Windows 11 will clean up its own driver mess so you don’t have to

Say goodbye to the nightmare of hunting down broken drivers after a bad Windows update. Digital Trends It seems that Microsoft is keeping up its promise of making Windows 11 better. After introducing a new low-latency mode that speeds up app launches and an update that fixes the RAM memory leak issue, the tech giant is testing a new feature that addresses one of its most prominent problems. The new feature is called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery, and it can automatically roll back a broken driver that was pushed to your PC through Windows Update. Right now, if a bad driver lands on your PC through Windows Update, you are stuck waiting for the hardware partner to submit a fix, or you have to roll it back yourself. If you don’t know where to look, your PC could sit on that broken driver for a long time. With this new update, you won’t have to worry about it. Windows 11 will automatically roll back to the working driver via its update system. So how does this work? When a driver is flagged for quality issues during Microsoft’s internal shiproom evaluation process, the company can now trigger a recovery action directly from the cloud. It pushes a rollback instruction through the existing Windows Update pipeline, uninstalls the problematic driver, and replaces it with the previously working version. Paulo Vargas / Digital Trends The whole thing happens in the background, and you don’t have to do a thing. Microsoft has also made it clear that hardware partners don’t need to take any action either. The recovery is handled entirely by Microsoft. Partners will be notified when a driver is rejected, but the fix goes out without their involvement. What does this mean for regular Windows users? It means one less thing to worry about. Driver issues after a Windows Update are one of the more frustrating problems Windows users run into, and most people have no idea how to fix them. This feature quietly handles it for you. Microsoft says the feature is currently being tested with hardware partners and will begin rolling out gradually in September. Rachit is a seasoned tech journalist with over seven years of experience covering the consumer technology landscape. Computing Your next free Google account might only come with 5GB of storage Google's free storage has been a competitive advantage over Apple's 5GB iCloud limit for years, but that’s changing. Google has quietly altered one of the most reliable promises in consumer tech: 15GB of free cloud storage. For years, signing up for a Google account meant getting 15GB of free storage, shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos. However, that’s changed. New accounts are now defaulting to 5GB (same as iCloud), with the full 15GB available only if you have entered your phone number during setup. The prompt users are seeing reads: “Your account includes 5GB of storage. Now get even more storage space with your phone number.” Read more Computing Sony shows off AI-touched Xperia 1 VIII camera samples. It’s an epic self-own that I can’t digest Sony built the Xperia 1 series for people who know what a histogram looks like. Xperia Intelligence appears to have been built for everyone else, and the sample images make that tension impossible to ignore. Sony has a camera legacy that most brands, regardless of whether they make cameras or smartphones, dream of. The company rewrote what full-frame sensors could do with its Alpha series. That particular rendering of skin tones, that restraint with saturation, the commitment to accurate white balance; the company’s color science is precisely why cinematographers, videographers, and photographers like me, in the consumer tech space, swear by its color science and camera hardware. Read more Computing Razer’s new Blade 18 gets Arrow Lake refresh and a modest $3,999.99 starting price For $3,999.99, you get the base model with Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti. A 5090 variant is available, too. Razer has officially unveiled the 2026 Blade 18 today, and at the heart of all three configurations is an Intel Arrow Lake processor. I’m talking about the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, which features 24 cores, up to 5.5GHz clock speed (with boost), 36MB cache, and an onboard NPU that delivers up to 13 TOPS of compute power. Read more