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Microsoft Windows Insider chief 'fesses up to potential blue-screen inducing glitch Windows 10 Springwatch – as it shall henceforth be known – has entered its second week and Microsoft has dropped the first clue as to what caused the delay: bugs.Though Microsoft has never actually confirmed a release date or name for the elusive Windows 10 Spring Creators Update (aka version 1803), many expected it to arrive on April 10's Patch Tuesday, with build 17133 hitting the Release Preview ring of the Windows Insider programme.But nothing happened, until now.Supremo of the Windows Insider programme, Dona Sarkar, dropped a hint last...

The last few weeks I have noticed that my computer shuts down randomly. When it does this a blue screen comes up with a message that my computer will be restarting and then sending the error information that caused the problem to Microsoft. It also has a QR Code showing. Until recently I have never seen this happen and it seems to happen when I leave the computer on for a few hours. I am wondering if this is the result of some download from Microsoft.

Microsoft may be moving to discontinue several first-party apps installed in Windows 10 that aren’t a major priority. Unnamed sources indicate that the company is now shifting internal developers away from the likes of Windows 10’s Stocks and Weather apps to focus on Microsoft Edge. Microsoft is also grabbing employees that previously worked on now-canceled Redstone 5 enhancements to provide them with positions on the Edge browser team. The news arrives after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella distributed an email to employees in March that outlined a restructuring within the company. Rajesh Jha now leads a new engineering team focused on...

Chipmaker AMD has released new microcode updates to mitigate the Spectre variant 2 side-channel attack, which Microsoft has supported with a Windows 10 patch for AMD systems. AMD's latest microcode update coincided with Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday fixes and comes just weeks after Intel wrapped up its Spectre 2 mitigations for all CPU families released over the past nine years. AMD's chief mitigation for its chips on Windows affected by variant 2 CPU indirect branch target injections is called 'indirect branch prediction barrier' (IBPB), which is only intended for cases when software switches from one user context to a context...

At some point next month, just in time for Spring, Microsoft will start to emit the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update to everyone's PC. Avid Reg readers will be aware of what's forthcoming for the Redmond operating system. If you're just tuning in, well, see the aforementioned link, and strap in for these highlights. When the OS upgrade is released proper, we'll be on the scene with the full details. In the meantime, here's your need to know: Microsoft reckons the operating system will take, on average, 30 minutes to install, which is much shorter than usual. The OS will...

Grab some popcorn: Redmond has asked for feedbackMicrosoft’s about to test a new feature of Windows 10 that will force users to employ its Edge browser under some circumstances.Revealed in the announcement of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 17623 for Skip Ahead, the change means “we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge”.Microsoft’s justification for the change is that Edge is the best, most secure browser on Windows 10.But the change will reportedly override users’ preference for default browser.While that’s naughty in lots of ways and makes Microsoft’s...

Some users reported being pushed to the Win10 1709 upgrade with no advanced warning. Certain Windows 10 users are being forced to upgrade to version 1709, even if they have deferred the Feature Updates. All users who have been forced to upgrade to Windows 10 version 1709 seem to have limited the Diagnostic Data that could be collected by Microsoft. Some Windows 10 users are reportedly being forced to upgrade to version 1709, even if they had chosen to opt out of automatic updates. As reported by Windows blog AskWoody, Windows 10 users on versions 1607 and 1703 were pushed...

OS-detection services disagree on which Windows reigns Web analytics outfit StatCounter last week trumpeted news that Windows 10’s market share overtook Windows 7’s for the first time in January 2018. But other ratings services didn’t find the same result.StatCounter’s assessment of Windows version market share for January 2018 suggested that Windows 10 scored 42.78 per cent of Windows’ market share, as measured by worldwide internet. That compared to 41.86 per cent for Windows 7.Here’s a pretty graph showing the trend.StatCounter’s trend lines for Windows version market share. Click here to embiggen Before you figure out how to start selling champagne...

Not everyone loves Windows 10. Many people upgraded from Windows 7 and regretted it. It might not work with your favorite (and maybe old) software and seems to hang frequently. If you belong to this camp and are looking for ways to get back to Windows 7, here’s a breakdown of how to downgrade Windows 10 and reinstall Windows 7 on your PC.Return to Windows 7 You can only use this option if you upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7. Note that this method will not work if you did a clean reinstall or if you’ve had your Windows...

Unfortunately, I've had to get a new computer and it's an Acer Windows 10. Does it not have Windows Office? From searches, apparently Windows 10 doesn't come with everything previous systems (95, XP, Windows 7) did. All I can find is a 30 day trial and then purchase window which asks for a 25 number key number which I can't find anywhere in the 5 small pieces of paperwork that came in the box. And the key number looks to be for a 30 day trial. Do I have to buy Office? What else will I have to buy? Any...

