Nearly a year after announcing the feature, Microsoft is finally ready to roll the controversial Windows Recall feature out to the general public, the company announced today on its Windows Experience Blog.

Only available on Copilot+ PCs, a subset of Windows 11 systems sold within the last year or so, Recall takes continuous screenshots of everything you do on your PC, saving them, scraping text from them, and saving it all in a searchable database. This obviously has major security and privacy implications—anyone who can get access to your Recall database can see nearly everything you've done on your PC—which is why Microsoft's initial rollout attempt was such a mess.

Recall's long road to release involved a rushed initial almost-launch, harsh criticism of its (then mostly nonexistent) security protections, multiple delays, a major under-the-hood overhaul, and five months of testing in Microsoft's Windows Insider beta program. Microsoft signaled that Recall was nearly ready for release two weeks ago when it came to the near-final Release Preview channel.

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode seven, "Goldeneyes," which was released on April 10.

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Some elements of Microsoft's Copilot assistant in Windows 11 have felt like a solution in search of a problem—and it hasn't helped that Microsoft has frequently changed Copilot's capabilities, turning it from a native Windows app into a web app and back again.

But I find myself intrigued by a new addition to Copilot Vision that Microsoft began rolling out this week to testers in its Windows Insider program. Copilot Vision launched late last year as a feature that could look at pages in the Microsoft Edge browser and answer questions based on those pages' contents. The new Vision update extends that capability to any app window, allowing you to ask Copilot not just about the contents of a document but also about the user interface of the app itself.

Microsoft's Copilot Vision update can see the contents of any app window you share with it. Credit: Microsoft

Provided the app works as intended—not a given for any software, but especially for AI features—Copilot Vision could replace "frantic Googling" as a way to learn how to use a new app or how to do something new or obscure in complex PC apps like Word, Excel, or Photoshop. I recently switched from Photoshop to Affinity Photo, for example, and I'm still finding myself tripped up by small differences in workflows and UI between the two apps. Copilot Vision could, in theory, ease that sort of transition.

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Windows 11 has become so synonymous with Microsoft's push into generative AI that it's easy to forget that it originally launched as a mostly cosmetic overhaul of Windows 10. But Microsoft continues to work on fundamental elements of the operating system's design. Case in point, Windows tester phantomofearth enabled an overhauled version of the Start menu from a recent Windows 11 beta build, the menu's first substantial rethink since Windows 11 launched a little over three years ago (via The Verge).

The new, larger Start menu displays up to two rows of eight pinned apps—you can't see more than two rows by default, but you can expand this section to show more apps—and then shows the scrollable list of apps installed on your PC. This list is hidden behind an "All" button on the current Start menu. These apps can be displayed as a vertically scrollable list, in a horizontal grid, or sorted by category (which does appear to be the most space-efficient display option).

Perhaps most interestingly for people who are tired of Windows' constant reminders and recommendations, the new Start menu looks like it lets you turn that "Recommended" section off entirely, replacing it with a full list of all apps installed on your PC. I find the Recommended area inoffensive when it sticks to showing me recently installed apps or opened files, but recent Windows 11 builds have also used it to advertise apps from the Microsoft Store.

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Framework, the designers and sellers of the modular and repairable Framework Laptop 13 and other products, announced today that it would be "temporarily pausing US sales" on some of its laptop configurations as a result of new tariffs put on Taiwanese imports by the Trump administration. The affected models will be removed from Framework's online store for now, and there's no word on when buyers can expect them to come back.

"We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0 percent," the company responded to a post asking why it was pausing sales. "At a 10 percent tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss."

"Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it," Framework said. Nintendo also paused US preorders for its upcoming Switch 2 console last week after the tariffs were announced.

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We're used to updating Windows, macOS, and Linux systems at least once a month (and usually more), but people with ancient DOS-based PCs still get to join in the fun every once in a while. Over the weekend, the team that maintains FreeDOS officially released version 1.4 of the operating system, containing a list of fixes and updates that have been in the works since the last time a stable update was released in 2022.

FreeDOS creator and maintainer Jim Hall goes into more detail about the FreeDOS 1.4 changes here, and full release notes for the changes are here. The release has "a focus on stability" and includes an updated installer, new versions of common tools like fdisk, and format and the edlin text editor. The release also includes updated HTML Help files.

Hall talked with Ars about several of these changes when we interviewed him about FreeDOS in 2024. The team issued the first release candidate for FreeDOS 1.4 back in January.

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On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that would transform personal computing over the next five decades.

I'm not here to do a history of Microsoft, because Wikipedia already exists and because the company has already put together a gauzy 50th-anniversary retrospective site with some retro-themed wallpapers. But the anniversary did make me try to remember which Microsoft product I consciously used for the first time, the one that made me aware of the company and the work it was doing.

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode six, "The Shadow in the Night," which was released on April 3.

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In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we're looking at.

But interviews with Nintendo executives and a blog post from Nvidia did at least confirm several of the new chip's capabilities. The "custom Nvidia processor" has a GPU "with dedicated [Ray-Tracing] Cores and Tensor Cores for stunning visuals and AI-driven enhancements," writes Nvidia Software Engineering VP Muni Anda.

This means that, as rumored, the Switch 2 will support Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology, which helps to upscale a lower-resolution image into a higher-resolution image with less of a performance impact than native rendering and less loss of quality than traditional upscaling methods. For the Switch games that can render at 4K or at 120 FPS 1080p, DLSS will likely be responsible for making it possible.

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Among the changes mentioned in yesterday's Nintendo Switch 2 presentation was a note that the new console doesn't just support MicroSD Express cards for augmenting the device's 256GB of internal storage, but it requires MicroSD Express. Whatever plentiful, cheap microSD card you're using in your current Switch, including Sandisk's Nintendo-branded ones, can't migrate over to your Switch 2 alongside all your Switch 1 games.

MicroSD Express, explained

Why is regular-old MicroSD no longer good enough? It all comes down to speed.

Most run-of-the-mill SD and microSD cards you can buy today are using some version of the Ultra High Speed (UHS) standard. Designed to augment the default speed (12.5MB/s) and high speed (25MB/s) from the earliest versions of the SD card standard, the three UHS versions enable data transfers of up to 624MB/s.

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Nintendo's Switch 2 presentation gave us pricing for the console ($449 to start) and Nintendo's product pages have given us pricing information for accessories ($80 for a Pro Controller, $90 for another pair of Joy-Cons, and $110 for a replacement dock, sheesh). But what Nintendo didn't mention during the presentation was game pricing, either for standalone Switch 2 titles or the Switch 2 Edition upgrades for existing Switch games.

Nintendo announced via its website after the presentation that Mario Kart World, the console's flagship launch title, will cost $50 when you buy a digital copy as part of a Switch 2 bundle. But the game will cost $80 when you buy it on its own, $30 more than the pack-in version and $20 more than the usual $60 price for first-party Switch games.

Pre-order listings at US retailers that have gone live since this morning also list several $80 games—we'll use Wal-Mart's as an example. The upgraded Switch 2 Editions for a trio of Switch games—2024's Super Mario Party Jamboree, 2023's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and 2022's Kirby and the Forgotten Land—are all going for $80, the same as Mario Kart World.

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