Googlebook pre-orders begin September 21, and they'll be on shelves October 4.

With tools like a multimodal cursor, smart dictation, and more, Googlebook anticipates your needs to simplify your day.

Google and partners are finally announcing the first laptops under the new Googlebook banner. There are five models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to kick things off. They're available for preorder starting today and arrive in stores on October 4th.

Starting prices range from $899 to $1,299, putting the Googlebooks in the same territory as the MacBook Air and a plethora of Windows laptops. Each Googlebook also comes with 12 months of Google AI Pro with 5TB of cloud storage, along with three-month trials of YouTube Premium, Adobe Photoshop, and CapCut. Google's also promising up to 10 years of updates.

Here's a look at the hardwar …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Chester Ismay, a data science educator and AI consultant, created schedule viewers to keep up with the sports he follows, including the WNBA, NFL, NBA, and Premier League. But he still had to decide which games deserved his attention each week.

In this episode of Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes, Chester built a sports concierge agent to surface the games he should watch. It reads his preferences and current schedules, then sends a weekly summary to his phone. He took the audience through the setup, which combines a prompt file, limited tool permissions, a schedule, and notifications.

How to create your own sports concierge

1. Define your preferences. Chester started with a structured preferences file that identifies the teams he follows and adds context about why he follows them. He built a simple web interface for editing those preferences rather than working directly with the underlying JSON.
2. Give the agent access to current schedule data. His existing sports viewers pull schedule information from sources such as ESPN and store it in repositories on GitHub. A read-schedules tool, run with Node, pulls the latest schedule files and combines them with Chester’s preferences, giving the agent the information it needs without requiring it to search for each game on its own.
3. Write the agent’s policy. Chester spent most of the walkthrough on CONCIERGE.md, the file that defines the agent’s job. The policy sets the goal, identifies the data sources, and defines the rules for deciding which games to recommend. It also specifies how to handle finished tournaments and duplicate matchups, along with the expected output and delivery format. Chester noted that when the output misses the mark, he goes back to the policy and adds more detail to the instructions or adjusts them to better match with the goals of the project.
4. Run the agent with limited permissions. Chester used Claude Code to read the files, apply the policy, and generate the weekly recommendations. He configured permissions so the agent worked only with the files and tools required for the task.
5. Schedule delivery and check the results. Chester used launchd on his Mac to run the concierge every Wednesday and ntfy to send the result to his phone. He checks the recommendations against the underlying schedules and uses tests and multiple data sources to catch errors. Time zone handling required another adjustment. Games could fall on the wrong day when the system defaulted to UTC, so Chester added explicit time zone instructions.

Coming up next

Next week, AI engineer Sajal Sharma gives an agent its own computer in the cloud using services such as E2B and Scrapybara. He’ll demonstrate how sandboxing lets an agent install packages, run code, drive a browser, and control a remote desktop.

Follow along with Zero to Agent in 30 Minutes on Radar, or watch the latest episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re an O’Reilly member, you can watch live. Save your seat.

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Today we published our latest Global AI Diffusion Report. Global AI diffusion continued to climb in the second quarter of 2026. In June, AI usage was 18.8% of the working-age population worldwide, an increase of about 1% from the first quarter of this year. Growth was broad-based: almost every economy saw increased usage.

Notably, the UAE (73.3%) and Singapore (64.3%) continue to top the leaderboard. South Korea again saw the largest absolute change, with an increase of 3.5 percentage points. Saudi Arabia climbed five places from 30th to 25th, the largest rise in the rankings. Japan recorded the largest relative change, growing by 2.2 percentage points, or roughly 10% relative to its Q1 usage of 22.5%. Worldwide, the quarter brought a continued widening of the AI gap between the Global North and South, with usage now at 28.8% in the North and 16.2% in the South.

To track all these trends, we continue to measure AI diffusion as the share of people worldwide ages of 15 and 64 who have used a generative AI product during the reported period. This measure is derived from aggregated and anonymized Microsoft telemetry data and is adjusted to reflect differences in operating system and device market share, internet penetration, and population. Additional details on the methodology are available in our AI Diffusion technical paper.

No single metric is perfect, and this one is no exception. Through the Microsoft AI Economy Institute, we continue to refine how we measure AI diffusion globally, including how adoption varies across countries in ways that best advance priorities such as scientific discovery and productivity gains. For this report, we rely on the strongest cross-country measure available today. Over the past year, there has been a significant rise in new AI tools and models. For our next report, we will expand our measure to include usage of these new tools and expect this update to increase AI user share across almost all economies, with larger projected increases in China.

In addition to our comparison of AI diffusion between the Global North and the Global South, we also find important differences in how AI is being used. Using consumer Microsoft Copilot usage insights, we examined these differences. The most notable difference is a higher share of education and learning use in the Global South.

This report also includes a substantive discussion of open-weight AI models. Open-weight AI model use is increasingly visible through application programming interface (API) usage of AI, where open models have captured a growing share of token volume. This shift could especially benefit the Global South by lowering access costs and enabling adaptation to local languages and needs, although barriers such as infrastructure, connectivity, and skills remain.

Download the latest Global AI Diffusion report and explore the data here.

The post The continued state of global AI diffusion in 2026 appeared first on Microsoft On the Issues.

