When Windows 7 checks for updates, the process can take an age. Often you might find yourself staring at the screen while nothing much seems to happen.

Finding the list of updates for you to install should only ever take a few minutes at worst, but for many people that isn’t the case. Thankfully there’s a quick fix to try.

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The importance of social media to businesses has long been recognized. According to a recent survey, time spent on social platforms represents 28 percent of all online activity, so if it’s important to customers, it naturally becomes important for companies too.

While some firms are content to carry out intermittent checks on Facebook and Twitter, many businesses are now demanding more nuanced ways of monitoring social media content. Social relationship management, or SRM, is a software solution that promises to strategically analyze social network interactions to give your business a competitive edge. With organizations from a broad spectrum of industries all realizing the importance of social media, gaining greater insights in this field could make the difference between success and failure.

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Organizations are rapidly migrating to the cloud. According to the 2016 Cloud Migration Survey, the top reasons for the cloud rush are the promise of high availability, reliability and potential cost savings. Companies, however, are not taking a one-size fits all approach. They are recognizing the pros and cons of private versus public cloud and tailoring their migration strategies to meet their needs.

The RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report, which includes responses from over one thousand technical professionals, notes that private cloud adoption by organizations will rise from 63 percent in 2015 to 77 percent in 2016. Because more companies are adding private cloud to their environments, it opens up the possibilities for hybrid cloud. Seventy-one percent of them now operate in a hybrid cloud environment which enables them to combine the benefits of both public and private platforms.

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Have to keep track of something like a to-do list, shopping list or other items? There are multiple apps that will handle this for you and sync across platforms, allowing your lists to go on the road with you. That ability is one of the keys to choosing a good note-taking app, but things such as easy sign-in are also important for most users.

You are, perhaps, used to seeing options that allow you to bypass entering a username and password and instead click a button that will log you in automatically.

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With Windows 10, Microsoft faced criticism for its heavy promotion of the new operating system. Windows 7 and 8 users became more than a little annoyed by the presence of persistent nagging upgrade prompts, and others have been irritated by the addition of 'promoted apps' to the Start menu.

Now Microsoft is at it again. Apparently unhappy with the number of people using its Edge browser, the company is now trying to encourage people to switch from rivals by using popup ads to push Edge and Bing Rewards. Will the company never learn?

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Two-hundred-and-five in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 on Windows Store in the past seven days.

Microsoft released a new Windows Insider build this week. You can check out what is new here.

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The Samsung Galaxy Note7 was one of the -- if not the -- most disastrous phone launches of all time. After numerous reports of handsets catching fire or exploding, Samsung was forced to recall the device -- but some people have been reluctant to give theirs up.

The phone may have been banned from planes, and Samsung has even offered a financial incentive to hand over the Galaxy Note7, but despite the potential danger many users are hanging onto their phones. In a drastic move to prevent them from being used, some mobile providers -- incoordination with Samsung -- are disconnecting Galaxy Note7s, rendering them all but useless.

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A new survey has revealed that IT professionals working in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) earn a substantially higher salary than their counterparts in the UK and Ireland.

Computer Weekly and TechTarget's Salary Survey 2016 APAC found that the average salary of ANZ IT pros was between £50,000 and £94,000 a year. In order to learn more about IT salaries in the region, 450 IT professionals from Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia were questioned regarding how much they earned annually.

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If you visit Google Play on your computer, you can install apps to any of the Android devices you own. All you need to do is click the Install button and you'll then be presented with a list of your phones and tablets to choose from.

Over the years, you've probably owed a number of Android devices, and it's possible that this list has become a bit unwieldy. Why should you be forced to make a selection when you only have one phone? Here's how to clear up the list and make your life a little easier.

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IT experts will be doing a lot of job switching with the start of next year, according to a new report by Spiceworks. Releasing the report during SpiceWorld 2016 Austin, the company says more than a third (37 percent) of IT professionals will start looking for a new job next year.

More than a quarter (26 percent) plan on accepting an offer next year, as well. A vast majority (69 percent) want to do it in order to advance their IT skills, but 64 percent say they want a higher salary. Four in ten say they want to work in an organization where IT takes more priority.

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Last month, Canonical released a beta of Ubuntu Core 16. This is not a typical Linux distribution, but instead, one that is focused on Internet of Things and the cloud. What makes the operating system particularly interesting is the use of "Snaps" -- an ingenious modular way of handling software. It combines applications and dependencies into one convenient package.

Today, Ubuntu Core 16 achieves final release status. You can download it immediately for free for PC, Raspberry Pi, and more. With all of the IoT-related botnet news nowadays, this is arriving at the perfect time.

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For anyone who is a Windows Insider, the release of a new insider build is something of a double-edged sword. There is -- of course -- the excitement of trying out the latest and greatest build of Windows, but there is also the prospect of a huge download; one that must be completed on every computer you use.

Microsoft has a plan to reduce the size of update downloads. The Unified Update Platform (UUP) sees the introduction of differential download packages meaning that users need only download the bits that have changed since the last release rather than having to download the whole build in its entirety. It's a feature that will be an important part of Windows 10 Creators Update next year, but -- of course -- Insiders get to try it out sooner.

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It’s taken a few days longer than normal for a new build to arrive for Windows Insiders, but Build 14959 for both PC and Mobile finally makes its way onto the Fast ring.

This is the first new build since Microsoft announced the next big step in Windows 10’s evolution -- Creators Update. This is due to be released early next year, but Windows Insiders will get an early taste of all its new features and improvements.

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While the Android smartphone market was starting to feel stale, there have been many great offerings lately, such as LG V20, Google Pixel, and the LeEco Le Pro3. In other words, it is a great time to be buying an Android handset.

Today, Huawei adds another remarkable-looking Android smartphone to the list -- the much-anticipated 'Mate 9'. The 5.9-inch 1080p screen should look great, and the company promises two days of use from the 4,000mAh battery -- plus fast-charging, of course. It even has 4GB of RAM standard, plus 64GB of storage. Will consumers embrace the premium dual-sim device?

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According to a new study 43 percent of app developers spend between 10 and 25 percent of their time debugging application errors discovered in production, rather than developing new features.

The survey carried out by ClusterHQ found that a quarter of respondents report encountering bugs discovered in production one or more times per week.

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