NFL pre-season football is in full swing, meaning regular season games will be here before you know it. It is a league where anything can happen. Injuries (which are prevalent in USA football) can change rankings in the blink of an eye. If you participate in Fantasy Football, for instance, you know how things can change from week to week.

While many folks compete in fantasy leagues and track their favorite teams using smartphones nowadays, nothing trumps a full-fledged PC experience. This is what Microsoft's Surface Pro line of tablets can deliver. If you do use a Surface Pro 3 or 4 computer, and you love the NFL, Microsoft has something that will make you giddy --  Special Edition NFL Type Covers. Yes, all 32 teams are represented. This includes my favorite team, the J-E-T-S, JETS, JETS, JETS!

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Last year, Microsoft announced that a virtual reality version of Minecraft was in the works. Today Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta gains VR support, as Microsoft works with the Oculus Rift team to produce a more immersive version of the game.

In terms of controlling the VR version of Minecraft, you have the option of using a keyboard and mouse, or sticking with your trusty Xbox One controller. There are also a host of new VR-specific options to work with.

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The EU is looking to exert greater control over online messaging tools such as WhatsApp and Skype. Documents seen by the Financial Times suggest that Brussels wants to treat such services more like traditional telecoms companies.

The proposals come amid mounting privacy concerns about data handling, particularly the "security and confidentiality provisions" from companies like Microsoft and Facebook.

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Some users who have installed Windows 10 Anniversary Update on SSDs are experiencing problems with their computers freezing.

Microsoft does not yet have a fix available, but it is aware of the issues and is working to get a patch pushed out to those who have been affected. While there is not a proper fix available at the moment, the company has provided details of a couple of workarounds that should do the job for the time being.

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With the release of Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft's support for Windows Phone is gradually starting to die off. We already knew that Windows Phone support for Skype was coming to an end, but now we know more.

Microsoft has now announced that as well as ending support for Skype on Windows Phone in October, come 'early 2017' the apps will simply stop working. And it's all thanks to a move to the cloud.

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A year on from the release of Windows 10 most businesses are still reluctant to adopt the OS, according to research by solutions and managed services company Softchoice.

Based on an evaluation of more than 400,000 Windows-based computing devices between January and May this year, across 169 organizations in the US and Canada using the TechCheck asset management solution, the study reveals less than one percent were running Windows 10.

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update rolled out to all users last week, but the Windows team doesn’t rest on its laurels for long, and is already working on new builds.

Today those Insiders who elected to stay in the program, and not switch back to the current branch, get the first new release for the Fast ring -- Build 14901 for PC.

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In an attempt to get more users to upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft announced early this year that it would drop support for Intel Skylake processors on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 after July 17, 2017. The controversial policy was short lived though, as a few months later the software giant gave its customers a one-year reprieve, pushing the deadline to July 18, 2018.

But, as you can see, that is not the end of the story, as Microsoft has changed its mind once again. Today, it announces that Intel's sixth-generation processors will actually be supported for an even longer period of time on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 devices. That is good news for those who are not planning on upgrading to Windows 10 in the foreseeable future.

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Microsoft is doing its part protecting its users from hackers, but it can’t do everything on its own.

According to new figures released by Secunia Research in its Country Reports, covering Q2 2016 for 12 countries, the number of unpatched Windows machines is on the decline. Compared to Q1 this year, when 6.1 percent of systems were unpatched, only 5.4 percent are not up to date now. Same time last year, the figure was 10.3 percent.

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Microsoft has created a backdoor in Secure Boot, the security feature designed to ensure that a device can only run the operating system that it is meant to. And, to make matters worse, it has just accidentally leaked the "golden keys" needed to bypass it.

The Secure Boot backdoor is there to, for instance, allow a Microsoft developer to install a new build of Windows on a device -- that has the security feature enforced -- without it having to be digitally signed beforehand. It makes their job easy, but it also makes the security system ineffective if -- when -- the golden keys that unlock it make their way into the wrong hands.

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Upgrading from one version of Windows to another is always likely to cause a few problems with your PC. Bugs can slip through, and changes to the OS might mess with how you had things set up previously.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is a huge update for Windows 10, and has already caused big freezing problems for some users. It’s also possible it might have started limiting your Internet speed, but don’t worry, this is easy to fix if it has.

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Child pornography is something that, understandably, raises hackles and many people would argue that anything possible should be done to pursue those believed to be involved. But a court in the District of Kansas has ruled that the discovery of images of child porn is not enough to justify warrantless email searches by agents.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that email attachment images obtained by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) should be dismissed as evidence as they were gathered via what was deemed to be a warrantless search.

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If you have just upgraded to Windows 10 Anniversary Update, you have possibly noticed the addition of a Windows Defender icon in the notification area. Then again, you may not -- a quick straw poll in the BetaNews newsroom reveals that not everyone is seeing it.

Assuming the icon has suddenly appeared for you, it's possible that you'd rather it vanished. Here's what you need to do if you would like to banish the Windows Defender icon and clean up your notification area.

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The latest version of Windows 10 has undergone rigorous testing at the hands of Windows Insiders, but with so many different configurations of PCs it was inevitable that some users would encounter problems following the update.

I’ve personally experienced a weird problem whereby after playing a video Windows becomes much less responsive, to the point where a reboot is the only solution, and users on Reddit are reporting various issues with their PCs freezing and Windows 10 failing to respond.

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The arrival of Linux in Windows 10 caused ripples of excitement in certain circles. But as well as making it possible to run GUI Linux apps on the desktop, there are also concerns that there are security risks associated with having the Bash feature from Linux available in Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

Speaking at the Black Hat USA security conference, Alex Ionescu from Crowdstrike said that he had reported some concerns to Microsoft during the testing period of Windows 10. While some of the issues he raised have been addressed, he says that the presence of Linux represents a "new potential attack surface" that users need to be aware of.

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