Wayne Williams

The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities affected millions of processors around the world, and the "fixes" that followed compounded the problems with reports of the patches bricking AMD PCs, and Ubuntu systems, and causing major slowdowns. Intel even told customers to stop installing the patches due to 'unpredictable' reboot issues.

In a new blog post, Microsoft provides an update on the state of the situation, and has some good news for Windows 1o users.

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Shortly after Microsoft released the latest Windows 10 preview build to Insiders on the Fast ring, reports started coming in that the Store was missing for a number of users.

The problem wasn’t one of those listed in the known issues, and Microsoft announced that it was investigating. If you’re on the new build and the Store is missing for you, there is now a workaround you can try.

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While NetMarketShare has Windows 10 stumbling backwards in February, StatCounter shows the opposite. Rather than the new OS losing share, the Irish analyst firm has Windows 10 shooting upwards, past Windows 7.

That’s good news for Microsoft as it would have been rather embarrassing if Windows 7 had reclaimed the crown after only one month.

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Depending on which analyst firm you believe, Windows 10 either finally overtook Windows 7 in January (StatCounter), or it simply narrowed the gap a little more (NetMarketShare).

If you were expecting NetMarketShare’s latest figures to show Windows 10 besting Windows 7 there as well this month, you are in for a nasty surprise as its numbers for February have the OS slipping into reverse gear and actually losing share.

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Amazon is a company that isn’t afraid to take risks, and try new things. Some of its ideas -- like the Echo -- paid off handsomely, while other gambles, like the Amazon Fire Phone, failed miserably.

Amazon is also happy to splash the cash to expand its reach, buying Whole Foods in 2017, and Ring this week. But where can Amazon go next? LendEDU ran a poll of 1,000 American consumers who had purchased something from Amazon in the last 30 days, and asked them whether they’d be interested in using an Amazon-created cryptocurrency for purchases, or banking with the retail giant. The results may surprise you.

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We’re pretty much on the home straight for the next big feature update of Windows 10.

Rumored to be called the Spring Creators Update, the final release on the Redstone 4 branch will introduce a lot of new features and improvements to Microsoft’s newest OS. Today's Insider build polishes things up and adds some improvements for enterprise customers.

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Public Cloud is a massive business for tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently the clear leader, with 62 percent share, followed by Microsoft Azure, on 20 percent, and Google on just 12 percent.

However, Google has scored an important win over Microsoft, replacing its rival as the cloud infrastructure service Apple relies on for its own iCloud services.

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We’re edging ever closer to the release of the next big Windows 10 feature update. Rumored to be called the Spring Creators Update, it includes a number of high profile new features and improvements.

Last week, Microsoft rolled out two new Insider builds -- one for those on the Fast ring, and another for those who opted to Skip Ahead (the first in the Redstone 5 branch). Today, the software giant delivers a build just for those on the Fast ring.

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If you grew up in the UK in the 1980s, you’re probably familiar with the Acorn Computers brand. The company produced a number of popular microcomputers, such as the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archimedes. It’s best known as the maker of the BBC Micro -- the education focused computer found in many schools across the country (and which was the inspiration for the Raspberry Pi).

Brand nostalgia is a big thing right now, with modern versions of old computers -- like the ZX Spectrum and C64 -- making their way on to the market. If you were an Acorn devotee back in the day, the good news is there’s a new smartphone for you, arriving in time to commemorate the brand’s 40th anniversary. The bad news is it isn’t a great smartphone, or even a custom built one.

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It won’t be too long now until the next big feature update for Windows 10 rolls out. Expected to be called the Spring Creators Update, this introduces a number of big features, most notably Timeline, a welcome addition that lets you resume past activities you started on your main PC, other Windows PCs, or iOS/Android devices.

In preparation for the new feature update, Microsoft has been pushing the previous one -- The Fall Creators Update -- onto as many compatible systems as possible.

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Last year, the UK’s National Health Service was hit hard by the WannaCry/WannaCrypt ransomware attack that went on to infect computers around the world. The attack was so bad that Microsoft took the unprecedented step of patching Windows XP to try and stem the spread of the problem.

While it first believed that NHS computers running XP were the source of the issue, it turned out to be Windows 7 systems that were mostly to blame. PCs running Windows 10 were immune from the attack. You would have thought, having been through such a terrible experience, that the NHS would have taken steps to prevent it happening again, but it seems not.

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It’s a fact that today’s mobile phones boast way more computing power than the systems used by NASA to put a man on the moon in the 1960s.

The iPhone 6, released in 2014, is 32,600 times quicker than the speediest Apollo-era computers and capable of performing instructions a whopping 120,000,000 times faster. So in a race against seven computers from the past 75 years, you’d imagine the iPhone 6 would wipe the floor with an Apple II from 1977, a 1990s PC running Windows 98, and a £12.99 BBC Micro:Bit, right? Wrong.

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The US Department of Defense has decreed that the Air Force must complete its migration to Windows 10 by March 31 2018.

Failure to do so will result in any systems not running Microsoft’s latest operating system being denied access to the Air Force Network. However, because Windows 10 is not compatible with many of the Air Force’s existing systems, a significant number of computers will need to be replaced in order to hit the deadline.

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Windows 10 Insider Preview builds have been arriving much less frequently with the Redstone 4 branch than with Redstone 3 (Fall Creators Update), but as we get nearer to the official release of the next feature update that is likely to change.

Today, Microsoft rolls out two new builds, just a week after the last one. These are Build 17101 for Insiders on the Fast ring, and Build 17604 for those who have opted to Skip Ahead -- that is elected to bypass builds for RS4 and move straight to RS5.

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Black Mirror is one of Netflix’s better original series. The show presents a nightmarish vision of modern society and new technologies and in the latest season, one episode in particular stood out for a lot of people.

In Hang the DJ, a dating system called 'Coach' not only pairs up singletons, it reveals how long they have together.

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