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While many of our young readers may associate Saturday Night Live with people like Andy Samburg, I remember a greater cast -- John Belushi, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray to name a few. One of my favorite sketches, was called "The Thing that Wouldn't Leave". In it, Murray and Curtin play a married couple, who want nothing more than for their guest, played by Belushi, to leave. The wife screams in agony as the guest keeps finding reasons to stay.

Well, sometimes true life imitates art, as Windows XP becomes "The Thing that Wouldn't Leave" for Microsoft. While the world has been preparing for XP's 2014 death, Microsoft today throws a curve-ball and announces a reprieve (at least partially).

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If you aren't familiar with the saga, the HP Chromebook 11 was greeted with much fanfare, only to be pulled from the Google Play store thanks to an overheating charger. This charger saga garnered more attention than actual incidents.

Google announced a new charger to replace the faulty model, rolling out free replacements to those who purchased the little laptop. Now, with a new charger firmly in place, the Android maker has returned the device to its Play Store.

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The BetaNews team is quite diverse, hailing from various places around the world. While this can lead to subtle nuances, such as extra U's in some words or unknown slang, a larger (playful) dispute is what is true Football. After all, in Europe, "football" is what we American's call soccer -- we view football as the NFL -- pig skin, helmets and pituitary cases.

With this in mind, EA did a smart thing by not putting the word "football" in the title of its soccer game, FIFA 2013. This causes neither side of the pond to feel alienated. However, there was a group that may have felt slighted -- non-Nokia Windows Phone 8 owners. Sadly, the game was an exclusive to the Finnish company's handsets, until today. Yes, more Windows Phone users have access to the game, but there is a catch.

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It seems to be a big day for cloud storage. Earlier Google added additional functionality to its Drive product. Now Box has an update of its own, though this new release is geared towards the mobile crowd, bringing more storage to those on iOS devices.

Additional cloud storage isn't all that's included, though. "We've overhauled our app to make it super-fast, simpler to use and more immersive. The result, we believe, is the best content viewing and collaboration experience available today for your iOS device".

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Yesterday, Wednesday 15 January, was the last day you could officially continue to run the preview versions of Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1. From today, if you haven’t upgraded to the full version of the new OS, you’ll see a message telling you to "Reinstall Windows Now". Click the "Get Windows" button to start the upgrade.

You can ignore this warning and continue using the preview, but with a rather major inconvenience -- your PC will restart every two hours. If you’ve only installed Windows 8.1 Preview to test it out, and aren’t using it as your main OS, you may not view this as a massive problem.

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Independent testing organization AV-Comparatives has released its Anti-Virus Comparative Summary Report 2013.

This rounds up the results of the company's tests carried out over the past year on 22 consumer antivirus and internet security products.

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EaseUS software has released EaseUS Todo Backup Free 6.5 and EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation 6.5. The new release debuts one major new feature: the ability to back up and restore Android devices to the user’s PC.

Todo Backup combines file- and image-based backup and recovery with disk cloning and -- for paid-for users only -- snapshotting tools.

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WiseCleaner software has unveiled Wise Disk Cleaner Free 8.03, a major new update of its Windows disk cleaning and defrag tool. Version 8’s most notable improvement is a revamped user interface that’s less cluttered and easier to follow than previous versions.

Version 8 also adds a new module that ensures all future updates -- which tend to be delivered at least once a month -- are installed automatically, plus promises customized configuration options via a user-created INI file.

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Cloud storage has become the norm these days, with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all offering services. It's even built right into Windows 8.1 and Office 2013, and many other apps are adding various integrations.

Now Google is announcing an update to Drive, which brings new, and much needed functionality to its offering. The service allows for easy collaboration on projects, but until now, it was difficult to track the various changes being made.

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If you need to find out more about your PC then you’ll probably turn to a system information tool. That will then access various low-level technical details about your computer, pick out the most important, and try to present them in a readable and accessible way.

Usually this works very well, but sometimes your chosen tool may strip out too much information, or perhaps miss the data you need altogether. And that’s when you might want to turn to RWEverything, a powerful program which doesn’t try to second guess what you might want to know: it just gives you absolutely everything, often in its most raw and basic form.

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While not every company has technologically embraced the massive influx of multiplatform, multi-network mobile devices taxing its network, the inevitable power they give employees to access enterprise resources in any location and manage their own technology systems -- a phenomenon known to some as "the consumerization of IT" -- will undoubtedly dramatically and permanently change the face of the enterprise as we know it today. And while it is widely recognized that the continued consumerization of IT presents countless challenges for IT departments, I see 2014 as the year IT views these changes as opportunities and empowers its employees with the tools they need to maximize the incalculable power of their devices.

One of the major tools to which I refer? The enterprise app store.

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Of all the services I use, Facebook knows me best. It knows where I live, who my "friends" are, what movies I like, what my favorite bands are, where I like to go out for a drink, what sort of content I want to see when I scroll through my feed and which sources I like for news stories.

Facebook also knows that when it comes to reading news on my tablet I prefer Flipboard. Why? Well, the apps are nicely designed, pleasant to use and, because of the newspaper-like layout, provide a certain sense of occasion. The content that I get, after having carefully selected the sources and added my social network accounts, mostly suits my preferences. There is still stuff that I have to filter out but, generally speaking, Flipboard does a good job at tailoring the news content to my liking. Facebook, though, could do an even better job, if it decided to offer a rival service.

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If you're like most other IT pros I know, you're probably already cringing just at the title of this article. And I don't blame you one bit. How many times has Microsoft tried to usher in the post-RAID era? Every previous try has either been met with gotchas, whether it be performance roadblocks, technical drawbacks, or outright feature deprecation.

Native Windows drive mirroring (read: software RAID) has been in every Windows release since Win 2000. And for just as long, it has been plagued by sub-standard read/write performance which is why everyone who tried it always ran back to their hardware RAID.

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IObit has launched Smart Defrag 3.0, a major new version of its Windows defragmentation tool, which promises to improve performance by preventing fragmentation of the user’s hard drives.

Version 3.0 comes with a new defrag engine, adds a Defrag & Prioritize Files option for boosting overall performance and revamps the user interface to fit in the Windows 8 look.

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Organizing icons on your desktop can be as simple as dragging and dropping them into their new positions. Keeping this new layout is usually more of a challenge, though. Other users of your system can also rearrange the icons at any time, and running an application which changes your screen resolution may cause a similar desktop disaster.

ReIcon is an interesting free tool which offers a straightforward solution. Launch the program and click the Save button to save the current icon layout, or use the Restore option to reload it: easy.

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