Items tagged with Microsoft
Microsoft has thrown us all for a loop with its announcement today of the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build. At the start of the month, Microsoft opened up its Skip Ahead program, which allows Windows Insiders to test [early builds of] future Windows 10 versions. At the time, we incorrectly assumed that Microsoft would be delivering the Windows 10 19H2 (2019, Second Half) Update to testers, since Windows 10 19H1 Update testing is wrapping up. However, Microsoft today announced that those on the Skip Ahead track will instead receive builds of Windows 10 20H1....
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Gamers who have been holing out for prices on the Xbox One X to go down before they jump into 4K gaming might want to take advantage now. Newegg has the Xbox One X bundle that includes a single controller and a copy of the maligned Fallout 76 game for $349.99, which is a $150 discount off the normal $499 price. That makes this Newegg deal significantly better than the best price we saw during Black Friday at Walmart for $399. The only caveat is you have to be able to live with paying Bethesda some loot for the stinker of a game that is Fallout 76. Bethesda is still working on the game, but so far...
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Microsoft acquired LinkedIn over two and a half years ago, paying a whopping $26.2 billion in cash for the world's largest professional social network. It ranked as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's largest acquisition at the time. Microsoft obviously has a lot invested in LinkedIn, financially and creatively, and in a nod to both, it has started beta testing a new video streaming service. The service is called LInkedIn Live, and it is an invite-only affair in the United States at the moment. Those who accept the invitation and choose to participate can broadcast live video in real-time to certain...
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We have a special treat for you today, folks. Back in August, we brought you news about a Windows 95 "app" that was developed by Felix Rieseberg using Electron. The Windows 95 port was mostly a faithful recreation of the original groundbreaking PC operating system complete with playable classics like Minesweeper and Solitaire. Rieseberg is now back with Windows 95 version 2.0. Whereas the first release was pretty barebones, v2.0 ups the stakes with period-correct applications like Frontpage and the Netscape Navigator 2.01 web browser. For those that want to get your fix with some nostalgic...
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Are you itching to try Windows 10 preview build 19H2? This quick and simple hack will allow you to test out Windows 10 19H2, even if you missed the Skip Ahead enrollment period. The Skip Ahead ring allows Windows Insiders to switch from the current update preview to the next one. First and foremost, you must already be a Windows Insider to take advantage of this trick. If you are a Windows Insider, first launch the registry editor. Insiders should then navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ WindowsSelfHost\UI\Selection You will then need to double-click on “UIContentType”...
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Microsoft is likely finished with the major sticking points of its upcoming Windows 10 19H1 build (aka the April 2019 Update), which means that the company is primarily putting the final touches on this next major release. The folks in Redmond have just pushed out Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18334 to the Fast ring, and it primarily brings enhancements that are aimed at gaming. In particular, Microsoft is wanting gamers to pay particularly close attention to gaming performance with this latest build, so as an added incentive, it is allowing testers to try out State of Decay for...
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For many years and through many iterations, Microsoft championed Internet Explorer as the best browser around, and at one time IE dominated the landscape. What about now? Microsoft's message is very different in the era of Windows 10 and Edge (which is undergoing an overhaul to Chromium). In a recent blog post, Microsoft warned of the "perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser." Internet Explorer is a legacy product at this point. It hangs around because in the old days, so much of the web and the tools businesses built were designed to be compatible with IE. Consider that a decade...
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Microsoft published a set of three videos that it has dubbed "The Twins Challenge" to help promote its Office 365 software. In the videos, Microsoft is taking shots at more traditional office programs such as its recently released Office 2019 in order to demonstrate the advantages held by Office 365. The three videos published to date focus on the three most important components of Microsoft's Office product suite: PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. To make the videos a tad more comical, Microsoft hired biological twins to test these utilities, with the twist being that one twin would use Office 2019...
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Chrome is the most popular browser on the market even though it is far from perfect. One of the biggest complaints that Chrome users have is that the browser tends to be very resource intensive using up memory and excess processing cycles that can slow down the entire system. It appears that Google is finally ready to do something about the resource-intensive nature of Chrome with a new mode that would place limits on resources the browser can consume. Details of a mode called "Never-Slow Mode" have surfaced on Chromium Gerrit and indicate that the mode would place hard limits on the resources...
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We don't have a crystal ball handy, but if you ask Microsoft, the company will tell you that the future of playing games will at least partially be driven by streaming titles from the cloud. That is Microsoft's vision with Project xCloud, an ambitious streaming platform. Microsoft has not shared a ton of details about the upcoming service, though it did reveal that all digital Xbox One games currently in the Microsoft Store on Xbox will be capable of streaming to a mobile device. More on that in a moment, but first, let's take a step back for a moment. Microsoft describes Project xCloud as "the...
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Late last week, we reported on an issue that caused many people trying to reach the Windows Update server within Windows 10 to be greeted with an error message. While many people immediately placed the blame on Microsoft -- and how could we blame them given the company's continued troubles with Windows updates -- the eventual solution that worked for many involved changing DNS providers. Today, Microsoft is providing some clarification for what went wrong and is absolving itself of any blame in the situation. Early this morning, Microsoft posted the following statement to its Windows...
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Microsoft is cooking up something for GDC that will make gamers very happy. It has an entire GDC session where it will debut and talk about its new cross-platform development platform that will bring support for Xbox Live to platforms including Android, iOS, and the Nintendo Switch in addition to the Xbox and PC platforms that it already supports. Notice there is no mention of support for the PS4 from Sony. Microsoft noted in its GDC session description that when the new SDK rolls out for all the other platforms, it will reach over 2 billion devices, a massive gain from the 400 million gaming devices...
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The latest test build of the next major upgrade to Windows 10 includes a very interesting feature—Windows Insiders who download and install preview build 18329 (19H1, or Redstone 6) can extend their mixed reality experience beyond Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and run traditional desktop (Win32) apps in mixed reality. "In this update, we added the ability to launch Desktop (Win32) applications (such as Spotify, Paint.NET, and Visual Studio Code) in Windows Mixed Reality, just like how you launch Store apps. Please keep in mind this is feature is still in development and we are actively...
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We have come a long way from the standard Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and cryptic error messages that plagued us during the Windows 95/98 and Windows 2000/XP days. The error messages have become a bit more detailed over the years, but they can still be a bit nonsensical and difficult for your average Windows user to decipher. Fortunately, it looks as though Microsoft is looking to make things a bit more informative for us mere humans with the Windows 10 19H1 Update (which will reportedly be called the Windows 10 April 2019 Update). In the last Windows Insider webcast, Microsoft...
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