Windows Phone is becoming an increasingly unattractive proposition in the eyes of smartphone buyers. The tiled operating system dropped to 1.7 percent market share in the third quarter of the year, thanks to extremely weak sales of Lumia devices. Microsoft is the largest vendor of smartphones running the tiled operating system, so its performance has a strong effect on the platform's popularity.

In the third quarter of the year, Windows Phone sales reached 5.87 million units according to research firm Gartner. For the same period, Microsoft says Lumia sales were 5.8 million units, suggesting that its platform market share is close to the 100 percent mark. And things don't look great for Windows 10 Mobile devices either.

Running commands and launching built-in Windows tools is very straightforward in Microsoft’s new operating system. Just click on the Start button and type whatever you’re looking for, then select the item to launch it.

There is another way to do this though, and that’s through File Explorer. This can actually prove really useful. If, as an example, you’re browsing your hard drive and suddenly decide to defragment it, you can take action without having to switch your focus.

Microsoft is hoping that within the first two to three years after launch Windows 10 will run on over one billion devices. Expectations are high, but the new operating system has a few things going for it which can help it reach that milestone. One of them is universal apps.

The idea is simple: developers can build a single app that works across all types of devices that support Windows 10, including PCs, tablets and smartphones. The software giant's efforts are already starting to bear fruit, as Todoist has just launched its to-do app in Store as a universal app.

Windows 10 Mobile is making its official debut this week, and the first smartphone to come with the new operating system is Microsoft's Lumia 950. In the US, the flagship is offered directly by the software giant through its online and brick and mortar stores, but it is also carried by its longterm partner, AT&T.

If you want to get your Lumia 950 from a US carrier, AT&T is actually your one and only option, at least for the foreseeable future. The carrier is taking orders now, offering the device with a two year agreement, monthly plans and, of course, unlocked.

Microsoft recently announced two flagship devices, the Lumia 950 XL and the Lumia 950, both of which run its Windows 10 Mobile operating system and share many features: same screen resolution, same amount of onboard storage and system memory.

The 950 XL is certainly the better purchase out of the two models. Yes, it is bigger than the 950 and more expensive, but there’s three key features that will win businesses and individuals alike.

With the roll out of Microsoft Office 2016, enterprises and workforces will be put under intense pressure to not only consider migrating to Microsoft Office 2016 but to manage and effectively sync the software with existing systems and programs, with no perceived system downtime.

The new software offers a variety of productivity development tools that will appeal to enterprises and their workforce. However the need and urgency to deploy such software must be evaluated thoroughly by CIO’s or key decision makers in comparison to the existing IT infrastructure; in order for it to succeed and not cause any level of threat to current workforce productivity.

One of the features that could have helped Windows 10 Mobile become a more appealing and competitive platform will not be available in the new smartphone operating system at launch. Windows 10 Mobile is expected to make its debut later this month, arriving on Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL first.

The missing feature in question is support for Android apps. The holdup? Microsoft has revealed that Astoria bridge, the tool that makes it possible to run Android apps on its OS, is not yet ready for prime time.

As part of the third Hour of Code, Microsoft has launched a coding tutorial based on Minecraft. The event is part of Computer Science Education Week, which runs from December 7-13 and uses the familiar Minecraft to teach coding to people aged 6 and above.

The tutorial is a collaboration between Microsoft, Code.org, and Mojang AB, the company behind Minecraft. It provides a gentle on-ramp to learning the basics of coding, with a view to inspiring the next generation of developers.

I consider myself a patient person. After more than 25 years in the IT industry you sort of have to be. When I bought my first real hybrid 2-in-1 PC -- an HP Envy x2 -- I learned to put up with the many quirks of the then brand-new Windows 8. And when Windows 8.1 arrived, I tolerated several weeks of display artifacts and other graphical anomalies, confident that they would all get sorted out -- eventually.

Which they did. In fact, for each case a new round of device drivers -- specifically, for the Envy x2’s Atom Z2760 chipset and associated Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) video subsystem -- cured what ailed it. So it’s understandable that I would expect a similar scenario to play out with Windows 10. After all, Microsoft’s new OS is really just a retread of Windows 8 (which was itself a retread of Windows 7, etc.). And my trusty Envy x2 excels at running Windows 8.1.

The Internet is one of the most significant inventions in all of humankind. It has enabled the world to easily communicate across borders -- both literally and figuratively. More importantly, however, it allows the free movement of information and ideas. Your location shouldn't  have to limit your mind.

Sadly, a lack of money can block access to the Internet for poor communities globally. There are many people on this planet that do not have access to a service that you and I probably take for granted. In other words, social inequality impacts people in technological matters. Today, Microsoft announces a new fund -- as a part of its Affordable Access Initiative -- in hopes to deliver affordable Internet to people in underserved locations.

The writing has been on the wall for some time now, but Microsoft has today officially killed Zune. After nine years, the music service is no more, driven to the grave by the competition.

Zune players just never managed to fight off the iPod, and with smartphones taking on the role of music player in addition to everything else, it didn’t take long for Microsoft's player to become surplus to requirements. Microsoft is not learning from history, though; the company continues to try its hand at music with Groove.

In a lengthy, rambling blog post, Microsoft President Brad Smith explains how what has happened in relation to security over the past year is shaping the company's attitude to the cloud.  He says that "it's time to rebuild the world's faith in the technology that empowers us all".

He takes a while to get to the point, meandering slowly around anecdotes about Windows 10, Edward Snowden, terrorist attacks in Paris, hacking, and governmental desires to weaken encryption. He says that these and other events "show it's crucial to have a conversation about worldwide information security".

In a scene in the 2014 sci-fi movie Robocop, the namesake main character analyzes his enemy’s emotional condition and concludes that violence is imminent.

You can say he successfully detected emotions. For a living person, that isn’t really a big deal, but for a computer, that’s science fiction. Or, to be precise, that was science fiction. Not any more.

While Microsoft may be looked at as the enemy of open source, it actually does contribute to the cause. In fact, I am comfortable saying that the company embraces open source; although closed source ideology will always be its "bread and butter".

Today, the Windows-maker announces that it is making yet another one of its projects open source. The Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit seems quite interesting and could prove valuable.

If you've installed the November Update for Windows 10 (or Threshold 2 if you prefer) there are a number of changes for the better to enjoy. But there are some changes that you might not be happy with, and the arrival of a new Scan With Windows Defender entry in context menu is something that is likely to grate with many people.

It might be that you have no intention of using Windows Defender, or your context menu may have become unwieldy and need a little trimming. Either way, a quick registry hack is all that's needed to banish the unwanted option. Here's what to do.