Articles about Windows

Microsoft’s Cortana is now officially available on Android. The company announced earlier this year that it would release its digital voice assistant to Android and iOS later this year. Prior to the official release, a private Android beta of Cortana leaked this July. Today the company releases a public beta client of Cortana for devices powered by Google's mobile operating system.

In case you’ve used Cortana on a Windows Phone handset before, it wouldn’t take much time to get settled with it on Android. It maintains the same interface and functionalities. In case you haven't used it before, Cortana is Microsoft's answer to Google's Google Now assistant. You can use Cortana to ask for directions, and get your queries answered, among other things.

Continue reading →

It's no secret that Chrome for Mac (OS X) is a mess. It eats a ridiculously high amount of memory, energy and shortens the battery life. Google announced earlier this year that it was working on a fix. And now it is delivering on that promise. The latest Chrome build -- available via Canary channel -- is significantly less resource hogging, and surprisingly faster at the same time.

The company has been hard at work improving the memory consumption in its Web browser while also making the tabs snappier. You can read about the development process and feedback at Chromium's developer website. The build dubbed 45.0.2454.46 is also significantly lighter on the battery and is no longer making the laptop crazy hot. In a recent build, the company was testing interesting internal processes like tab discarding in the background. The idea behind it is simple: make the tabs you haven't used in awhile idle automatically. This would, under the typical condition, free up a significant amount of memory.

Continue reading →

When we think of smartphones, two platforms come to mind: Android and iOS. For some, Windows Phone is there as the third, but as Gartner’s second quarter smartphone sales results show, Microsoft is losing even more ground.

Combined, Android and iOS own 96.8 per cent of the smartphone market. Android actually dropped market share from 83.8 last year to 82.2 percent this year. Apple managed an increase from 12.2 to 14.6 percent in the same time period.

Continue reading →

There have been various numbers thrown around suggesting how many people have downloaded Windows 10 and how many have the operating system installed. Great debates have started about just how accurate these figures may be, but as any statistician will tell you, the more data you have to work with, the more likely it is to give an accurate picture.

Microsoft announced that there were 14 million downloads in the first 24 hours after launch, and it has been estimated that this figure now stands at anything from 50 million to 67 million. UK-based data analysis firm GoSquared has put together a tool that shows, in real time, Windows 10 adoption around the world by indicating its share of Windows traffic.

Continue reading →

Lenovo has issued a BIOS fix for some of its machines, thus preventing a vulnerability which could allow potential hackers to gain control of a desktop or a laptop computer from the manufacturer.

In a press release published on the Lenovo website, the company has urged consumers to manually update their BIOS. Newer machines will have the fix by default.

Continue reading →

As Windows 10 is free, it's hard not to be tempted into upgrading. But just because the operating system is free, it does not mean it is necessarily right for you. You may have tried Windows 10 for a few weeks and come to the conclusion that you hate it. Perhaps you yearn to move back to the comfort of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.

If you've decided that you simply do not like Windows 10, you can downgrade with ease. Of course, this is not possible if you have performed a clean installation of Windows 10, but it's an option that's available to you if you upgraded from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. So, are you ready to ditch Windows 10? Here's what you need to do.

Continue reading →

We all know that virus infections are a pain, not only do they disrupt your work they can also be hard to remove as they often prevent you from downloading or running cleanup tools or even from accessing Windows.

If you don’t have access to a friendly geek with the right tools you can be faced with hours of work or even having to wipe out and reload your machine.

Continue reading →

The strangest, and largely overlooked news, coming out of the tech sector this week is Dell's Microsoft betrayal. This isn't the first time that the PC maker strayed. Linux joined the product stable long ago, and last year an educational Chromebook debuted. But this newer and larger model, which will be available September 17, raises question: WTF?

Dell's core PC market is business—small, large, and everything between. Windows, and that smattering of Linux, is core, and longstanding loyalty to Microsoft's application stack. But the Chromebook 13 announcement, as positioned by the OEM and Google, is all about the competing cloud app stack. Interestingly, selling prices rival Windows laptops, which is another head scratcher: $399 to $899, depending on configuration.

