Articles about Microsoft

The Windows 10 Insider Beta Channel is what used to be the Slow ring, and updates pushed out here are typically a lot more stable than those on the Dev Channel (previously the Fast ring).

Today, Microsoft rolls out Build 19042.450 to the Beta Channel, and the new flight is mostly about resolving a number of security vulnerabilities.

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Windows 10 Home offers you a number of personalization, customization and tweaking options, but Windows 10 Professional takes things even further. Thanks to the inclusion of Group Policy Editor, not only can you tweak the hell out of the operating system, but also lock it down for ultimate security.

Group Policy Editor is unique to the Professional edition of Windows 10, and it gives you access to hundreds of settings that are either simply not available in the Home edition, or have to be implemented through awkward registry edits.

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Windows has featured a clipboard for time immemorial, but it has always been rather limited -- so much so that you may have been drawn to a third-party clipboard utility. In future versions of Windows, this will change as Microsoft is giving the tool a serious update.

The new clipboard can be found in Windows 10 build 20185 which was released to the Dev Channel last week. It will be a while before the feature makes its way to the average user, but it's still an exciting glimpse into the future.

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An unpatched vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler exists that could be exploited by an attacker to run malicious software with elevated system privileges.

The issue affects Windows 7, Windows 8.x, Windows 10 as well as versions of Windows Server. It is being tracked as CVE-2020-1048 and CVE-2020-1337 and has a severity rating of "Important". Despite having been acknowledged by Microsoft back in May, a working patch is yet to be rolled out.

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Windows 10 currently lets you choose from two styles -- Dark Mode and Light Mode -- which you can enable and switch between in the Settings > Personalization section of the OS.

If you’ve ever wished for access to more style modes than that, then you’ll be interested in a new app which lets you customize Windows with additional styles, and can even give Windows 10 a convincing retro makeover.

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Microsoft has been introducing a few new and interesting features to its preview builds lately, including a new Start menu and improved alt-tab experience, which you can now also get on your non-Insider version of Windows 10, if you follow our instructions.

Today the software giant rolls out to Windows 10 Build 20185 to the Dev Channel (what used to be the Fast ring).

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Microsoft has made great progress with its Your Phone, gradually adding more and more capabilities so you can text, answer calls and browse photos stored on your phone from the comfort of your computer. But now things are about to get really interesting.

The company is increasing what it dubs the "seamless connection between PC and phone", adding the ability to run Android apps in Windows 10 via the Your Phone app. There is, of course, a bit of a catch.

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What's that you say? There's a Windows 10 update that's causing problems? Get outta here! Just over a month ago, we wrote about KB4559309 -- the automatic update that gives everyone the Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge -- and complaints that it was causing systems to slow down.

Well it seems that it wasn't just a few isolated cases. Microsoft has now been hit with enough people complaining about performance issues and slow booting, that the company has been forced to launch an investigation. It is also asking for more feedback from anyone experiencing the slow-down problem or a general reduction in system performance.

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The telemetry features that are built into Windows 10 have people falling into one of a few camps. There are those who don't even know what telemetry is, those who know but don’t care that Microsoft is gathering data from their computer, and those who know what it is and consider it to be a massive invasion of privacy.

For anyone who counts themselves in this last group, there are numerous settings, tools and techniques that can be used to block telemetry in Windows 10. One of the more ingenious is making use of the HOSTS file (used to resolve hostnames), but now Microsoft has updated its Defender tool so this is detected as a "severe" risk, specifically "SettingsModifier:Win32/HostsFileHijack".

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Being a Windows Insider obviously carries some risks. You may install a build which doesn’t play at all nicely on your PC, resulting in features breaking, or worse. The plus side is you do get to try out cool new features before anyone else.

Recently Microsoft introduced an updated Start menu with theme-aware tiles, and an improved Alt-Tab experience which shows all open tabs from Microsoft Edge. Although you officially need to be an Insider to enjoy these, there is a sneaky workaround that will allow you to get them without having to join the program.

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Microsoft is continuing its ongoing game of cat and mouse with itself, releasing updates to fix problems introduced by previous updates. The latest to be released is KB4568831 and it addresses a range of issues.

Among the fixes this particular update brings are issues with LTE connectivity in Windows 10 version 2004, problems with Bluetooth headsets, and issues with printing.

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As recently promised, Microsoft has released PowerToys v0.20.0. This release sees the arrival of a new utility in the form of Color Picker for grabbing hex and RGB color values from anywhere on screen. There are other changes and fixes too.

There are now eight utilities available in PowerToys, and with this release Microsoft has made numerous improvements to those that were already in the collection. This includes adding SVG icon rendering to File Explorer, as well as improvements to Keyboard Manager.

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If you're using Microsoft Edge, you may have noticed that the browser crashes when you type in the address bar. You are not alone -- many people are experiencing this exact problem.

Microsoft has spent some time looking into the cause of the issue which seems to have been affecting people who were now only using Edge, but who have Google set as their default search engine.

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It is only two months since Microsoft released Windows 10 May 2020 Update, and it has already earned itself an 11 percent share of the market, according to figures released by AdDuplex.

The uptake of Windows 10 version 2004 is by no means the fastest of any edition of Windows 10, but considering the number of problems that have emerged in this particular update, it's pretty good going.

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

Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system turned five this week. Check out Wayne's look back at how it all started out and why things are not better than they are right now.

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