Sonos, for those not familiar, is a multi-room audio system that many people love for its diverse functionality. You can play music everywhere in your house, providing you lay out money for each of the speaker systems. What more functionality could you possibly want?

Funny you should ask. How about a turntable? You remember -- those relics from a by-gone era. Except they still aren't dead, and many people still prefer the sound. Audiophiles claim it is the best, as opposed to CD and MP3.

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Popular PC tools developer Wise Cleaner has released a public beta of its latest utility, Wise System Monitor.

The new addition is a desktop gadget which tracks and displays CPU usage, upload and download speeds, RAM consumption, CPU temperature and more.

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A few weeks back we reported on the launch of a free tool to help out CryptoLocker victims allowing them to retrieve locked files.

One of the companies behind the DecryptCryptoLocker tool, Fox-IT, has released some details of how well it's working. It has so far dealt with 2,900 requests for decryption keys and dozens more are being received on a daily basis.

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Many enterprises are now going to be forced to upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer! Microsoft recently announced that the company will be cutting-off the support lifeline for older versions of Internet Explorer (IE) including IE7 and IE8 (the most popular version) by January 2016. Choosing to continue using IE7 and IE8 will be a high risk strategy for enterprises as no patches for critical vulnerabilities will be provided by Microsoft.

And this is not all -- it is rumored that Windows 9 operating system (OS) will be unveiled by 30 September this year (for launch in April 2015) -- close on the heels of Window 8.1’s general availability in October 2013. This is when many enterprises have only just transitioned to Windows 7 from Windows XP; and some businesses are potentially underway in their Windows 8/8.1 projects.

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Farstone Technology has released VirtualXP Free 1.0, a free-for-personal-use tool that simplifies the task of converting a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 physical PC into a virtual machine.

The idea is that users hesitating about switching to a newer version of Windows can take their old system with them, ensuring all data, settings and programs continue to work going forward.

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Digg may not be the "in" thing that it was when Kevin Rose started it, but the site is still around and trying to stay relevant. Last year, in the wake of Google's shutdown of its Reader app, the social sharing site launched an alternative. More recently it launched Digg Deeper, a service that automatically IDs trending stories and videos based on those you follow via Twitter.

Now Digg Deeper is coming to more platforms, one of which is the aforementioned Reader application. "You can now use Digg Deeper to scan the most-shared stories, videos and links from your Twitter connections", the service announces.

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Phablets are emerging as the next big thing in the smart device market. According to research firm IDC, big-screen smartphones will out-ship portable PCs (laptops) before the end of 2014, and tablets sometime in 2015. What's more, also this year, phablet shipments are expected to far outnumber desktop PCs. Want to bet on a winning large form factor? Pick phablets.

In 2014, IDC expects shipments of phablets, tablets, portable PCs and desktop PCs to reach 174.9 million, 233.1 million, 170 million and 133.5 million, respectively. Fast forward to the end of 2015, and shipments of phablets and tablets reach 318 million and 233 million units, respectively. And with Apple expected to unveil an iPhone phablet, big smartphones are only going to make things worse for PC and tablet shipments.

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Google knows a lot about you, and the government may be snooping on your activities, but it's your significant other who may well be the one spying on you the most, according to a new survey by security firm Avast.

The company surveyed 13,132 adults in the United States and found that one in four women and one in five men regularly checked their partner's smartphone. Most of the women were doing so purely to be nosy, but a quarter of married women admitted to looking for evidence of infidelity.

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The business of marketing has always been about understanding the customer, and the modern information-driven world means there's more potential to know what customers are up to than ever.

The trouble is that many businesses fail to properly exploit this due to lack of visibility into how their marketing efforts work. Cloud-based file distribution specialist Content Raven aims to change this with its new Marketing Raven tool.

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When you’re working at the Windows command line it might sometimes be useful to download a file, but the standard tools don’t make this particularly easy.

If you’re looking for something simpler then Curly could be ideal. It’s a console-based downloader, free, portable and amazingly small (under 28KB), yet somehow it still manages to squeeze in one or two surprising extras.

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The results of a new survey from Kaspersky Lab show that the rate of mobile device theft is increasing but over the same period the time taken for IT departments to respond has increased.

Part of this is down to employees taking longer to report mobile loss or theft. Only half report the theft of a mobile device within a day with 38 percent taking up to two days and nine percent waiting between three and five days.

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Microsoft today introduces Lumia 830, a new Windows Phone 8.1 device that is advertised by the software giant as "the first affordable flagship" smartphone. The device is touted to give rival devices from Apple and Samsung a run for their money, so let's take a look at what it has to offer.

The highlight of Lumia 830 is its PureView-branded main camera, which is paired with some very interesting software features, which allow users to, for instance, change the intensity of the flash in the captured still, after the fact. It is aided by optical image stabilization. To showcase just how capable the 10 MP unit is, Microsoft inexplicably compared Lumia 830 with an outdated flagship, Apple's iPhone 5 which is verging on two years of market time. Thankfully, Microsoft has not gone crazy (well, maybe it did).

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Premium devices got most of the attention at IFA 2014, thanks to their cutting edge software and hardware. But there are some other interesting new products announced at the trade show which warrant a look. One of them is HTC's mid-range Android smartphone, Desire 820.

Desire 820 may not be as exciting as, for instance, Galaxy Note Edge is with its curved edge display, but it gives us a sense of what the future of Android hardware looks like. I'll give you a hint -- it's not 32-bit. Desire 820 is among the first smartphones of 2014 to be unveiled with a 64-bit processor, Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon 615.

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Like most teenagers growing up in the late 90s / early 00s, MSN Messenger made me realize that there was more to life than having to talk face to face.

Maybe you didn't want to go to that party, for example, so you could just send your friend a message with some poor excuse about homework. Or maybe you just wanted to sit up in front of a desktop computer until 3.00am, discussing the wrongs and rights of the world through a series of awkward 'lols,' 'brbs' and emoticons. You could even declare your undying love for someone behind the safe smokescreen of your computer by just typing it, which let's be honest, is much, much easier.

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Office 365 users are encouraged into storing their files in one of two locations -- locally or on OneDrive. Microsoft's own cloud storage service is neatly integrated into its office suite, just as it is into Windows 8.1. There are ways to integrate other services such as Google Drive, but today Box launched a beta version of Box for Office 365 in a bid to bring the cloud service to Office. The new beta was announced at Box's BoxWorks event. There are also plans to add Box integration to Office for iPad, although no timescale has been suggested for this.

The idea behind integrating Box into Office 365 is simple, but the beta page explains: "With our new Box for Office desktop app integrations, you can easily open, edit, share and save any file from Box seamlessly within Word, PowerPoint and Excel".

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