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You'll be able to upgrade to Windows 11 for free if you're already a Windows 10 user. Use the PC Health Check app to check your devices now. Windows 11 is on the way, and if you're already a Windows 10 user, it will be free to upgrade to Microsoft's newly redesigned operating system, the company said in a blog post after its virtual event on Thursday. (Find everything you need to know about Windows 11 here.) So long as your PC meets the minimum requirements, you'll be able to update to Windows 11 the same way you usually update...

Microsoft is today closing off a vulnerability that one Chinese researcher claims has “probably the widest impact in the history of Windows.” Every version of the Microsoft operating system going back to Windows 95 is affected, leaving anyone still running unsupported operating systems, such as XP, in danger of being surreptitiously surveilled. According to Yang Yu, founder of Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, the bug can be exploited silently with a “near-perfect success rate”, as the problems lie in the design of Windows. The ultimate impact? An attacker can hijack all a target’s web use, granting the hacker ”Big Brother power”, as...

I received a Sony DSC-W830 camera as a gift. Nice. Unfortunately it will not connect nor download pix to my PC running XP. Can anyone help? Thanks.

HAVE YOU UPDATED TO WINDOWS 10 AND HAVE A DATA CAP ON YOU INTERNET PLAN THEN YOU MUST READ THIS Windows 10 is using yourbandwidth to offer updates to others Windows 10 uses an individual’s internet connection to share updates with others across the internet. Microsoft calls the feature Windows Update Delivery Optimisation and says it is designed to help users get updates faster. It is enabled by default in Windows 10 Home and Pro editions. Windows 10 Enterprise and Education have the feature enabled, but only for the local network. This is the same way that torrents work: A...

Morgan Stanley analyst Kathryn Huberty upped her sales projections for the tablet computer market Thursday, and argued that Microsoft will grab the number two spot in the market, after Apple iPad and ahead of tablets running Google‘s Android software, with the launch of Windows 8 later this year. Huberty and the tech team at Morgan Stanley are now estimating shipments of 133 million tablets in 2012, up 57% from their original estimates; and 216 million tablets in 2013, up 112%. No surprise there, tablet sales have been growing fast — despite high-profile stumbles by Hewlett-Packard and Dell — thanks to...

Need help from a computer guru. This is NOT for a criminal event. My nephew is going to be getting a divorce. He and his wife have a computer in their home. However, the wife has now put a password on the computer so that it cannot be accessed except by her. ALL their financial dealings is on this computer and he has no idea what is now been done. IS there a way to easily bypass a password to get into the computer and see what is on HIS computer? Do I need to take it to a computer...

Microsoft has given small system builders the green light to start selling new Windows 7 PCs more than a week before the general launch date of October 22, a Seattle-area computer maker said today. According to Jon Bach, the president of Puget Systems, several Microsoft representatives have told him that his company, which sells custom PCs nationally out of its Auburn, Wash. facility, can install Windows 7 on new machines, then sell and ship them to customers on October 13.That date is nine days before the worldwide October 22 launch Microsoft has touted, when Windows 7 upgrades are to go...

A software update for the Windows operating system has left hundreds and thousands of computer users unable to access the internet. The update, known as a "patch", conflicts with another piece of software, the Zone Alarms firewall, that many people use to protect their computers from hackers and viruses. The patch, codenamed MS08-037, was designed to fix a security loophole in the way Windows handles website addresses. It was discovered that there was a weakness with the operating system that could allow hackers to re-route legitimate web pages to malicious websites instead, and leave internet users open to fraud...

Madison, Wis. - It was introduced a month ago, and already Microsoft's Windows Vista, the successor to the Windows XP operating system, has been bruised by critical media reports about security flaws and other shortcomings. In a random sampling of Wisconsin CIOs, we found most organizations taking a deliberate approach to the enterprise versions of Vista, even as other recently released Microsoft products like Office 2007 receive high marks, and as individuals await the release of the consumer version of Vista. However, since it is wise for IT departments to be running the OS ahead of time, either in a...

