Technology

Understanding the Windows 10 FREE Upgrade Offer

Windows 10 is finally here and yes there is a mad rush of people getting the FREE upgrade. Here are some details you need to understand about this FREE Upgrade Offer: You have until July 28th, 2016 to take advantage of the offer if you meet the requirements (explained below). If you wait too long and miss this deadline you have some options: Buy a new computer with Windows 10 already installed Pay for the Windows 10 Upgrade ($119 for Home and $199 for Pro) Become a guinea pig and be part of the Windows Insider program In order to qualify for…

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Ready or Not Here Comes Windows 10!

For those people who reserved an upgrade from Windows 7 or 8.1 to Windows 10, it could already be downloading. What, you were expecting Microsoft to ask you if it was okay to eat up your bandwidth with a nearly 6 GB download? Nope, just like the Windows 10 Updates, Windows 10 upgrade is going to be automatically downloaded. To see if your computer is secretly downloading Windows 10 check Windows Explorer for a folder called  C:\$windows.~BT note: this is hidden folder so you may need to go into File Explorer and go to: Organize > Folder Options > View > Show hidden files, folders, and…

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Truthful, but not very PC…

So, still no official (or even unofficial) explanation from Mozilla as to why they suddenly (as in July 9th) banished Silverlight NPAPI from the upcoming Win64 Firefox releases. Mozilla’s silence on this dramatic change with the Win64 Fx is a bad thing for things to come. Why are they being so secretive? Why choose the worse of two evils (Flash)? Why continue to support a plugin that everyone (including Facebook) is trying to move away from (Flash > HTML5)? So yesterday the discussion in Bug 1165981 (this was the bug that was suppose to Whitelist BOTH Flash and Silverlight NPAPI in…

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Windows 10: Fact or Fiction

InfoWorld has put together a very good Fact of Fiction about Windows 10.  A couple good ones to point out: Fact: Windows 10 has a 10-year support cycle Like Windows Vista, Win7, and Win8 before it, Windows 10 has a 10-year support cycle. In fact, we’re getting a few extra months for free: According to the Windows Lifecycle fact sheet, mainstream support ends Oct. 13, 2020. Fiction: Microsoft pulled Windows Media Player from Windows 10 One word here seems to be tripping up folks. What Microsoft has pulled is Windows Media Center, which is a horse of a completely different…

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Yet Another Windows 10 Automatic Update Fiasco

As if the Nvidia driver update issue (still unresolved on Microsoft’s part) weren’t bad enough another and much more serious forced automatic update issue came to light today. Following the Nvidia debacle, over the weekend Windows 10 pushed ‘KB3074681’ to Windows Insiders running Windows 10 Build 10240. This is presumed to be the same build as the final release consumers and businesses will receive on Wednesday. KB3074681 had no detailed information about what it contained but as it was classified as a ‘security’ patch it installed immediately and without warning to all versions of Windows 10 (Home, Pro and Enterprise)…

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Idea Town Coming Soon to Firefox

Earlier this month I talked about Dave Camp’s email: “Individual features rolling out to small audiences for focused and multi-variate testing”. Haven’t a clue on what exactly they mean by this, much less how it is going to be implemented…To me it sounds like they want to make select end user guinea pigs. I suspect there will be more about this in the future or it will be scrapped. I was correct in that there would be more in the future and the users would be guinea pigs as well. So Mozilla is introducing in Firefox 40 (ETA: August 11th) and opportunity for users on…

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More on Firefox Win64

After posting Firefox Win64 Supports Only Flash I got to thinking I knew I had seen a comment recently in Bugzilla about ‘video changes’ in Firefox for Win64. Looking through the bugs I am following, I found Bug 1181014 which basically was proposal to allow users to download win64 builds from everywhere, not only on the /all/ pages. The /all page referred to here is the Systems & Languages link on the Firefox download/landing page. This link takes the user to page where they can see all the localization builds and supported operating systems of Firefox. The first time I saw…

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Firefox Win64 Supports Only Flash

In a very odd move Mozilla has made a change to the latest Firefox Nightly (Firefox 42) Win64 which only allows the Shockwave Flash NPAPI plugin. Note: the Prime Content Decryption and Open H264 are now standard all will always be supported. While Shockwave Flash is still supported Silverlight is not. Simple enough, just install the plugin and you’re ready to go. Users won’t be able to install Silverlight in the Win64 version of Firefox since it is not allowed. Microsoft’s Silverlight is used by Netflix and Amazon Video along with many other Video on Demand (VOD) sites (especially outside the US). This is a result…

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Windows 10 Forced Updates Already Causing Issues

Windows 10 hasn’t even been released to the general public yet and there is already a major problem. The cause of this problem was Windows 10 insisting that EVERY update is mandatory, including device drivers (which were optional in Windows 7 and Windows 8). In this case it users of dual monitors with certain Nvidia graphic cards. The flaw revolves around Nvidia graphics cards with users taking to Nvidia’s forums to report Windows Update is automatically installing new drivers which break multimonitor setups, SLI (dual card) configurations and can even stop PCs booting entirely which pushes Windows 10 into its emergency…

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UI Changes Coming Firefox 40 Windows 10 Only

Once again Mozilla is fiddling with Firefox’s UI with Firefox 40 due for release on August 11th. However, it will only affect Windows 10 with this release (Firefox will auto-detect if it is being run on Windows 10 and apply this theme). Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 will be getting the theme updates in a later version. With Firefox 40 on Windows 10…we’ve matched the tabstrip and toolbar to the native Windows 10 theme. This includes refinements to our standard icon set, as well as much improved HiDPI (>1dppx) support. All of our first-tier icons now have 2× variants that are…

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