Microsoft Stops Selling Windows 7 & 8

By DustinPosted on

If you were in the market for a new PC with Windows 7, you might be out of luck. Microsoft is no longer selling OEM licenses for Windows 7, and no longer selling Windows 8 in the retail box. Windows 8.1 is the big client OS on the scene now. So, if you were looking to stay with an older OS, your time may be up.

There will be retail box sales of Windows 8.1 (Microsoft draws a hard line between Windows 8 and Windows 8.1) and businesses and consumers will still be able to buy Windows 7 Professional licences through ‘Downgrade Rights’, but it will come at additional cost and have limited availability.

Windows 8 About to Bypass Windows XP in Market Share

By DustinPosted on

Windows XP is set to drop below the market share for Windows 8. There are a lot of hold outs still running Windows XP & Windows 7, but Windows 8/8.1 is still gaining market share and is going to be overtaking the long lived XP very soon. Oddly enough, Linux is still very low – even below Vista or Windows NT. Of course, this could be the year of the Linux desktop!

Finally, Windows 7 remains the clear market leader with 53.05 percent of the market. There’s also the “other” category of operating systems that didn’t make the graph. These include Windows Vista (2.82 percent), Windows NT (1.64 percent), Linux (1.41 percent), and Mac OS X 10.10 (1.18 percent). All the numbers are based on tracking visits to websites.

New Microsoft Band Watch Announced

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has announced it’s new smart watch, the Microsoft Band. Still a bit bulky for everyday use for me, but when out walking or just out and about, it’d be excellent. Although, the other features would make me want to wear it more often. Lots of excellent features that are cross compatible with Windows Phone, Android and Apple’s iOS. Cost is $199. I may end up picking one of these up soon.

Microsoft Band, the first device powered by Microsoft Health, helps you achieve your wellness goals by tracking your heart rate, steps, calorie burn, and sleep quality. It also helps you be more productive with email previews and calendar alerts – right on your wrist.

OneDrive Unlimited Storage for Office 365 Users

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft Office 365 users will now have unlimited storage with the included OneDrive cloud storage. With files getting bigger and bigger, and with features such as automatic upload from your phone to OneDrive, unlimited storage can come in very handy.

Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers. The roll out will continue over the coming months, so if you want to be one of the very first to get more storage, go here to put yourself at the front of the line. In the meantime, you can take advantage of the massive capacity you have today by activating the auto upload feature for your camera roll on your phone.

 

New Preview Build for Windows 10

By DustinPosted on

The Windows Blog tells us a new build for Windows 10 Technical Preview is available. The new build, build 9860, has some issues, but brings in a few new additions as well. As usual, it’s a work in progress and shouldn’t be considered a fully functional OS for production systems.

To get the update manually, go to PC Settings, Update & recovery, Preview Builds, and check for updates. The new update will download and install automatically. For those that want to wait for it to update automatically, it will do some at night, and be ready for you in the morning. Just leave your PC running.

A lot of stuff coming in from user feedback, using the feedback tool, forums and the new Windows Suggestion Box program.

  • Action Center for Windows PCs. As we shared when we announced Windows 10 in September, we aren’t limiting our view to one specific device type. We are looking across our entire product family to look at ways to bring great experiences to our customers across different devices. So with this build, we’re bringing “Action Center” from Windows Phone over to the PC as the place where you can see and follow up on all actionable items. This build is focused ONLY on enabling basic notifications – quick actions and cleaner UI will come later. You’ll see notifications from the system and apps – from new emails and invites to IMs, Facebook posts and more – all in one place, so you don’t miss a thing. Click on the new Action Center icon in the notification area of your taskbar to check it out.

ACDesktopFull

  • Move apps easily from one monitor to another. When you’re working on multiple monitors, use WIN+SHIFT+<arrow> to move the active app to another monitor. You can find a list of new keyboard shortcuts for navigating and managing your multiple desktops here in this blog post.

  • Animation for switching desktops. One of the pieces of feedback that you gave us was that it was hard to know when you were switching desktops. We addressed your feedback by adding an animation to make it clear that you are switching. Check it out by creating some new desktops and moving between them.

