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Microsoft is announcing that Windows 11 will be released on October 5th. The new operating system will be available as a free upgrade for eligible Windows 10 PCs, or on new hardware that ships with Windows 11 pre-loaded.The free upgrade to Windows 11 will start rolling out on October 5th, but like many Windows upgrades in the past, it will be available in phases. New eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first, and then Windows 11 will become available for more in-market devices in the weeks and months following October 5th.“Following the tremendous learnings from Windows 10, we want...

The official announcement of Windows 11 last month brought both excitement and confusion for enthusiasts. A brand-new Windows operating system only comes around every few years, but Microsoft’s hardware requirements left many scratching their heads. Chief among them is the instance on mandatory TPM 2.0 modules and AMD Ryzen 2000 or 7th generation Intel Core (and newer) processors. The processor cutoff was particularly puzzling, considering that AMD’s first-generation Ryzen 1000 processors came out in 2017, which is not that old in the grand scheme of things. For example, the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X is still a perfectly acceptable processor for...

Booting up your new phone and going through everything in there is always a special experience, but this ritual is often soured by the presence of bloatware and unnecessary third-party apps.

With the Galaxy S10, Samsung celebrates its 10th anniversary Galaxy S phone by going big and bold. How bold? Each of the four new Galaxy S10 models is more impressive than the last: there's the cheaper S10E ($750), the Galaxy S10 ($900), S10 Plus ($1,000) and Galaxy S10 5G, the brand's first 5G phone (price TBA, as are UK and Australian prices for the whole range). This is Samsung seeking to whip up excitement, roar back in sales and defend its title as the world's top smartphone brand. But the Galaxy S10 phones also represent a quest for perfection.

Many new devices are cluttered with programs that you never installed, never requested, and many not want. There’s nothing like the fresh, clean feeling of unboxing a brand-new computer or smartphone. Too bad the feeling usually comes to an end the moment you hit the power button. ... Bloatware isn’t all bad — you might end up buying that antivirus program. But it can also slow down your machine and waste valuable storage space. And every now and then, these unwanted programs will even threaten your privacy. Late last month, the Chinese computer maker Lenovo admitted that a bit of...

According to Ruslan Kogan this is the world's first Internet Explorer 7 "tax". The Australian online retailer Kogan.com has introduced the world's first "tax" on Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) browser. Customers who use IE7 will have to pay an extra surcharge on online purchases made through the firm's site. Chief executive Ruslan Kogan told the BBC he wanted to recoup the time and costs involved in "rendering the website into a antique browser".The charge is set to 6.8% - 0.1% for every month since the IE7 launch.Every month the surcharge will rise by 0.1%.Too much effort According to Mr...

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, A.D. 56-120 ** Congress passed and the president signed 125 bills into law in 2009. Your tireless federal regulatory agencies were even busier: They issued 3,503 rules and regulations. Regulations considered in recent years have included energy-efficiency standards for clothes washers and pool heaters, SUV emission rules and the Consumer Product Safety Commission's designs to regulate escalators (safer than unregulated stair steps, by the way) as a "consumer product." The year's Federal Register - the daily depository of federal regulations - already tops 61,000 pages. According to research...

When one person really thinks about how many laws does one break everyday just waking up and going to work? How many tax code violations does one break without even knowing it? How many state laws and loacl laws are broken each day without even realizing that you are breaking the law? How many times have you been pulled over for something that was a non-issue but was something classified as a minor offense just so you could be pulled over and examined by law enforcement? If one were to fill a room with pages of laws that affect you,...

Real Networks, makers of the RealPlayer music and media management application, have launched a new version of their software. RealPlayer SP for Windows is available immediately as a beta download, with a Mac version expected by the year end.

Critical Vulnerability In Internet Explorer Found, Patch on the Way Jason Mick (Blog) - December 17, 2008 12:50 PM A new security flaw discovered in Microsoft's Internet Explorer has the company and its customers losing much sleep News broke in the security world earlier this week that a critical vulnerability had been found in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. The vulnerability could be used to take over computers and is known to be currently being used to steal passwords. Rick Ferguson, a senior security adviser at security firm Trend Micro says thus far the hole has only been exploited to steal...

