July 2017

Microsoft confirmed to Zdnet yesterday that it will support PCs with Intel's Clover Trail processor with security updates until 2023.

Microsoft announced today that it is expanding support for OneDrive's version history feature to all file types stored by the service.

OneDrive supported the restoration of document file formats by using the service's version history feature up until recently.

Avast just announced that the company has acquired the software company Piriform, best known for the software program CCleaner for Windows.

Microsoft plans to roll out a change in the coming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update that aims to reduce the time the computer is installing the update.

The new feature shifts some processes which are currently processed during installation of the update.

Microsoft separates Windows 10 updates into online and offline phases. The process begins with the online phase. Windows Update finds a new update for the PC and starts to download it.

Malwarebytes AdwCleaner 7.0 has been released; it is a complete rewrite of the security application that Malwarebytes, maker of the popular security solution Malwarebytes, acquired in October 2016.

AdwCleaner is a specialized tool for Windows that scans the system for adware or changes caused by adware to remove those and restore the previous state of the system.

So, I recently purchased a new (used, but new to me) laptop, that had a 1TB 5400RPM Hard Disk in it, granted the laptop is fairly powerful and capable of modern gaming, rendering, and number crunching thanks to a 4th generation i7 CPU and a Dedicated 2GB GDDR5 GPU. However, the HDD seemed to be running awfully slowly, even for a 5400RPM drive.

The most recent build of Microsoft Edge on the Windows 10 Insider channel comes with a change that hides some preferences on the browser's about:Flags page.

Microsoft Edge is a rather bare bones web browser when you compare its feature set to other browsers out there. It is like Notepad on Windows, a good but not great program that you can use for basic tasks.

When you compare options that Edge ships with, with those of Google Chrome or Firefox, you will soon realize that you don't get a lot of them in the default Windows 10 browser.

When you delete huge folders in Windows, you will notice that the process takes quite a bit of time to complete.

I keep backup folders of Ghacks locally on a platter-based drive, and these folders come close to 30 Gigabytes in size with more than 140,000 files and 350 folders.

When I need to delete them again, it takes a long time if I run the delete operation in Windows Explorer. First thing that happens is that Windows runs calculations which in itself may take a very long time to complete.

Luminar is a popular photo editor for Apple Mac OS X devices. The company Macphun has released a beta version of Luminar for Windows that brings most features of the Mac software to Windows devices.

Luminar is offered as a beta version currently. You can only download it after you enter an email address on the developer website, and need to use the activation code that is sent to the email address to register the software.

Considering that the Mac version is commercial, it seems very likely that the Windows version will also be commercial and not free.

Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC is an error message that Windows 10 may throw during the update to a newer version of the operating system.

Microsoft moved away from the classic service pack / new version of Windows update scheme of the past to Windows as a Service with the company's Windows 10 operating system.

Windows as a Service pushes out feature updates frequently to Windows 10 systems that administrators and users need to install for continued support.