Windows Feature Suggestion Box

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has a new way to suggest ideas, features and suggestions for Windows – Windows Feature Suggestion Box. Using User Voice, it allows you to submit feedback for Windows. Users get to vote on the best submissions and Microsoft will look at the highest voted suggestions and see if they can implement them in a future update of Windows.

Users get 20 votes to start and can vote 1-3 times per suggestion. When you are out of votes, you can take away from previous voted suggestion. If a suggestion is added into Windows, you get those votes back. This is used for suggesting features and not for submitting bugs and errors to the Windows team.

Windows Phone has a similar User Voice available, and I have voted on and submitted several ideas over the years, and many have been implemented. Microsoft does listen and take these suggestions seriously.

It is a nice feeling when you suggest a feature and people vote on it. Seeing that feature in Windows, and knowing that you had a part in getting it in the product (one way or another).

Microsoft is moving in the right direction by taking a lot of input from users via the feedback tool in Windows 10 Technical Preview, Windows Feature Suggestion Box, MVP program, and other avenues.

Windows Feature Suggestion Box provides the Windows PC/Tablet user community with a channel for feedback. To help us build the best version of Windows ever, we created this forum to hear your ideas, suggestions and feedback. Please vote for a feature suggestion or submit your own!

How Does This Work?

Standard Disclaimer – our lawyers made us put this here 😉 Please note that the Windows Feature Suggestion Box is moderated and is a voluntary participation-based project. If your submission is not a product feature suggestion it may be removed. Please do not send any novel or patentable ideas, copyrighted materials, samples or demos which you do not want to grant a license to Microsoft. Your submission is subject to these License Terms . Please limit your suggestions to 25 words or less.

 

UserVoice

Windows 10 Technical Preview Available

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has released the Technical Preview for Windows 10 this morning. Jump in, grab the installation ISO (available in multiple languages in 32 and 64 bit versions) and install. I recommend doing it on a VM or spare machine, not your production machine. There is always the possibility to lose data (rare, but I don’t like taking the chances).

Important

    • Remember, trying out an early build like this can be risky. That’s why we recommend that you don’t install the preview on your primary home or business PC. Unexpected PC crashes could damage or even delete your files, so you should back up everything.

    • If you want to stop using Windows Technical Preview and return to your previous version of Windows, you’ll need to reinstall your previous version from the recovery or installation media that came with your PC—typically a DVD. If you don’t have recovery media, you might be able to create a USB recovery drive.

    • After you install Windows Technical Preview, you won’t be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows.

Introducing Windows 10 Video

By DustinPosted on

Microsoft has released a new video introducing Windows 10 as well as the Windows Insider program. Insider program opens tomorrow, as well as the download for the technical preview. As with previous tech previews – they are meant as beta software and not the final product (there were a lot of people thinking it was the final version when Win 8 was in preview).

They have also updated their Windows blog with an “Introduction to Windows 10” post as well, with more details – http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2014/09/30/announcing-windows-10/

ZDNet Lists 5 New Features Windows 9 Needs to Win

By DustinPosted on

ZDNet has an article saying what it needs to get Windows 9 the love it needs. It’s actually 12, but the last 7 are in bullet points near the end… I’ll say that the #3 item on there would be huge. With a lot of people, myself included, using an SSD for OS and a standard drive for applications and data, it’d make a lot of sense to have an option to separate the two. Right now, it can be done with a registry change. However, it can break some applications (you have to install IE first, then change the path for Program File). Little tweaks like that would be extremely beneficial to some users.

It’s 2014, and drives are cheap. It should be easy – and by easy, I mean as close to automatic as possible – to make Windows take notice of the fact a system has multiple drives and use one for Windows and programs, and the other for data.

Taking this a step further, I’d like to see Windows isolate all applications from the operating system in such a way that I can, with a click of the mouse, either blitz all the settings of a specific application to default, or even remove that application from the system, deleting all of its setting with it. This would go a long way to eliminating the bitrot and slowdowns that affect Windows as time goes on.

Windows 8 already has a feature that rolls Windows back to an “out of the box” state, but this is a very blunt instrument. Repairing an operating s system should no longer means nuking everything and starting from scratch.