come as unwelcome news for those who like the predictability of pay-once-own-forever software or who are nervous about where Canva might draw the line between “free” and “premium” features down the line.

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AMD shores up its budget laptop CPUs by renaming more years-old silicon

Both AMD and Intel continue to serve low-end PCs with aging silicon.

As newer, more efficient silicon manufacturing processes have gotten more expensive and difficult to develop, chipmakers like Intel and AMD have repeatedly rebranded some of their older processors with new model numbers. This has allowed both companies to release “new” products that aren’t actually new at all, muddying the waters for people trying to buy lower-end and midrange laptops.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, AMD has quietly rebranded a swath of its Ryzen laptop chips with new model numbers without changing the silicon. The rebranded processors use either Rembrandt-R silicon with Zen 3+ CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores or Mendocino silicon with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics cores. Both of these architectures first launched in 2022, but Mendocino’s Zen 2 CPU architecture dates all the way back to 2019. During the company’s model number decoder ring era, these designs had been sold as Ryzen 7035- and Ryzen 7020-series chips, respectively.

This is actually AMD’s second rebranding for the Rembrandt-R silicon, which was launched as the Ryzen 6000 series in 2022. These chips will compete most directly with Intel’s non-Ultra Core 100 series processors, most of which use 2022-vintage Raptor Lake silicon.

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