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Windows 11 users, watch out – you’re in for an upgrade you can’t ignore thanks to mandatory adverts
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Microsoft seems intent on making ads disguised as recommendations a fact of life in Windows 11, and the tech giant has apparently begun testing promotional recommendation pages that take up your whole screen, urging users to install Edge and other services – similar to the page you see when you first set up your device or install Windows 11.

Thinking back, I recall a few times when this screen appeared on my own Windows 11 PC after an update, and it caught me off guard as my PC is already set up to my liking. Like myself, some users would be greeted with “Let’s finish setting up your PC” automatically after a Windows Update had been installed. Before this, this sort of notification might appear if you bought a PC and set it up for the first time, but now it looks like anyone already up and running could also see it. 

Man sitting at a table and looking at a laptop, holding one hand in the other in front of his face and looking concerned

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Space_Cat)

A breakdown of the new notification in Windows 11

The new notification screens were spotted by Windows Latest following Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday update in April 2024. As shown in a screenshot provided in Windows Latest’s report, the notification screen explains that the ‘set-up’ process will involve backing up your files using OneDrive, restoring “Microsoft recommended settings” (read: setting Edge as your default browser), backing up your phone on your PC, setting up Windows Hello, as well as getting a Microsoft 365 subscription, and turning on Phone Link between your phone and PC.

You are then given two options, neither of which is to opt out of the notification if you’re not interested. You can choose to “Continue” or select “Remind me in 3 days,” and the pop-ups will eventually return. Windows Latest tried the ‘Continue’ option, which led to a “Let’s customize your experience” page which prompts users to customize their Start menu’s ‘Recommended’ section. As shown in a provided screenshot, users would be given some control over the apps that appear in this section. 

If you decide not to make any adjustments you’ll be guided to a page with the heading “Use recommended browser settings.” The top option, not by coincidence, is Microsoft Edge – Windows 11’s default browser. This is accompanied by Bing as the default search engine, which again no surprise. Enabling these also pins the Edge icon to the taskbar and creates a desktop icon (if you’ve removed these). Luckily, if you’re not interested in using Microsoft’s web browser and search engine, you can click on “Don’t update your settings,” (which sounds like you’re getting left behind), and you can keep your previous settings. 

Woman standing in a room at night time with a backdrop of a city, while holding a laptop and using it with one hand

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Gorodenkoff)

A closer look at Microsoft's promotional tactics

This isn’t the first of Microsoft’s heavy-handed attempts to get people to use its software and services, and not the first to be met with distaste from users. As Windows Latest points out, Edge already comes preinstalled, and it’s difficult to remove for users running Windows 11 outside of Europe. 

If you make it through all of these option screens and have any patience left, you’ll be met with more promotional pages for other Microsoft services, like the offer to try Microsoft 365 Family with a free trial. You could forgo this and subscribe to Microsoft 365 Basic, which includes ad-free OneDrive and Outlook, along with 100GB of cloud storage. In the screenshot that Windows Latest includes, no prices are stated – just a ‘Continue’ button. After this page, users are urged to set up Microsoft’s Phone Link app, which works in a similar way to Apple’s AirDrop feature, and allows you to access data on a linked Android phone on your PC.

Each page does at least have an option to skip that particular step and finish the PC setup process, but this is strange wording, because as I mentioned earlier when I saw the notification, and as Windows Latest stated while documenting this process, our PCs were already set up to our liking.

This has been happening in parallel with Microsoft adding ads disguised as recommendations in the Start menu and experimenting with adding Xbox Game Pass ads on the Settings page. I don’t like this direction for Microsoft, and if it’s not careful, it could end up annoying users rather than encouraging them to try out the software.  We live in a time when people’s attention spans can be short, but frustrations and annoyance can live in people’s minds for a pretty long time. 

