Windows 10

Having rolled out a new Windows 10 Insider build at the end of last week, Microsoft returns with another new build for those on the Fast ring.

The software giant is doing a reset of the Skip Ahead ring starting from this build. It's focusing now on stabilizing Redstone 5 ahead of its launch in the Fall, and so Skip Ahead insiders will be automatically switched to the Fast ring for now.

It looks as if Microsoft is back on its weekly release schedule for Windows 10 Redstone 5 preview builds. Build 17711, for Insiders on the Fast and Skip Ahead rings, offers a number of improvements and changes.

These include Fluent Design tweaks, the usual raft of Edge additions, and improvements to display settings and the registry editor.

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

Latest usage share statistics suggest that Windows 10 is still trailing behind Windows 7 and that Windows 10 may not surpass Windows 7 this year in usage share.

NetMarketShare reports on the state of the desktop operating system market on the first day of each month, and it has long shown Windows 10 to be lagging behind Windows 7. This is in stark contrast to the figures from rival analyst firm StatCounter which famously had Windows 10 overtaking its predecessor way back in January.

This time around NetMarketShare took a few days extra to present its numbers for June, but after an audit, in which the figures changed considerably, they are finally available and make for interesting reading.

Tomorrow is July 4th -- a very special day for the United States of America. This is the day we celebrate our independence from the then-tyrannical British government. Thankfully, the Brits are now our allies -- we can enjoy some of their finest exports, such as Ed Sheeran, without guilt.

While you are celebrating America's freedom, why not also celebrate your computing freedom by switching from Windows to Linux? Rather than install a distro on your aging PC, you could totally buy a new computer that comes with Linux pre-installed! System76 sells such computers with either Ubuntu or its own Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS, and today, it announces a very rare sale.

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

Microsoft released a massive new build of the upcoming next version of Windows 10 this week. It includes improvements to Microsoft Edge and Skype, and other new features, but loses Sets.

The next big feature update of Windows 10, codenamed Redstone 5, has been shaping up nicely, with lots of great improvements and new additions.

The highlight of this future update is unquestionably Sets, a tab-based feature that’s designed to let you access related web pages, research documents, files, and applications in one location. Sets was originally planned to be part of the April 2018 Update alongside Timeline, but Microsoft needed a little more time to get things right, and so pushed it back. Sadly it now looks as if it won’t make it into the following feature update either.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Microsoft last rolled out a new Windows 10 Redstone 5 build for Insiders, but today the wait for an update is over.

Build 17704, for those on the Fast ring and Skip Ahead, includes a number of big improvements and changes.

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

As always, if I've missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email.

At its recent WWDC, Apple revealed the latest version of macOS -- Mojave. The OS update introduces a number of new features, including a dark theme and desktop Stacks. One of the more interesting additions is Dynamic Desktop which cleverly cycles through a set of 16 images of the desert taken at different times of the day.

If you like the idea of this, but are on Windows 10, the good news is it’s now possible to get the feature on your OS, and for free.

Windows 10 is a very good operating system, but despite Microsoft initially offering it as a free upgrade, many users were reluctant to switch from Windows 7, and it’s easy to understand why. A lot of Windows 10’s big changes -- the Microsoft Store, bundled third-party apps, live tiles in the Start menu, Cortana, Bing integration, and so on -- simply weren't that appealing to users of previous versions of Windows.

Windows 7 still offers everything that most people would want from an OS, but nearly a decade on from its debut, it now looks and feels quite dated compared to its successor. But if the aging OS had a modern makeover, could it win back many of those people who have moved on to Windows 10? I suspect so. Take a look at Windows 7 -- 2018 Edition and make up your own mind.

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

As always, if I've missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email.

Windows 10 has long had a reputation for being a rather problematic operating system. Part of this is down to early versions famously spying on users, and Microsoft shoving it onto systems against the owners' wishes didn’t help either.

Rolling out major feature updates twice a year has led to numerous complaints and problems as well, with one of our most searched-for articles here being how to rollback an update.

As recently noted by AdDuplex, the Windows 10 1803 rollout is progressing much more smoothly than all previous feature updates. AdDuplex’s figures suggest over 50 percent of Windows 10 users have already been offered the update, while Microsoft’s own numbers say 250 million machines have it. With close to 700 million Windows 10 systems, that’s just over 35 percent.

It’s certainly been a huge improvement over the famously slow and problematic Creators Update last year, and part of the reason this rollout has been so successful is down to Microsoft’s use of AI and Machine Learning.

With the Windows April 2018 Update now available to all, it’s full steam ahead for Microsoft on the next big feature update, codenamed Redstone 5.

New builds are arriving on a weekly basis, and today sees the rollout of Build 17692 for Insiders on the Fast and Skip Ahead rings.