The official launch of Windows 10 Mobile may have been delayed, but the preview builds keep on coming. Today Microsoft launches Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 10586.71, a cumulative update complete with a few extra bug fixes.

Some of the performance-enhancing features of today's build were made available to Insiders on Friday through the Configuration Update, but this is included in this cumulative update. If you're on the Fast Ring, there's another update to download as well -- Insider Fast Configuration Update. This ensures that future flights will be downloaded by updating expiring certificates.

Continue reading →

Microsoft today unveiled a measure designed to attract more SMBs to Office 365. The new scheme sees Microsoft's FastTrack customer service operation expanding so that it is now available to organizations with as few as 50 users; the previous minimum was 150 seats.

Microsoft says that many SMBs who have opted to use Google's App instead reach a "breaking point" when they hit 50 users. The company aims to capitalize on this by offering enterprise-grade services to businesses that would otherwise not be able to take advantage of features such as centralized management capabilities.

Continue reading →

Super Bowl 50 is almost here! While my beloved New York Jets are not in the big game, I will still tune in. Why? Not only should it be exciting football, but it is a shared social event. Many people watch -- even those that aren't NFL fans -- for things like the commercials and the overall camaraderie and competition. Oh, there is a lot of snack-eating too!

This Sunday, February 7, the two competing teams are the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos. The former will be the champions. Well, at least according to predictions by both Microsoft's Bing and the Madden 16 video game. Will they be right?

Continue reading →

As you’ll have seen earlier, according to figures from NetMarketShare, Windows 10 overtook Windows 8.1 in January, taking just six months to do so. StatCounter, which also measures operating system usage, shows Windows 10 achieving the same feat in that month, although its figures are slightly different.

To mark this achievement it seems only right to compare Windows 10’s growth with that of past Windows releases to see how the new OS is really doing.

Continue reading →

A month ago, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 was on over 200 million devices. It also claimed that Windows 10 adoption was accelerating, which seemed to be in clear contradiction of NetMarketShare’s monthly usage figures. The pattern there showed adoption of the new OS to be slowing month after month.

That wasn’t the case in January however, as the latest usage figures from NetMarketShare show Windows 10 starting the new year at a fair pace and finally doing something it’s been threatening to do for the past couple of months -- overtaking Windows 8.1.

Continue reading →

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants! Depending on your age, you might absolutely adore that character or possibly not be familiar at all. Me? I fall into the former. While it is a kids show, I find it to be quite entertaining.

You know who else might be a fan of Mr. SquarePants? Microsoft. Yes, believe it or not, the company has built an underwater data center, located in California, named 'Project Natick' for the ocean. In other words, like SpongeBob, the data center will live under the sea. While it is only in a testing phase, it is still cool nonetheless. Hopefully it operates quietly, however, as if it is noisy, it might bother Squidward's clarinet playing.

Continue reading →

It's possible that you reached this article purely by chance, or you may have Googled 'how to change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge'. However you got here, the fact that you're reading this indicates that you're either interested in Windows 10's Edge, or actively use it -- and this means there's something you need to know.

If you fall into the latter camp and use Edge's InPrivate mode to cover your online tracks, you might want to think about changing your web browser. Edge has already got some stick for its lack of extension support -- "it's coming, it's coming!" Yeah, whatever... so's Christmas -- but now it turns out that InPrivate mode is a privacy nightmare. It is possible to peak behind the curtain and see which sites have been visited when using a browsing mode that should mask this.

Continue reading →

Surface devices have been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently. As well as false accusations of Surface tablet causing problems at the NFL playoffs, Microsoft has also recalled Surface Pro power cords because of an overheating issue. Some problems are fixed with a little good PR, but other require software fixes.

Just a couple of days ago, Microsoft released a firmware update for Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. While this addresses problems with Bluetooth performance, battery charging, and wireless issues, it does nothing to resolve the power management and battery drain issues many users are experiencing. Microsoft says a fix for this is still in the works.