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Copilot is everywhere in Windows 11 and it’s about to get harder to ignore – but is Microsoft in danger of wearing out the AI assistant’s welcome?
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Windows 11 is going to see a lot more of Copilot in the future – that’s pretty obviously the line Microsoft is taking with its desktop-based assistant – and there’s fresh evidence of the AI creeping into more corners of the OS.

Firstly, we have a sighting of a new wallpaper, which came yesterday, when a couple of inbound laptops with the promising Snapdragon X Elite CPU were leaked. Both of those Lenovo notebooks had a Copilot-themed wallpaper on the desktop, so it’s a safe assumption that Microsoft has an official new background for the AI in the pipeline.

As Windows Latest observes, this is actually a traditional ‘bloom’ wallpaper, except Microsoft has redone the image in the Copilot colors (mirroring the Copilot button in the taskbar).

The tech site also points out other ways in which Copilot is creeping into Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge. For example, in the Edge browser, as highlighted by leaker Leopeva64, there’s now a bar of options pertaining to the AI when you open the Settings panel.

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This bar contains suggestions for how you might use Copilot, allowing you to get advice on security settings for example, or managing your passwords in the browser. These suggestions change depending on what section of Edge’s settings you’re in, by the way, making them more relevant to what you might be looking to do.

Note that this idea is just in testing right now, and in the Canary channel to boot (the earliest test avenue).

Another ability brought in for Copilot in Edge (again, in the Canary channel) is an expanded Ask Copilot context menu. This means that when you select a section of text in a web page, there are new options for directly interacting with Copilot in this menu.

As Windows Latest explains, these choices are: Explain, Summarize, Expand, and Ask anything in Chat.

The last option acts like the current incarnation of Ask Copilot – it just fires up the AI’s panel with a query on the selected text.

With the new options, however, Explain prompts Copilot to do just that – offer an explanation of the text – and Summarize provides a summary, as you’d expect. In a similar vein, Expand goes the other way, furnishing you with extra facts or information about the selected text.

Again with Edge, Leopeva64 also spotted that AI is going to be integrated into the browser’s ‘Magnify Image’ option, with a button spotted that offers to ‘AI Enhance’ the image after it’s been blown up. This is in very early testing, though, and the button doesn’t yet do anything at all.

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Another recent addition Windows Latest flagged up is ‘Circle to Copilot’ in Edge in Windows 11 (and iOS), allowing you to literally draw a circle around something to activate a Copilot query about the highlighted item.

All this comes on top of a recent move in the Beta channel of Windows 11 previews, trying out a new way of highlighting that Copilot can help with something – by animating the taskbar button for the AI when this is the case. New options have also been added to the menu that appears when you hover over the Copilot button, too, expanding that further.

Analysis: Making Copilot a more visible presence

All of this is still to come, we should note – these are changes in testing for Windows 11 or its Edge browser, and in the case of the wallpaper, a glimpse of what’s very likely to come.

Indeed, that Copilot background will likely be the default wallpaper for AI PCs starting with Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops that launch in June. (Not forgetting Microsoft’s own Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, the consumer spins on which will land then, and may have a custom version of the Elite SoC inside).

Overall, though, it’s clear that Microsoft is pushing forward with expanding Copilot’s capabilities, and sussing out ways in which the AI can be made more visible on the desktop. Whether that’s about an animation for the taskbar button (effectively declaring “It’s-a-me, Copilot, I can help with that”), or a fancy desktop wallpaper that could be a permanent reminder of the AI, if you fall for the color scheme (which does look quite funky, to be fair).

We’d be surprised if most of these tested changes didn’t come to fruition, frankly, and as noted, there’s a theme of Microsoft increasingly pushing Copilot which comes as no surprise.

The big rumored addition on the horizon is, of course, AI Explorer – but that feature (supposedly debuting in the Windows 11 24H2 update) may have an unexpected twist in its initial incarnation that’s a bit of a shocker. (Spoiler alert: If you don’t have an ARM CPU like the aforementioned Snapdragon, then you can forget it – Intel and AMD-powered PCs might be left out in the cold).

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