The beta “Consumer Preview” version of Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system could be released on Wednesday 29th February.  Microsoft have announced a “Windows 8 Consumer Preview event” in the city, that is also home to the Mobile World Congress expo that week. This looks like a reasonable time to launch the beta given that [...]

Categories: Microsoft

It is widely expected that when Microsoft launch the Windows 8 beta in a few weeks that it will be labelled the “Windows 8 Consumer Preview”.  This has alarmed and concerned many IT Pros who feel that Windows 8 is cutting them out with Microsoft putting all the focus on consumers and tablets with its [...]

Categories: Microsoft

As a Microsoft Windows MVP and a Windows author I’ve got a busy year ahead of me.  I’ve got several Windows 8 books to write for starters, all to be out during 2012 so I really do need to know Windows 8 backwards.  The Building Windows 8 blog has been extremely useful in this respect [...]

Categories: Windows

As Martin wrote earlier, today marked the unveiling of the new Windows Store that will be integrated into all Microsoft products including Windows 8, Windows Phone and the Xbox.  One very interesting snippet of information that came from the Windows Store launch though was ‘confirmation’ of the availability date for the Windows 8 beta. I [...]

Categories: Microsoft

Microsoft have begun issuing invitations to testers who expressed an interest in the next generation version of their Security Essentials, free anti-virus product. In the invitation email the company say… The Beta program is a fully functional antimalware app with ongoing updates to help protect your PC from viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.  In [...]

Categories: Microsoft

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has for many years now had one of the biggest and most visited websites on the whole Internet.  The company has taken great pride over the years and in 2002 a leaked document, still available online called “The Glass Wall” provided a masterclass in website usability that many people still consider [...]

Categories: The Web

Remember Fences? The program helped users organize their computer desktop by offering advanced grouping and hiding options. The developers of Fences are currently working on a new project called Bins, which they call a Taskbar Organizer. The main idea behind Bins is to merge multiple pinned taskbar items into one icon. You may have read [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Microsoft have been hemorrhaging web browser market share ever since the first launch of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.  Now the fight back has begun with the, frankly excellent, Internet Explorer 9 and the move towards HTML 5. Both Google and Mozilla are including HTML 5 support in their latest browsers too, but neither have managed to [...]

Categories: Microsoft

Windows Live Sync, formerly Live Mesh and part of the new Windows Live Essentials 2011 Suite is now available for the Apple Mac, as reported by Windows Observer.  The beta can be downloaded hereas a .dmg file. Live Sync is an excellent tool that I’ve come to rely on myself for automatically syncing files and [...]

Categories: Apple, Microsoft