Although Microsoft made upgrading from Windows 8 to 8.1 easy and free, the process has to be done through the Microsoft Store. If you want an ISO version of the OS, and don’t have a TechNet or MSDN subscription, you need to engage in a little trickery, which is straightforward enough, but not ideal.

As someone who once bought a brand new Advent laptop with Vista on it, but without any discs I could use to reinstall or repair the OS in the event of trouble, I know how frustrating not having a physical (or digital) copy can be. Newegg is currently offering a "Windows 8.1 Back-up Media disc" for pre-order that could potentially save the day.

When I was a young man, I hated school. While sitting in the dreary classroom, I would often stare out the window and daydream about the huge world out there. However, there were times when I loved school -- on field trip days. On these days, we would board a big yellow school bus and travel to a magical place such as the Zoo or a Broadway show.

While the destination was important, the trip itself was too. You see, the entire thing was an experience; one that cannot be matched by a video or photograph. Sure, kids can watch a DVD about giraffes, but to see the animals in person and potentially feed them is something different entirely. Today, Google announces Google+ Connected Classrooms -- a way for children to go on virtual field trips with Google+. While this sounds like a great way to leverage technology, it can be argued that it is the beginning of the end for real field trips.

IDC recently announced its tablet shipment estimates for Q3 2013 that showed a 6 percent growth over the previous quarter. This growth was entirely driven by large, branded Android tablet vendors as iPad demand declined ahead of the product refresh. This left the Android platform with a 65 percent share of the overall market. Let's take a deeper look at these figures in context of tablet market tiers.

As I had explained previously, the tablet market can broadly be categorized into multiple tiers, based on usage patterns. Here's a look at IDC's data in context of market tiers:

Open-source password manager KeePass 2.24 has been released for Windows. The tool, which allows users to manage a variety of online and offline passwords via a secure, encrypted container, boasts a number of minor new features to go with an impressive list of changes and improvements for such an incremental release.

First, KeePass 2.24 adds support for importing passwords from Norton Identity Safe 2013 CSV files. It also now supports tags when using either the generic CSV importer or Mozilla Bookmarks import options.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins is to resign from his position at the head of the company, and the board of directors is also facing a reshuffle. The struggling mobile firm was set to be sold to a consortium lead by Fairfax Financial Holdings for $4.7 billion but that plan, announced last month, has now fallen through.

BlackBerry instead intends to raise $1 billion in fresh funding from a group of investors including Fairfax.

The Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the FAA, has lifted the last of its device restrictions, allowing people to finally use electronic devices during takeoff and landing. The ruling went into effect last week, with Delta being the first airline to allow passengers the privilege.

"We've been fighting for our customers on this issue for years, and we are thrilled by the FAA's recent decision -- this is a big win for customers. Delta and JetBlue have already started flights with the new rules -- we're excited to see which airlines are next", said Drew Herdener, vice president of Amazon.

In late-July 2012, Microsoft launched Outlook.com, a new consumer-oriented email service set to replace the cluttered and dated Hotmail. Its long-term mission would be to take on Google's prevalent Gmail and establish itself as a product with widespread appeal. By grandfathering-in those who used Hotmail, Microsoft announced, in early-May 2013, Outlook.com had reached 400 million users.

I delivered my review of Outlook.com two days after its launch. My impressions were positive for a product that, at the time, was still undergoing testing (the official public launch happened in late-February 2013). Still, I concluded that the service was not up to par with Gmail, because it was missing key functionality. But lots of things have changed in the meantime, which is why I decided to write this long-term review of Outlook.com, outlining the most important changes and detailing the positives and negatives of the service, now that it has reached maturity.

The Lenovo Yoga 10 tablet looked great... until I turned it on. You see, when I did the unboxing, the build quality felt solid. Holding it my hands, I had high hopes; the integrated kickstand was intriguing. The tablet itself resembles an Apple Magic Trackpad.

While most tablets are just rectangular slabs, the integrated kickstand allows the Yoga to stand up on its own. I was particularly blown-away by just how well-made the kickstand is; it's crafted from thick aluminum. This enables the tablet to be used as a display for watching video services like Hulu Plus or Netflix. However, the overall package is a cruel joke -- beautiful on the outside but horrible on the inside.