PowerShell Restart-Computer allows you to restart local and remote computers by using the Restart-Computer command. This cmdlet can be entered directly at the command prompt or it can be included in a PowerShell script. It is worth noting however, that in order to use this command to remotely shut down a machine that is running Linux or MacOS, you will need to be running PowerShell 7.1. The PowerShell 3.0 version of the Restart-Computer cmdlet can shut down the localhost or a remote Windows machine but is not compatible with MacOS.

Use PowerShell Restart-Computer when the restart belongs in an administrative workflow

Normally, restarting a Windows computer involves clicking the Start button and then clicking the Power button. Even so, there are situations in which it may be preferable to use PowerShell instead. This is especially true if you are interacting with a remote system and do not have physical access. As an example, you might use PowerShell to reboot a system following:

• Windows updates
• Remote administration
• The running of automation scripts
• Server maintenance

Use PowerShell Restart-Computer command locally, but do not assume it is harmless

The easiest way to reboot a local computer using PowerShell is to enter the following command:

Restart-Computer

When you run this command on a Windows 11 machine, the computer will restart immediately. It is worth noting however, that using the Restart-Computer cmdlet on Windows Server requires you to have the appropriate permissions.

Reserve PowerShell Restart-Computer -Force for a known blocking process

Occasionally, PowerShell Restart-Computer may have trouble restarting a computer. This is especially true if there are certain applications open or processes running. In such situations, you can force a reboot by appending the -Force parameter to the end of the Restart Computer cmdlet. The full command looks like this.

Restart-Computer -Force

The most important thing to understand about using PowerShell to force a restart is that the computer will reboot immediately, with no regard for anything that might be running on the machine. As such, this command carries the potential for data loss since any unsaved data is typically lost during a reboot.

Confirm the remote-management path before restarting

The procedure for restarting a remote computer is nearly identical to restarting a local machine. Once again, you will use the Restart-Computer cmdlet. The difference is that you will need to append the -ComputerName parameter, followed by the name of the system that you want to reboot. Here is an example:

Restart-Computer -ComputerName PC01

While the previous example is simple, there is one major caveat to using it. The command will only work if you have permission to reboot the remote system. In a real world environment, it is often necessary to provide PowerShell with alternate credentials that are valid for the remote machine. The command used for rebooting a remote computer when alternate credentials are required is:

Restart-Computer -ComputerName PC01 -Credential (Get-Credential)

Many administrators simplify this procedure slightly by capturing the credentials to a variable. An example of such a command sequence might look like this:

$Cred = Get-Credential

Restart-Computer -ComputerName PC01 -Credential $Cred

vPowerShell Restart-Computer for multi-computer restarts

Just as PowerShell can reboot a single computer, it can also reboot multiple computers with a single command. All you have to do is to separate the computer names with a comma. If you needed to reboot three different machines for example, you might use a command like this:

Restart-Computer -ComputerName PC01,PC02,PC03

Wait for the service your next step actually requires

Occasionally, you may need to include the Restart-Computer cmdlet within a larger script. As an example, you might create a script that is designed to perform a system maintenance task requiring a reboot. The problem is, how do you pause your script until the reboot is complete, and then continue running the script? The easiest option is to use the -Wait parameter. Using -Wait by itself tells the script to pause until the target machine has rebooted. An example of this command is:

Restart-Computer -ComputerName PC01 -Wait

You can also use the -For PowerShell parameter to tell the script to stop until WinRM connectivity has been verified. Another option is to use the -Timeout parameter followed by a period of time (up to 300 seconds) for which the script should wait.

Diagnose permissions and connectivity before forcing the restart

Although the Restart-Computer cmdlet is straightforward to use, things can and sometimes do go wrong.

Access denied

The most common problem is likely an Access Denied message. Such a message typically means that admin credentials are required.

Remote restart fails

Another common problem is that a remote restart fails. This is usually related to a firewall restriction or a WinRM configuration problem. The firewall must be configured to support WMI/DCOM or WinRM/WSman.

Computer never restarts

If the remote computer never restarts, the problem may be related to a hung service. In such cases, you may have to resort to using the -Force parameter. Similarly, network connectivity issues may also prevent a remote machine from restarting.

Prefer PowerShell Restart-Computer for orchestration and shutdown.exe for cancellable scheduling

Shutdown.exe is a command line utility that is built into the Windows operating system. It uses various command line switches to shut down or restart the computer. Both PowerShell and Shutdown.exe can be used to reboot or to shut down your computer. However, PowerShell does not offer a good way to force a computer to hibernate, while shutdown.exe does. Here are the PowerShell and Shutdown.exe commands for various common tasks.

Task	Shutdown.exe command	PowerShell equivalent
Restart the computer	Shutdown /r	Restart-Computer
Turn off the computer immediately	Shutdown /s /t 0	Stop-Computer
Restart your computer after a one-minute delay	Shutdown /r /t 60	Start-Sleep 60 | Restart-Computer
Hibernate the local machine	Shutdown /h	No PowerShell equivalent
Abort a pending shutdown This refers to a situation in which the computer will automatically shut down after a specific amount of time.	Shutdown /a	Press Ctrl + C  (can only interrupt the foreground PowerShell pipeline before Restart-Computer executes.)

Conclusion

Use Restart-Computer as the default when the restart is part of a scripted Windows workflow, especially when the next step depends on the remote system coming back online. Use shutdown.exe instead when you need a scheduled restart that an operator can cancel. Before using -Force, verify that no one is actively using the system and that no application or write operation can lose data.

Frequently asked questions

The post PowerShell Restart-Computer: Restart Local and Remote Computers appeared first on Petri IT Knowledgebase.