ISSUE 23.45 • 2026-11-09 COPILOT By Will Fastie Microsoft’s handling of Copilot has been messy from the start. This isn’t exactly news. Copilot has been a moving target for the past three years, and the dance probably isn’t over yet. The most recent manifestation of this was the collapse of the Windows Copilot App, which […]

MICROSOFT 365 By Peter Deegan Rent or buy? It’s the question all Microsoft customers face. It’s not a simple comparison, but the hard facts lead to one conclusion for most people. Microsoft stopped supporting Office 2021 on October 13, 2026, with no extension and no paid security updates. If that’s you, or you’re buying Office […]

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen Zipping around the sky in my car with the new Windows 27 running on my brain implant, I will enjoy my music, weather forecasts, system info, calendars, and my everyday tools and settings. They will be displayed in a single panel that appears when I need it and goes away […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley Recently, we were looking for something to solve a problem at the office.  Rather than spin my wheels looking for the best way to get software A (an Excel spreadsheet) to talk to software B (a line-of-business app that has a SQL backend), I reached out to someone on the […]

ISSUE 23.44 • 2026-11-02 PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston Although we are already deluged with information from the Internet, our content-overload problem is being made worse by “technology” newsletters and websites that knowingly publish outrageous fictions. I’m not referring to the usual breathless prose by tech writers about some new gizmo that the authors are […]

RATIONAL AI By Michael A. Covington AI companies measure usage in “tokens.” What are those, and how can we control how many we’re using? Before you ask that, you may wonder whether it’s even worth counting things that are priced at a few dollars per million, or even a few cents per million. How would […]

MICROSOFT 365 By Peter Deegan Sooner or later, everyone needs to do something simple with a PDF. It could be combining two files, pulling out a few pages, or shrinking a file that’s too big to email. These are features that Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader DC does not provide. Naturally, Adobe wants you to pay […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley Providers are pushing us to two-factor authentication (2FA). Every day, I get a prompt to enroll in two-factor, use two-factor instead of a password, or even upgrade to a passkey. Just the other day, I saw that Facebook is mandating passkeys for me. Don’t panic. It doesn’t appear that this […]

ISSUE 23.43 • 2026-10-26 PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley We take for granted that our computers will boot and operate efficiently. For all operating systems, from Windows to Apple to your favorite flavor of Linux, the software we most often take for granted is drivers because they power all the things we depend upon. Speakers. […]

MICROSOFT By Lance Whitney Microsoft makes some of my favorite products, ones that I couldn’t live or work without. But it also drives me nuts with all the technical problems and sales tactics I encounter. When AskWoody editor Will Fastie asked me to write an opinion piece about Microsoft as a company, I had to […]

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen You’ve been there: Windows adds another suggestion, button, ad, or pop-up, and figuring out how to turn the darned thing off can feel like looking for a Necco wafer in a button jar. NixThis by Builtbybel takes a different approach. You just point it at the thing that’s bugging you, […]

LEGAL BRIEF By Max Stul Oppenheimer, Esq. On August 26, Meta and the Attorneys General of 51 US states and territories filed a request that a federal district court judge approve the settlement of a complaint. The settlement proposal is 130 pages long (although 53 of them are signature pages for all the parties and […]

ISSUE 23.42 • 2026-10-19 PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston It’s now clearer than ever that the algorithms used by social-media apps such as Facebook and Instagram are harming young people and adults. As San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge recently wrote, “five times more 10- to 14-year-old girls were admitted to the ER […]

MICROSOFT 365 By Peter Deegan Microsoft announced unwelcome changes to OneDrive allotments for Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans. Less widely reported is a new “Pro” plan with an astonishing price tag. I will explain the changes and compare all the consumer Microsoft 365 plans. For Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans, OneDrive will be […]

SOFTWARE By Will Fastie I hardly know where to start. This is a remarkable development. It should not have come as a surprise. Based on the rapid pace of AI, it was inevitable. It’s just that we are suddenly confronted with a situation we have not seen before. ArtCraft has used AI to develop almost […]

PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley Will October bring tricks or treats? It’s the season when children in all manner of scary and not-so-scary costumes come to my door at the end of the month to yell “Trick or Treat!” and are handed candy. It’s also the time when I look to Microsoft and wonder whether […]

ISSUE 23.41 • 2026-10-12 WINDOWS 11 By Martin Brinkmann Microsoft is phasing out VBScript, with the next major compatibility hit arriving around 2026–27. Here is what actually breaks, why VBA survives, and how to properly audit your systems before the lights go out. For roughly three decades, VBScript has been the duct tape holding together […]

COMMENTARY By Amy Babinchak I am a known person in the Great Lakes sailing community, at least in some circles. Recently, I was asked to identify a fish from a photograph taken in northern Lake Michigan. This seemed a reasonable assignment, but I didn’t recognize the fish. I can identify a lot of Great Lakes […]

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen All I wanted was a free program to adjust the brightness of my two computer screens. Bright screens are pretty irritating on my old eyes at five a.m. I could have tried to figure out the monitor buttons, but those things must be designed by the same folks who design […]

ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley It’s that time of the year again. No, not pumpkin spice — I’m talking about Cybersecurity Awareness Month. AI provided this definition: “October is recognized as Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the United States, led annually by CISA and the National Cybersecurity Alliance, with themes such as ‘Securing the Next 250’ […]