The increasing use of technology by customers presents many challenges for business. This means that traditional areas like finance and operations may no longer be driving change. According to a new report by research specialists Gartner, meeting the digital era, where change may be motivated by evolving customer expectations, needs a fresh approach if it's to be done successfully.

Unlike other projects which are about delivering on budget and on time, digital transformation schemes can involve taking risks in order to achieve better performance. Gartner calls this "discovery oriented project management" where it's necessary to experiment and continue to learn from projects even after their launch.

Worldwide, Windows Phone may hold a distant third-place spot in the smartphone market, but in Europe handsets running the mobile tiled OS are closing in on Apple's iPhones through huge share gains. According to a new Kantar Worldpanel ComTech report, in five key local markets Windows Phone sales more than doubled in Q3 2013, compared to the same period from last year. Meanwhile, iPhones lost market share.

In France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain combined, Windows Phone's market share grew to 9.8 percent in Q3 2013 from 4.6 percent a year earlier. The highest market share gains happened in France (to 10.7 percent from 5.2 percent), Germany (to 8.5 percent from 2.5 percent) and Great Britain (to 11.4 percent from 4.2 percent), with Italy and Spain posting more moderate growths (to 13.7 percent from 10.8 percent and to 3.7 percent from 2.2 percent, respectively). By contrast, in the said local markets iPhone's market share decreased to 14.6 percent in Q3 2013 from 16.8 percent a year earlier.

After the launch of its own brand tablet, the Hudl, UK supermarket Tesco is hitting the headlines for another reason. We are all used to the irksome familiarity of watching adverts on TV and online, they are hard to avoid. But the retailer is turning things on their head slightly by introducing advertisements that watch customers.

Well, that's not strictly true, but it's an interesting way of looking at what is happening. Just as the likes of Google tailor advertisements to web users, Tesco is looking to ensure that the ads its customers see are relevant. The fuel stations found at many branches of the supermarket are soon to be home to personalized ads courtesy of Amscreen.

NetMarketShare's monthly operating system statistics always make for interesting reading and analysis. For example, a month ago they showed Windows 7's growth was outpacing that of Windows 8. That was, naturally, just a blip, but in October -- the month that Windows 8.1 launched -- Windows 7 managed to make further market share gains.

There are other interesting things about last month's share statistics. Windows 8.1 -- which NetMarketShare has included since the Preview version launched -- is up, as you'd expect, while Windows 8 drops. Combined, the two operating systems see an overall rise, but the growth is slight.

To cloud or not to cloud? It's a question a lot of my clients are asking more often, and is undoubtedly one of the biggest trends in the IT industry right now. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and soon to be DaaS -- all acronyms which represent offloading critical functions of some sort to the cloud or into virtualized environments. All the big cloud providers are guilty of throwing fancy numbers around to make their case. But do their trumpeted cost savings really add up?

You'll have to make it to the end of this piece to find out what I think about that personally. Because in all honesty, it depends. Too many business owners I work with make the same cost comparison blunders over and over again. Most of them are so blindly focused on raw face value costs -- the "easy ones" -- that they lose focus on the bigger picture, namely their TCO (total cost of ownership).

Sometimes there is revolution in evolution. That's my surprising reaction to iPad Air, which Apple started selling on November 1. This is simply the best tablet I have ever used. Period. The fruit-logo company wisely chose to resist reinventing the wheel and build a vehicle around four instead.

For people who complain -- and there are many -- that Apple's newest 9.7-inch tab shows waning innovation, let me correct the record. You are oh-so wrong. iPad Air is an amazingly refined piece of art -- like a sculpture chiseled to perfection. iPad 3 and 4 are unpolished bricks by comparison. More importantly, anyone looking for a tablet to largely, or completely, replace a Windows PC or Mac, Air is it.

The latest Edward Snowden bombshell that the National Security Agency has been hacking foreign Google and Yahoo data centers is particularly disturbing. Plenty has been written about it so I normally wouldn’t comment except that the general press has, I think, too shallow an understanding of the technology involved. The hack is even more insidious than they know.

The superficial story is in the NSA slide (above) that you’ve probably seen already. The major point being that somehow the NSA -- probably through the GCHQ in Britain -- is grabbing virtually all Google non-spider web traffic from the Google Front End Servers, because that’s where the SSL encryption is decoded.