Tag archive: windows

Try to imagine you are Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer. You’re weary of Apple’s perennial coolness, and of the fact that Mac sales have been growing at a startling clip. Your company basically invented the tablet 10 years ago, but didn’t have the chutzpah to take it mainstream, and now Apple has built the most valuable company in the world on the popularity of mobile devices. You’re still essentially minting money, Windows 8 is just over the… Read More

Skype says it wants to make travelers' lives easier over the holidays and has announced a free WiFi deal with certain airports. If you find yourself stuck in one of the 50+ participating airports' terminals over the holidays, you'll be able to tap into a free hour of Internet access at a third party wireless hotspot, courtesy of the Microsoft-acquired VoIP service. The date for the free WiFi offer begins Wednesday, December 21… Read More

After years of litigation, Novell's antitrust case against Microsoft has ended in a hung jury. A single juror was left unconvinced that Microsoft leveraged its monopoly power in the desktop operating systems market back in the mid-1990s to advance its own Microsoft Office suite and crush WordPerfect and Quattro Pro. The result is that the case (which dates all the way back to the introduction of Windows 95) could find itself going to… Read More

Mentioned in great detail on the developer blog of the Windows engineering team, Microsoft is working on a method of logging into a computer powered by Windows 8 through a “Picture Password”. Likely designed for touchscreens, users are prompted with a familiar picture of their choice and asked to make a series of finger gestures on the screen to setup password protection. Microsoft recommends that users pick at least three gestures… Read More

Microsoft has announced that beginning early next year, it will begin silently upgrading Internet Explorer on systems running Windows Xp, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. The move mirrors an upgrade strategy that's been used by Google Chrome since 2009, which routinely upgrades users to the latest version without explicitly asking for permission. Currently, even if Windows users have automatic upgrades enabled, Microsoft asks for permission… Read More

Microsoft and Apple have always been competitors on some level, and as a result, their fans often contain a bit of that old competitive spirit. It’s not uncommon for Mac buyers to become overnight loyalists, but Windows has an entrenched fanboy battalion as well. Given the situation, it’s almost unnatural to think that – *gasp* – someone might own both a Windows PC and a Mac. Can you imagine the nerve? In the same household! Yet it… Read More

Announced on the official Skype blog earlier today, the communications company released new versions of Skype for both Mac and Windows that include the ability to connect to Facebook. After installing Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac or Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, users can click the Facebook icon on the left side of the screen and authorize Skype to access Facebook data through the Facebook Connect button. However, users have to agree to release a bevy… Read More

Formatting your hard drive is very useful. It's good for clearing everything off a secondary drive or when installing a new copy of Windows. Formatting is also good for cleaning up storage issues, eliminating viruses and other hard-to-resolve problems.  Our How-To guide for formatting your hard drive will be broken down in three parts: Prep, Formatting and Installing XP, and Formatting a Secondary Hard Drive. Preparation 1. Formatting a… Read More

It's not news that Kinect is coming to Windows. There's been talk of that since the beginning of the year. All sorts of support from Microsoft ramping up to… well… to pretty much right now. The MSDN Blog celebrates today's one-year anniversary of the Kinect's release with the news that Kinect for Windows is an official thing, complete with its own blog (the one linked above) and official website. Beta 2 of… Read More

In an interview with various Microsoft execs, CNet has unearthed new details about what killed the Courier. Microsoft’s fledgling attempts at a corporate-friendly tablet were notoriously squashed last April when it put the kibosh on the whole thing. While the device was never officially announced, we couldn’t help but wonder why such a hyped product was so unceremoniously dumped. In with the old, out with the new Microsoft had a two tablet… Read More

Rockstar Games moved pretty quickly with L.A. Noire. Usually the developer will release a console game and then wait a year or more before rolling out the PC version. Noire hit stores back in May of this year, and Rockstar already has a release date set for its PC counterpart: November 8 in the United States and November 11 in Europe. The release is actually L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition, and it'll be coming to Windows, as well as the… Read More

IBM may not make the news much nowadays with big consumer product announcements, but that hasn't stopped the long-time computer giant from growing. In fact, IBM's market value has now officially passed that of Microsoft, making it the second-most valuable technology company in the world, after Apple, and the fourth most-valuable company in the world, overall. The value of IBM jumped to $214 billion on Thursday, while… Read More

Adobe has formally announced it will be shipping Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe Air 3 in early October. Adobe touts the new versions as a “game console for the Web,” with graphics performance up to 1,000 times faster than Flash Player 10 and Adobe Air 2, thanks to full hardware-accelerated rendering for both 2D and 3D graphics and 64-bit support on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, while Adobe Flash remains common on PCs,… Read More

Microsoft confirmed last week that the upcoming Metro-styled update for the Xbox 360 dashboard will appear in Windows 8 as the user interface you'll use to access Xbox Live from your PC. The dashboard's new look was revealed over the summer at E3 and it should be coming to consoles this fall. Windows 8 is set to arrive next year, which gives MS plenty of time to work out those early launch kinks. There's a new video online now… Read More