Whether you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 on your laptop or bought a brand new machine, you’re going to want to eke out as much battery juice as you can while you’re on the go. Microsoft’s shiny new OS includes a new native battery saver feature — and there are a few other tricks you can pull to make sure your laptop lasts until you can find a power socket. Read more…
Tag: microsoft
Windows 10 is on 75 million PCs after only one month
If you’re still wondering why Microsoft made Windows 10 free, just consider the latest stats: It’s now on 75 million computers one month after its big launch, Windows corporate VP Yusuf Mehdi tweeted today. In comparison, it took six months for Microsoft to sell 100 million Windows 8 licenses , a more nebulous stat that didn’t necessarily include actual installs. None of this is a surprise though: We’ve written extensively about Microsoft’s desire to build a long-lasting Windows platform , and that starts with prioritizing the number of people running Windows 10 rather than mere revenues. Mehdi also divulged some other intriguing tidbits: More than “90, 000 unique PC or tablet models” have upgraded to Windows 10; over 122 years of gameplay have been streaming to Windows 10 PCs from Xbox One consoles; and, perhaps most intriguingly, the Windows 10 store “has seen 6x more app downloads “per device than Windows 8.” That last point is likely yet another big reason Microsoft chose to make Windows 10 a free upgrade. Microsoft worked hard to promote the Windows 8 app store, but it never managed to land a killer app (and in many cases, Windows 8 apps were simply worse than their iOS and Android counterparts). Developers waited until people actually started using Windows 8 apps, but that never really happened because there weren’t many to choose from. But with Windows 10, there’s an influx of new users eager to try out newer apps, and Microsoft has also made it easier for devs to bring over iOS and Android apps . 1. #Windows10 : More than 75 million devices running Windows 10 – and growing every day. 1/10 pic.twitter.com/g0kqGizU0c — Yusuf Mehdi (@yusuf_i_mehdi) August 26, 2015 Filed under: Software , Microsoft Comments Tags: microsoft, Windows10
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Windows 10 is on 75 million PCs after only one month
GOG Galaxy lets you roll back broken or unwanted updates
The latest version of gaming platform GOG Galaxy now supports patch and update rollbacks, letting you quickly restore a game to a previous version. Rollbacks were originally touted by the company as an DRM-free, anti-Steam feature , letting you skip an update if you hated it. “We know that patches can occasionally break a game or affect your mods, ” said tech VP Piotr Karwowski. GOG Galaxy has other ways you can avoid being locked down, like an opt-out for automatic updates and the ability buy games straight from its store sans the platform. Other game clients, including Steam, generally require such updates, a bone of contention for some players. The main drawback to GOG is a dearth of the latest games, though it does have fairly recent, popular titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt . The company describes the Galaxy client as “fully optional, ” though you’ll miss things like multiplayer, achievements and chat if you don’t use it. Along with rollbacks, the new version brings download pausing, extra installation options, improved friend searching, more speed and an updated UI. It’s now available to anybody in the preview program (you can enroll just by selecting the “receive preview updates” option), and will roll out to everybody else a bit later. Filed under: Gaming Comments Tags: Galaxy, GOG, GOG Galaxy, GoodOldGames, PCGaming, Platform, Steam, update, Windows
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GOG Galaxy lets you roll back broken or unwanted updates
Phone and laptop encryption guide: Protect your stuff and yourself
The worst thing about having a phone or laptop stolen isn’t necessarily the loss of the physical object itself, though there’s no question that that part sucks. It’s the amount of damage control you have to do afterward. Calling your phone company to get SIMs deactivated, changing all of your account passwords, and maybe even canceling credit cards are all good ideas, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Using strong PINs or passwords and various Find My Phone features is a good place to start if you’d like to limit the amount of cleanup you need to do, but in this day and age it’s a good idea to encrypt your device’s local storage if at all possible. Full-disk or full-device encryption (that is, encrypting everything on your drive, rather than a specific folder or user profile) isn’t yet a default feature across the board, but most of the major desktop and mobile OSes support it in some fashion. In case you’ve never considered it before, here’s what you need to know. Why encrypt? Even if you normally protect your user account with a decent password, that doesn’t truly protect your data if someone decides to swipe your device. For many computers, the drive can simply be removed and plugged into another system, or the computer can be booted from an external drive and the data can be copied to that drive. Android phones and tablets can be booted into recovery mode and many of the files on the user partition can be accessed with freely available debug tools. And even if you totally wipe your drive, disk recovery software may still be able to read old files. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Phone and laptop encryption guide: Protect your stuff and yourself
Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers
Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post , Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company’s current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit per second of total throughput. That means each of its 100, 000 total servers can randomly speak to each other at a speed of 10Gb/s, a hundred times faster than the first-generation network it created in 2005. To get there, Google did something surprising — it built its own hardware from off-the-shelf parts. It was back in 2004 that Google decided to stray away from products by established companies like Cisco and build its own hardware using off-the-shelf chips from companies like Qualcomm. The aim was to put less onus on the hardware and more on software, something that’s impossible with off-the-shelf switches. Vadat said hardware switching is “manual and error prone… and could not scale to meet our needs.” Using software switching was not only cheaper but easier to implement remotely — critical for a company whose bandwidth requirements have doubled (or more) every year. Google considers its servers as a key advantage over rivals like Microsoft and Amazon, so why is it talking now? For one, it’s recently started selling its cloud services to other businesses, so it’s keen to brag about them. It’s also being pragmatic — its data requirements are now so huge that it needs academic help to solve configuration and management challenges. That’s why it’s presenting the paper at the Sigcomm networking conference in London, and if you’re in the mood for a (much) deeper dive, you can read it here . Filed under: Peripherals , Internet , Google Comments Via: WSJ Source: Google Tags: DataCenters, google, GoogleCloud, Growth, Servers, Switches