The researchers damn Windows in current form, urge radical changes Calling the situation "untenable" and describing Windows as "collapsing," a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been. In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts. "For Microsoft, its ecosystem...

The love-hate relationship between Microsoft and its users has always centered on the performance of its operating system. And during the past year, Windows Vista has given us reasons to be both positive and negative about the future of the PC. Before it came out in January, Vista got good reviews, though some critics complained Microsoft should have taken bigger steps to change the look and functions of Windows, much as it did with Office 2007. But as the year wore on, there were reports about bugs and security issues. And then came the insultingly titled book "Windows Vista Annoyances"...

Just weeks ahead of its public launch, Apple Inc. has updated the minimum system requirements for its next-generation Leopard operating system to exclude 800MHz PowerPC-based Macs, AppleInsider has learned. The Cupertino-based company has yet to officially announce the hardware requirements to run Leopard, due out in October, but had long stated in developer documentation that the software would require "an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (800MHz or faster) or G5 processor."

Computer makers have been told they'll no longer be able to get Windows XP OEM by the end of this year, despite consumer resistance to Vista and its compatibility problems.By early 2008, Microsoft's contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines. "The OEM version of XP Professional goes next January," said Frank Luburic, senior ThinkPad product manager for Lenovo. "At that point, they'll have no choice." Despite Microsoft's relentless promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the finicky SOHO market. In a recent post...

Sales of boxed copies of Windows Vista at retail stores significantly trailed those of Windows XP in each product's first week on shelves, according to new figures from NPD. The market research firm's data showed the number of copies of Vista purchased was nearly 59 percent less than the number for its predecessor XP, looking at the first week of sales. Revenue was also down, but less dramatically, with the dollar value of first-week Vista sales off 32 percent from that seen with XP. Vista went on sale both on retail shelves and on new PCs on January 30. Businesses...

In early January, we posted a review of Vista, Microsoft's new operating system. Written by senior editor Erika Jonietz, the piece first appeared in the January/February 2007 issue of our magazine. In the piece, Jonietz described her disappointment with the company's new software--and confessed to having crossed that clearest of lines in the cultural sand: she went from being a Windows user to being a Mac user. The piece is the most widely read story we have ever posted on our site; it continues to be viewed by thousands of people every day. Clearly, it struck a chord with a...

HUNDREDS of computer enthusiasts were in Harvey Norman's Alexandria store in South Sydney at the stroke of midnight last night to be among the first in the world to buy Microsoft's latest PC software, Windows Vista. Prized copy: William Tsang shows his copy of Windows Vista signed by Bill Gates as he is served by Gerry Harvey at the midnight launch of the new operating system in Sydney Australia was the second market in the world, behind New Zealand, where the software was put on sale. As part of the global launch, one Harvey Norman customer walked away with a...

Unless you've recently emerged from a coma, you know the consumer versions of Microsoft's new Vista operating system ship Tuesday. This column is not a review of Windows Vista. ... This article is for those of you who are about to download or purchase Windows Vista and install it on a PC. I'm here to talk you out of it. ...Here's why. 1. Vista is incomplete Microsoft is already planning its first service pack .... Vista probably won't be truly ready for prime time until that first service pack version, possibly later this year. The hardware and software companies that...

I received a few e-mails over the weekend from readers who took issue with advice I recently gave to a Web chat participant who asked what he should do to help an elderly friend who was having PC trouble. The questioner said the woman knew nothing about computers and that her Windows machine was besieged with pop-up advertisements. I probably get two or three variations on this question in the course of each Web chat, and I usually ignore them in favor of more targeted questions because of the difficulty in diagnosing what precisely may be ailing the questioner's computer....

My computer used to be really zippy. 1 1/4 gig Ram, fast processor, etc. But then I installed symantic and that slowed it somewhat. Then all the Windows updates. Now it's actually pretty slow, sometimes. Anyone else have this problem?