In May 2005, a trojan called PGPcoder was discovered in the wild by Websense Security Labs. The trojan's purpose was to encrypt a user's files, then demand a ransom for their decryption. Although this scheme seemed novel, it is actually predated by over 15 years, by a similar scam in 1989. LURHQ's Threat Intelligence Group has now discovered a third such scheme involving ransomware which we are calling Cryzip. Unlike PGPcoder, which used a custom encryption scheme (which was subsequently reverse-engineered by LURHQ), Cryzip uses a commercial zip library in order to store files inside a password-protected zip. Although the...

We went down to New York for the long weekend. Despite the 16-degree weather, we walked down to Times Square - all the bright lights lured us the ten blocks from our hotel. When we got there, we stood like, well, tourists, gaping at all the electronic billboards. And then, across the square, I saw it: the world's largest Windows error message - on a two-story high e-billboard (I guess everything really is bigger in New York). It was the only billboard in the entire square with absolutely no movement - since the PC running it had obviously frozen.

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, has been talking about the digital future. The other Bill, technology critic Bill Thompson, has been reading between the lines.Bill Gates thinks I'm a communist. Not the old-fashioned state socialist concerned with five-year plans for boot production in the eastern provinces, but a "new modern-day sort of communist", the sort who "want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and movie-makers and software makers". Admittedly, Mr Gates probably does not know who I am and I doubt if he spends a lot of time reading the BBC news site. But he...

New Trojan poses as Lycos spam page Correspondents in Paris December 10, 2004A VIRUS that spies on keystrokes and downloads passwords and bank account details is masquerading as a screensaver designed by internet portal Lycos to attack spammers, an internet security company has warned. Finnish anti-virus company F-Secure said the so-called Trojan horse started to be distributed among emails on Monday. The mail has the subject line "Be the first to fight spam with Lycos screen" and comes with an attachment entitled "Lycos screensaver to fight spam," F-Secure said on its website. Whoever downloads it unwittingly installs a spying programme...

A European security vendor warned Wednesday that most browsers sport a bug that hackers can exploit to spoof a Web site and trick users into trusting bogus pop-up windows. The vulnerability, which Danish security firm Secunia rated as "moderately critical" is similar to previous bugs in browsers that was disclosed in July and September of 2004. Attackers could use it to add content into a trusted Web site's window by, for instance, inserting a fake form in a pop-up window seemingly opened by that site. Affected browsers, said Secunia, include the popular Internet Explorer and the up-and-coming Firefox, as well...

Unprotected PCs Fall To Hacker Bots In Just Four Minutes By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb.com The lifespan of a poorly protected PC connected to the Internet is a mere four minutes, research released Tuesday claimed. After that, it's owned by a hacker. In the two-week test, marketing-communications firm AvanteGarde deployed half a dozen systems in "honeypot" style, using default security settings. It then analyzed the machines' performance by tallying the attacks, counting the number of compromises, and timing how long it took an attack to successfully hijack a computer once it was connected to the Internet. The six machines were equipped...

(note from Stoat: This article goes on for eleven pages and so I'm only going to post an excerpt. Please be sure to go to the original article and read more than what I've posted here because there's a tremendous amount of real-world information that I would consider essential reading if you're considering the XP-2 patch either for your PC or for your enterprise) Forget the ivory-tower pundits--here are first-hand reports from the trenches, relayed by your peers who've already installed the new Service Pack. By Fred Langa, InformationWeek Sept. 6, 2004 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=46200911 You've heard a lot about Windows...

So I'm reduced to summarizing the article, because the tools at eWeek apparently don't want their material posted here. Long story short: Mozilla and Firefox users on Windows XP (and possibly Windows 2000) have a hole that potentially allows remote code execution, due to the way Mozilla/Firefox passes certain protocols to the operating system. This apparently only affects Windows versions - users can get the full story here, and then download the ShellBlock extension here, which closes the hole.

Just a day after Google's announcement that it was planning a free Internet email system caused many Internet users to wonder if it was part of an April Fool's Day joke, Bill Gates revealed that Microsoft had also played a joke on Internet users. The frustrated Gates said in a press conference today that he was disappointed that no one, including Microsoft users, seems to have gotten the joke. "Years ago," confessed the 48 year-old trickster, "I began what I considered to be the greatest practical joke of my life, and no one got it." "First I purchased a...