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Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers
Chastity belts were a joke, then a metaphor, then a hoax
Historian Albrecht Classen got so tired of hearing people blithlely assert that chastity belts were ever a thing that he wrote The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process , explaining how a 15th century hoax that appeared in a manuscript that also feature fart jokes and devices for making people invisible became canon. Read the rest
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Chastity belts were a joke, then a metaphor, then a hoax
Parallels 11 brings Microsoft’s Cortana to Macs before Siri
The latest version of Parallels, the popular Windows virtualization tool for Mac OS X, almost feels like it’s trolling Apple. One of Parallels 11’s key features, alongside full Windows 10 support, is its ability to put Microsoft’s Cortana right on your OS X desktop. That’s right — you could have a Windows-powered virtual assistant on your Mac long before Siri reaches the desktop. Parallels has already made it possible to run Windows apps directly on your Mac desktop for years with its “Coherence mode, ” but this latest update marks the first time it’s brought over a Windows feature on its own. Slideshow-313636 In a brief demonstration, Parallel’s Cortana feature (which requires a Windows 10 virtual installation, naturally) worked just like it did on Windows 10 proper, with decent voice recognition and no noticeable delays. It can even take advantage of your Mac’s location data, making it practically indistinguishable from a native OS X app. Parallels 11 also packs in the usual performance improvements: It can launch and shut down Windows around 50 percent faster than the last version, and a new “travel mode” can save up to 25 percent of your battery life. But really, the main reason you’d want to upgrade is to put Cortana on your OS X desktop and freak out all your friends. Parallels 11 is available today for $80, though users of the past two versions can upgrade for $50. And if you need more out of your Windows virtual machine, there’s also Parallels 11 for Mac Pro Edition, which will take advantage of that machine’s beefy hardware. It’ll cost you $100 a year, or $50 a year if you’re upgrading from Parallels 9 or 10. Filed under: Software Comments Tags: Cortana, Macs, OSX, Parallels, Parallels11, Windows10
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Parallels 11 brings Microsoft’s Cortana to Macs before Siri
Windows Memory Manager To Introduce Compression
jones_supa writes: Even though the RTM version of Windows 10 is already out of the door, Microsoft will keep releasing beta builds of the operating system to Windows Insiders. The first one will be build 10525, which introduces some color personalization options, but also interesting improvements to memory management. A new concept is called a compression store, which is an in-memory collection of compressed pages. When memory pressure gets high enough, stale pages will be compressed instead of swapping them out. The compression store will live in the System process’s working set. As usual, Microsoft will be receiving comments on the new features via the Feedback app. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity
Vigile writes: The future of graphics APIs lies in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, both built to target GPU hardware at a lower level than previously available. The advantages are better performance, better efficiency on all hardware and more control for the developer that is willing to put in the time and effort to understand the hardware in question. Until today we have only heard or seen theoretical “peak” performance claims of DX12 compared to DX11. PC Perspective just posted an article that uses a pre-beta version of Ashes of the Singularity, an upcoming RTS utilizing the Oxide Games Nitrous engine, to evaluate and compare DX12’s performance claims and gains against DX11. In the story we find five different processor platforms tested with two different GPUs and two different resolutions. Results are interesting and show that DX12 levels the playing field for AMD, with its R9 390X gaining enough ground in DX12 to overcome a significant performance deficit that exists using DX11 to the GTX 980. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity
Microsoft working on an app that reads the news to you
Microsoft is testing a new app called NewsCast, which makes a playlist of news story summaries and reads them to you, according to Neowin . The publication came across a page on the Microsoft Azure Web Sites domain that had the app for download. In it, the company mentioned that the program was created by the Bing team and is meant to make commutes more productive, since you can listen to playlist even while driving. Unfortunately, the download’s no longer available , but Neowin managed to take some screenshots that you can see below the fold. NewsCast reportedly uses Bing’s text-to-speech program to read out blurbs that last 30 seconds each, though the voice isn’t as organic as Cortana’s . It allows you to save summaries for later and also has a feedback button that launches a three-question survey for testers. Curiously, the app that was on Azure was available only for iOS devices, though it’s probably because a lot of Microsoft employees/testers use iPhones and iPads. As you can see, it’s not quite identical to the breaking news app Facebook’s reportedly developing, as well, but the two could very well be rivals in the future. [Image credit: JeepersMedia/Flickr , Neowin ] Filed under: Misc , Mobile , Microsoft Comments Via: PCWorld Source: Neowin Tags: app, ios, iphone, microsoft, mobilepostcross
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Microsoft working on an app that reads the news to you