Today Microsoft published an extensive blog post about the controversial Recall feature that was intended to launch with Copilot+ enabled Windows 11 PCs. To recap on Recall: Recall was announced as a service that creates and stores 'snapshots' of the user's activity on their PC, and uses the neural processing hardware within a Copilot+ certified machine to filter search requests by the user in order to find what they had previously seen. In effect, it took constant screenshots and would index the contents of those screenshots to assist with vague search queries. Saw a very funny picture in Discord a week ago and can't find it but can describe what it looked like? Search Recall and with the power of neural processing it would sift through its index of stored screenshots and attempt to provide you the exact image you described. Or, you could scroll back through the gallery of snapshots yourself to find what you wanted.

The idea of a program or service running in the background taking screenshots of your activity every few seconds yielded some pretty unsavory reactions from just about everyone. To assuage privacy concerns Microsoft did release an update in June committing to a broad set of security improvements to Recall before the preview would be available to test. This latest blog post titled, "Update on Recall security and privacy architecture", outlines more improvements on top of those announced back in June.

Microsoft quietly added WordPad to its "Deprecated features for Windows client" list last September—a short message stated that the popular bundled-in word processing application will: "no longer be updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like.doc and.rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like.txt." The aforementioned "future" version of their mainstream operating system appears to be the recently issued Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26040 (through Canary Channel). Microsoft is pushing an AI feature enriched user experience—last week's Insider blog reveals that Voice Clarity is escaping its Surface family confines; the application no longer relies on NPU hardware.

According to Preview 26040's accompanying notes: "Starting with this build, the WordPad and People apps will no longer be installed after doing a clean install of the OS. In a future flight, WordPad will be removed in an upgrade. WordPad will not be reinstallable. WordPad is a deprecated Windows feature." Many journalists have pointed out that protest efforts could save WordPad from its deprecated fate—enough fuss was generated over Microsoft's proposed axing of MS Paint, to warrant a reversal and eventual AI-enrichment. A segment of the Windows userbase will welcome the upcoming dismissal of Cortana (already effective in the latest W11 preview)—their older personal productivity assistant is being pushed aside in favor of Windows Copilot.

According to the latest report by Windows Latest, Microsoft's Windows 10 2004 May update will bring a much-needed disk performance update. The underlying reason behind this improvement is the terrible performance of the Windows Search indexer, which in previous versions of Windows 10 had high disk usage and resulted in a slowdown of the system. However, Microsoft decided to improve that and found a way to optimize its performance. This improvement will be of much need to everyone who owns and runs Windows 10 on a Hard Drive.

In Windows 10 update 1909, Microsoft has decided to separate Cortana from the Windows Search and thus brought disk usage a bit lower. However, Microsoft's engineers have been fine-tuning the Search Indexer, and now the performance is significantly better while having a lot less disk usage. Previously, the Search Indexer was very aggressive and spared no resources for its process, so this is a welcome addition. This improvement will leave disk usage capacity to other processes and will result in a noticeably snappier system, which Hard Drive users will appreciate the most.

After announcing its plan for a new, six-month update cycle for Windows 10, which Microsoft is treating as the last, monolithic release of Windows, the Redmond company has now announced its plans for the forthcoming Fall Creators Update (aherm) update.

Microsoft also announced the adoption of a new, Fluent design language, which strikes me as aesthetically pleasing, and a far cry from the Metro interface we've been saddled with since Windows 8. It carries on the bold color schemes, but marries it with a more subdued, less in-you-face style of user interface, and is supposed to encourage developers to design their apps in a way that makes sense on a variety of platforms - which, considering the advent of the Universal Windows Platform, makes all kinds of sense, doesn't it?