Free Republic

Life is good (LG) is what you may say out loud when using LG stuff. Unfortunately, today I have to tell you that life is horrible. I recently upgraded to an ultra wide LG screen which comes with split screen software. While I am happy with the hardware, I am utterly disappointed how LG treats security. The TL;DR version is that instead of writing software properly, they just disable UAC upon installation in order to make their software work. I received my monitor some time around last week and quickly installed the software. Nothing special has happened during the setup...

Typically, today’s budget PCs come with 4GB of RAM. A mid-range configuration may offer double that, and high-end gaming systems and workstations go as high as 16GB or more. There’s no doubt which way the wind’s blowing, either: Windows 8 supports up to 128GB of physical memory (assuming you’re running the 64-bit edition), while Windows 8 Pro can go up to 512GB. Does anyone really need this much RAM? Memory isn’t as expensive as it used to be, but there’s obviously no point paying for gigabytes of RAM from which you’ll receive no material gain. Does more equal faster? Many...

At a recent Windows Hardware Engineering Community summit in China, Windows chief Terry Myerson revealed a number of newsworthy tidbits about Windows 10,... At the very end of the news items, almost as an aside, came word of a unprecedented trial that Microsoft is undertaking "in partnership" with popular Chinese handset manufacturer Xiaomi. According to Myerson, a select group of Xiaomi Mi 4 owners (power users, he calls them) will be invited to test out a custom Windows 10 ROM on their devices. Devices that ship running not Windows out of the box, but Android. Let me restate that, so...

Today we announced new container technologies as well as Nano Server, a purpose-built operating system designed to run born-in-the-cloud applications and containers. As customers adopt modern applications and next-generation cloud technologies, they need an OS that delivers speed, agility and lower resource consumption. Nano Server is a deeply refactored version of Windows Server with a small footprint and remotely managed installation, optimized for the cloud and a DevOps workflow. It is designed for fewer patch and update events, faster restarts, better resource utilization and tighter security. Informed directly by our learnings from building and managing some of the world’s largest...

Even though the deadline for any type of support for Windows XP was up last April, many organisations are still using the venerable operating system to power their PCs and the applications that run on them. But XP was never a truly secure OS to begin with and despite numerous patches over the years, new vulnerabilities have been found. Of course, since April 2014, no more updates have been provided by Microsoft on general release and this has left anyone still running XP very much exposed to hacking and security breaches. According to figures from IT security firm Secunia taken...

Microsoft loves to use codenames and from the past few years, there are two in particular that you may recall; Blue and Threshold. With Windows 10 (Threshold) coming to market sometime this summer, Microsoft is already starting to work on the next update for the OS. Microsoft has said multiple times that Windows will be moving at a faster cadence than in the past and they are already working on a release for 2016. The codename for the project is 'Redstone', a popular item in the recently acquired game, Minecraft. At this time, not much is known about Microsoft's plans...

Although Microsoft has said its Windows 10 preview program has some 2.8 million participants, just over half of those are using the early version on a regular basis, according to Web metrics estimates. For March, U.S.-based analytics company Net Applications pegged Windows 10's user share, a rough projection of the fraction of online users running the OS, at 0.09%, or nine PC users out of every 10,000. That represented 0.1% of all Windows PC users, the slight difference due to the fact that Windows does not account for all personal computer operating systems, but instead about 91%. Windows 10's user...

Intel's recent results suggest a slowdown in firms leaving the ancient OS behind and upgrading to new systems. Why won't they update? Most interesting detail that emerged from Intel's lackluster first quarter financial results had nothing to do with mobile, the company's white whale. Instead, it concerned something so old that it almost seems laughable in the same week that the very 21st-century Apple Watch dominated headlines. Per ZDNet's own Larry Dignan: In a statement, Intel said it cut its first quarter outlook because of "weaker than expected demand for business desktop PCs and lower than expected inventory levels across...

Just over a year ago, we introduced Office Lens for Windows Phone—and over that time the app has become one of the most popular free apps on Windows Phone, with an average rating of 4.6 stars (out of 5) from more than 18,500 reviews. Today, we’re releasing Office Lens for iPhone and Android phones. Office Lens is a handy capture app that turns your smartphone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote so you’ll never lose a thing. Use it to take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky notes—then let Office Lens crop, enhance and...

Late last month a mysterious patch suddenly appeared as an Optional entry in the Windows Automatic Update chute. At the time I wrote: Conjecture at this point: It's somehow related to the ability to upgrade directly from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10. But of course, the official documentation doesn't say anything of the sort. The crows have come home to roost and, thanks to a German researcher named Gerard Himmelein at heise.de, we now have a more thorough understanding of exactly what Microsoft's dishing out (a Google English translation of the post is available). Yesterday Jan Willem Aldershoff...