Continue reading →

If you are in the market to get yourself a Windows 10-powered tablet but don't want to spend a lot on it, Tesco has something you might find interesting. The British merchandise retailer is selling a tablet called "Connect" that is priced at £99 ($150) and runs Microsoft's latest desktop operating system.

Surprisingly, despite rocking a cheap price tag, the Connect doesn't annoyingly disappoint on the hardware front. It sports an 8-inch LCD display of 1,280 x 800 pixels resolution. Inside the device sits an Intel Atom Z3735G quad-core processor (incidentally the same SoC that powers HP’s $199 Windows tablet) clocked at 1.33GHz coupled with 1GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage which could be expanded to another 32 gigs using a microSD card should you want more storage.

Continue reading →

Measured as sales through the U.S. consumer retail channel, Macs reached rather shocking milestone during first half 2015, according to data that NPD provided to me today. Yes, you can consider this a first, and from lower volume shipments. By operating system: OS X, 49.7 percent; Windows, 48.3 percent; Chrome OS, 1.9 percent. That compares to the same time period in 2014: OS X, 44.8 percent; Windows, 53.1 percent; Chrome OS, 2.1 percent. So there is no confusion, the data is for U.S. consumer laptops.

While data junkie journalists or analysts often focus on unit shipments, revenues, and subsequently profits, matter much more. Looked at another way, Mac laptop revenues rose by 10.9 percent during the first six months of 2015, year over year, while Windows PCs fell by 9 percent, and Chromebooks contracted by 9.5 percent.

Continue reading →

If you upgrade your computer from Windows 7 or Windows 8 to Windows 10, you probably have no idea what your product key is for the latest version of the operating system. The time may come when you want to perform a clean installation of Windows 10, and this is when you'll need that key.

It is not possible to use your product key for your old version of Windows to activate Windows 10, but during the initial upgrade process this key is converted into a new one. Using a special tool, you can find out the key that has been generated for you so you can make a note of it for future reference.

Continue reading →

Parents who are upgrading their computers to Windows 10 are warned that the move from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 will obliterate the safety features used to protect children. You may have spent time putting restrictions in place in a bid to keep your offspring safe when using your computer, but Windows 10 will change these child-friendly accounts into standard accounts with no limitations whatsoever.

The upgrade process wipes out website restrictions, game and app age ratings, time limits, and other parental controls and monitoring options. Unless a parent goes to the trouble of reinstating each of these settings individually, their children will have unfettered computer access. The discovery, revealed by The Register, will come as a surprise to many, but the worry is that many parents will simply be unaware that their children are not protected. And this is far from being the first time Windows 10 has been criticized.

Continue reading →

Windows 10 is now with us, and, whether you've made the move from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, there is a lot to love, but also a lot to hate. With this latest release, there is also one very big difference from previous versions of Windows: it is free of charge.

This is not only likely to encourage more people into making the move to Windows 10, but it also opens up a possibility that many people would simply not have considered before. If you decide that you don’t like Windows 10 (the OS is not without its fair share of problems, after all), you can downgrade to your previous version without ending up out of pocket. The question is, how many people will go -- or have gone -- down this route?

Continue reading →

NetMarketShare has released its monthly desktop operating system usage share figures, showing the fluctuations of the various iterations of Windows. All versions of Microsoft’s operating system registered drops in July, except of course Windows 10 which was launched at the tail end of the month.

Only being available for a few days meant the new OS was never going to shift the needle significantly, but there were enough upgraders (Microsoft says 14 million in the first 24 hours) to double the operating system’s share.

Continue reading →

Vulnerability intelligence firm Secunia has released its second quarter 2015 country report for US and 14 other countries around the world. This looks at what programs users have installed and which are most at risk.

The big news is that a high percentage of users have unpatched versions of Adobe Reader. Adobe has the highest market share in this segment and PDF readers are a common target for hackers.

Continue reading →