Microsoft

Microsoft To Get More Aggressive with ‘Get Windows 10’

Starting later this month business Windows 7/8.1 users will be included in the Get Windows 10 campaign. They too will start getting the nagware to upgrade to Windows 1o. According to a blog post from Matt Barlow, Microsoft’s MSFT 417,00 +4,13 +1,00% general manager of business group marketing, “Small businesses and organizations will soon be able to receive notifications about the upgrade and then directly upgrade to Windows 10,”. Microsoft defines small businesses and organizations as those with a device which: Running and licensed for Windows 7 Pro or Windows 8.1 Pro Configured to receive updates directly from the Windows Update service (i.e….

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Microsoft Has Ended Windows 8 Support

On January 13th, 2016, Microsoft Unfortunately, we could not get stock quote msft this time. officially ended support for Windows 8 and you better upgrade to Windows 10 while you still can for free. Okay, you may be asking since Windows 7 came out before Windows 8 and it is supported until January 2020 why would Microsoft end support for Windows 8 now? Well, Microsoft is referring to the original Windows 8.0 (though never branded as such). Okay, so I have Windows 8.1 I am good then? Maybe, maybe not…Microsoft’s FAQ: “Windows 8.1 falls under the same lifecycle policy as Windows 8,…

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Choose Windows 7 at “your own risk and your own peril”

This very odd statement is from Microsoft MSFT 417,00 +4,13 +1,00% Marketing chief Chris Capossela. “We do worry when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines,” Capossela stated. “And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to…

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The Return of KB3035583 Part 2

So, was doing some more housekeeping on the school laptop, mainly cleaning it up from some experimenting with XBMC/Kodi in the last couple weeks. I am actually going to be doing more with XBMC/Kodi on a different system once I add a video card which support HDMI and likely will cost more than I paid for the computer (only paid $25 for the computer from a local eWaste Re-seller and put another $53 into for 2 GB of RAM). Anyway, I noticed I had updates waiting to be installed. This time, I carefully looked at the list and what do…

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The Return of KB3035583

Yes, the evil (Get Windows 10 aka GWX) KB3035583 update somehow installed itself this morning on my main Windows 8.1 machine. I was doing some housekeeping on my school Windows 7 laptop as I am between semesters right now. Thought it would be a good time to remove some unneeded programs (Oracle Virtual Box and Microsoft Project Professional) that I am not going to use and update Flash,  Java, Thunderbird and Firefox. While I was running Malware Bytes on the laptop I started checking for updates on my main machine. I did look at the updates that were available I was…

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Firefox 43.0.1 Released

Mozilla has released a minor update to the current Firefox 43 branch with Firefox 43.0.1 on December 18th. This is part 1 of 2 for the fix of Bug 1079858. This bug has to do with Microsoft deprecating the use of the SHA1 Authenicode signatures for Windows singing on January 1st, 2016. Mozilla is moving to use SHA2 signature algorithms and the purpose of this patch is to simply inform the updater and maintenance service of the new SHA2 certificate issuer. Part 2 which will be released with Firefox 43.0.2 likely in the next week will Use SHA-2 to sign Windows binaries, and…

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Silverlight Support Returning To 64-Bit Firefox

At least for a while as Mozilla still plans on deprecating Silverlight support sometime in the future (much as Google and Microsoft already have). Bug 1225293 which was made public today indicates Mozilla’s short term plans to support Silverlight in the Win64 builds. When exactly Silverlight will return to the Firefox 64-Bit builds is not exactly known. It could (but not likely) be with Firefox 43 already in Beta and due out December 15th, 2015 or (more likely) Firefox 44 still in Developer’s Edition (Aurora) and due out in late January 2016 or Firefox 45 currently in Nightly builds and due out…

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Windows 10 ‘Forced’ Update and Spying

So Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 and 8.1 users are being targeted to be automatically update to Windows 10 via the Windows Update utility. While this has been happening since September and in October Microsoft called this an ‘accident’, now they are admitting that their plan is to get every Windows 7 and 8.1 PC (that can run Windows 10) on to Windows 10.  Right now the Windows 10 Update is only an optional update, but in ‘early 2016’ it will become a recommended update. For those user who have their update settings to automatically download and install recommended updates, they are going to…

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‘Give Microsoft Edge a Shot’

The title of this post sounds quite like a marketing gimmick by Microsoft to promote their new Windows 10 browser. It could be for a TV commercial or online advertisement. Actually it is the messages Windows 10 users may see if a new ‘feature’ in a forthcoming Windows 10 update is left in place when they attempt to change their default browser to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft has already made it a pain for users to change their default browser by making them do it from within the Windows 10 settings instead of allowing from within the browser itself. But, now…

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Mozilla to remove NPAPI Plugins from ALL Firefox

Following in the footsteps of Google and Microsoft, Mozilla plans to eliminate support for the ancient NPAPI plugins (with the exception of heavily sandboxed version of Flash) in the next year. This would include the 32-bit versions of Firefox. There has been a lot of heated discussions in the past few months in regards to Mozilla removing the support of NPAPI plugins (mainly Silverlight and Java) from the upcoming (Firefox 43?) Windows 64-bit (Win64) version of Firefox. I agree this needs to be done as NPAPI plugin technology is over 20-years old from the Netscape days and is badly outdated…

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