Continue reading →

Free online storage space is something many of us really appreciate. Quotas are usually so generous that’s there’s rarely a need to spend money on a paid subscription.

However, Microsoft recently announced plans to cut back on the amount of free storage offered to OneDrive users. As a recap, the base storage will drop from 15GB to 5GB, the 15 GB camera roll storage bonus is being discontinued, Office 365 Home, Personal, or University users will no longer get unlimited storage, and some paid tiers are going away also.

Continue reading →

After Microsoft revealed that Windows phone revenue fell 49 percent and Lumia sales dropped to 4.5 million units last quarter, disingenuous headlines like "Windows Phone is dead" started to show up. Believe it or not, some pundits actually believe that Q4 was the quarter when the platform met its end, like it did not "die" a long, long time ago.

Objectively speaking, Windows Phone was never relevant enough in the modern smartphone market to be truly alive. Lumia sales, which have typically accounted for the vast majority of Windows Phone sales each quarter, were never strong enough to pose a threat to the iPhone line or let alone the Android crop. Windows Phone was a feeble player from the start, which lost any real chance of mattering years ago, outside of the Microsoft crowd that is.

Continue reading →

When it comes to supporting older operating systems (or not), it is usually Microsoft that we are talking about. But this week Apple took its users by surprise by releasing an update to Snow Leopard -- the lengthily-named Mac App Store Update for OS X Snow Leopard.

If you are wondering why an OS update should come as a surprise, it is because support for Snow Leopard came to an end in the latter half of 2013. It is an update that is ostensibly about ensuring continued access to the Mac App Store, but it also helps to give Snow Leopard users an easier path to upgrade to El Capitan.

Continue reading →

Microsoft's cloud first, mobile first philosophy seems to be paying off. The company today announced its Q2 2016 earnings, with profit and revenue exceeding predictions. Revenue fell very slightly to $25.69 billion, but this was still higher than analysts expected; the slight drop has been partially blamed on a decreased interest in Windows.

Confidence in Satya Nadella's leadership seems high, with stock prices rising by more than 26 percent in the last year. His belief in the cloud appears to be paying off, with Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud business generating revenue of $6.3 billion. Overall, the company expects its entire annual cloud revenue to hit $9.4 billion, up from $8.2 billion.

Continue reading →

When it comes to government agencies at all levels, and things like the voting process, I am a hardcore believer in open source being necessary. To truly know that votes are being counted correctly by machines, only open source would allow independent auditing. It will also help to prevent unknown backdoors in secure government computer systems.

Closed source technologies from companies like Microsoft could, in theory, contain backdoors or vulnerabilities that hackers and evildoers could exploit. Even worse, Microsoft or its employees could purposely alter voting software to influence outcomes. Am I saying the company is doing this? Not at all. But with closed source software, there is no way to know for sure. Now, Bernie Sanders' campaign is questioning Microsoft's technologies being used in Iowa Caucuses. You know what? They have a point.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has been trying to beef up its store for Windows 10, and especially trying to integrate its new operating system across multiple devices from computers to phones to its gaming console.

Now the company is trying to enhance that even more with a new update to its Xbox beta app for Windows 10. This is intended to add features that users were looking for and it is asking for feedback on what the customers think and what they still would like to see added.

Continue reading →

Yesterday, TripAdvisor made a couple of announcements. The first was innocuous enough, letting people know that there was now a TripAdvisor app for Windows 10 available to download for free. Lovely stuff, if you like that sort of thing. The second announcement is less pleasing. It will be "pre-loaded on millions of Windows 10 compatible devices".

This is clearly going to be something that divides opinion, but I don't think I'm alone in thinking that padding out Windows 10 Mobile with crapware might not be the best way to attract users. There's no denying that TripAdvisor can prove useful -- it's helped me to make dining decisions on more than one occasion -- but pre-installed apps are rarely, if ever, a good idea, and Microsoft is hardly in a possible to put a (nother) foot wrong with Windows 10.

Continue reading →