Google Project Zero's Tavis Ormandy has turned up a howling blunder in a password manager bundled with Windows 10.On Friday, Ormandy dropped the bug, not in Windows but in the third-party Keeper password manager. He wrote: “I've heard of Keeper, I remember filing a bug a while ago about how they were injecting privileged UI into pages (issue 917). I checked and, they're doing the same thing again with this version. I think I'm being generous considering this a new issue that qualifies for a ninety day disclosure, as I literally just changed the selectors and the same attack works.“The...

This is a link for those people who still want Windows 10 FREE Upgrade.

Microsoft has quietly added beta versions of an SSH client and server to the next major update of Windows 10. The SSH client and server will allow admins and developers to securely connect to other systems without needing a third-party app like the popular PuTTY. Over the years we have seen Microsoft transform from a fairly closed company to one that embraces and supports open source software and standards. This move isn’t unexpected but is another step in that direction. With OpenSSH baked in, it becomes for developers to create secure connections between systems for transferring data and issuing commands....

Looking for some helpful hints and discussion on Windows 10 update. I have a G751 Asus ROG computer, which is pretty capable and modern (Intel quad core 4710HQ, 32 GB RAM, NVIDIA 970 GTX), only a couple of years old. I've been using Windows 10 Home Edition happily for the last 2+ years, accepting upgrades as they are pushed to me without problems. Now comes the Creators Update (the 1703 series of Windows 10), and I have big problems. First off, MS is pushing it on me, by clogging up my computer with the Windows 10 upgrade download. When I...

Windows has been knocking around in some form or another for a grand total of 32 years now, and in that time it’s amassed a lot of features—not just the newest bells and whistles but long-standing features you might have forgotten about or never even discovered in the first place. Here are 10 really useful tricks that Windows 10 is capable of that you might not know about, but should definitely know about. Virtual desktops Video and media streaming Scheduling tasks Malware removal Reclaim lost disk space Remote assistance Share files around the house Check for missing files and disk...

Windows laptops and tablets have traditionally run on X86 processors from the likes of Intel and AMD. Microsoft experimented with using ARM-based processors when it launched the Surface RT and Windows RT in 2012 — and it cost the company dearly. The failure of the Surface RT was mostly due to software, though. The system could only run a small subset of applications that had been specifically compiled for it — and hence you couldn’t just install Chrome or Photoshop, for example. It didn’t help that Microsoft’s marketing for the Surface RT was confusing for many consumers. Fast-forward to today...

Long a mainstay of the old-fashioned Windows interface fan club, Classic Shell’s developer Ivo Beltchev has thrown in the towel, releasing the code to SourceForge Hundreds of millions of downloads just doesn’t cut it, apparently. Ivo Beltchev, who first released the Start Menu replacement in 2009, has decided it just isn’t worth the effort any more. Yesterday he posted this on his official web blog:After months of deliberation, I have decided to stop the development of Classic Shell… There were few factors that led to my decision: Lack of free time.Windows 10 is being updated way too frequentlyEach new version...

Never go full Windows Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.A coalition of Social Democrats and Conservatives on the committee voted (PDF, in Deutsche, natürlich) for the Windows migration on Wednesday, Social Democrat councillor Anne Hübner told The Register.Munich rose to fame in the open-source world for deciding to use Linux and LibreOffice to make the city independent from the claws of Microsoft. But the plan was never fully realised – mail servers, for instance, eventually wound up migrating to Microsoft Exchange – and in February the...

Readers routinely ask me whether it’s still possible to clean install Windows 10 with an unused Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 product key. Over two years after Microsoft first enabled this functionality, the answer is a resounding yes.And I can think of a number of reasons why one might need to do so.As noted, Microsoft first introduced this capability over two years ago, and in doing so it erased what had been one of the early install/activation issues with the then-new Windows 10.Almost a year later, I reported that this capability—which was supposed to be temporary, by the way–still worked....

More than a year after ending its free Windows 10 upgrade program, Microsoft is getting ready to shut down the last official free upgrade extension. The news wasn't exactly shouted from the rooftops. If you've been waiting to claim your free Windows 10 upgrade using the "assistive technologies" exception, you need to act soon. In a quiet change to an obscure web page, Microsoft announced this week that those exceptions will end on December 31, 2017. On July 29, 2016, Microsoft officially ended the Get Windows 10 program, which offered free Windows 10 upgrades to anyone currently running a supported...