Summary: Microsoft officials confirm the company will deliver the second tech preview of Windows Server 2016 in May. It's been months -- six, in fact -- since Microsoft released a new test build of its next version of Windows Server. Last we heard from company officials, Microsoft planned to deliver its second test build some time in the spring of 2015. That was after the Windows Server team decided to delay the release of the next version of server until 2016, and to hold off on releasing a second public test build of it at the start of 2015, as...

Version 4.0.0 of Mono, the FOSS implementation of the .NET Framework, has been released. This is the first release of Mono that replaces various components of Mono with code that was released by Microsoft under the MIT license. Microsoft itself is working towards .NET Core: a redistributable and re-imagined version of .NET, which has two code drops: CoreFX and CoreCLR. Mono at this point continues to provide an API that tracks the .NET desktop/server version. This means that most of the Mono code that has been integrated from Microsoft comes from the ReferenceSource code drop. ...

Could Microsoft's open source advocacy ever result in the company offering its cash cow Windows OS up to open source? It's possible, according to one Microsoft official, though his comments Wednesday should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. During a technology panel session in Silicon Valley, Microsoft's Mark Russinovich, CTO for the company's Azure cloud platform, did what Microsoft officials have been prone to doing in recent years: Preach Microsoft's conversion from open source skeptic to proponent. Open source, Russinovich said at the Chef Conf 2015 conference, was "no longer taboo" at the commercial software giant, pointing to...

Every now and then, it's nice to break out of your bubble, to really get outside your comfort zone and see how things are "on the other side of the fence."I love Chinese food. Could eat Chinese food every day of the week. But, once in a while, it's a good idea to mix things up. You know. And order a pizza. This is that time for me. Only instead of Chinese food, it's Linux. Instead of pizza, Windows 10 (Technical Preview). That's right. I'm a full time Linux user, and I just spent a few days trying to live...

What’s the worst thing that could happen when your Windows update takes longer than expected? Ask the Paderborn Finke Baskets, a German pro basketball team who got relegated thanks to Windows’ sluggish performance. The Spiralling Progress Indicator of Doom spelled the end of the team’s run in Division Two of the Basketball Bundesliga. As the home team in a match against Chemnitz, the Finke Baskets were responsible for the large score display screen. The laptop controlling the screen crashed right before the start of the game and upon re-start insisted on installing automatic Windows updates. The game was supposed to...

THIS MONTH'S OPERATING SYSTEM statistics from Net Applications show that the spectre of Windows 7 is simply refusing to shift for Microsoft. The wildly popular operating system shows no signs of slowing down its dominance with a 58.04 percent market share (+2.05). A full two-point jump is quite an event in these parts at the best of times, but it's just embarrassing for an OS that has already been superseded. Users are likely to be hanging on for Windows 10 now. The preview build of the upcoming platform is holding steady with just under one percent of the market. Windows...

First look. Microsoft has released the first public preview build of Windows 10 to include Project Spartan, its new web browser. Is Project Spartan really new? The browser engine, called EdgeHTML, is a fork of the Internet Explorer (IE) web engine, called Trident, though with a key difference: EdgeHTML has no compatibility modes and will simply render the latest web standards Microsoft is able to deliver. The user interface is new but is really the successor to “Modern IE”, the Windows 8 web browser that runs in the don’t-call-it-Metro environment. Users will perceive Project Spartan as new though, since it...

Announcing Surface 3 When we developed Surface Pro 3, we set out to design the tablet that can truly replace your laptop – even your high-end laptop. Today we feel both fortunate and proud that the vision of Surface has become a reality with so many people using Pro 3 and loving the experience... he result is Surface 3, as well as a mobile-broadband version, Surface 3 (4G LTE). It’s the thinnest and lightest Surface we’ve ever shipped. It runs full Windows, including desktop applications. It includes a one-year subscription to Office 365 to help you really get down to...

Microsoft debuted a new device today: the Surface 3. The tablet has a lot to offer, including the fact that it’s the thinnest and lightest tablet the company has ever shipped, but the real kicker is that it runs a full version of Windows 8.1. In other words, Windows RT is dead. Windows RT, released in October 2012 along with the Surface RT, is an edition of Windows 8.x designed for mobile devices that use 32-bit ARM architecture. The Surface RT was meant as an example first-party device for other computer makers. Microsoft unveiled the Surface 2 and Surface Pro...

Full Title:Microsoft's Project Spartan browser is HERE (unless you build apps or run VMs, that is) Devs might be wise to skip latest Windows 10 build Microsoft has shipped a new build of Windows 10 that offers a first look at its much-hyped Project Spartan web browser, but the software giant has cautioned that developers may want to hold off upgrading. In a Monday blog post, Redmond man Gabe Aul said Project Spartan is the main feature of Windows 10 Build 10049, which is rolling out now to testers on the Fast release ring of the Windows Insider program. But...