Apple this week announced their new iCloud service, bringing together MobileMe and iTunes in the cloud. With it though they also announced they were dropping support for Windows XP from the new product. Indeed they were only supporting their own desktop operating system, OS X, going back four years to 10.5 ‘Leopard’ too. This raises [...]

Categories: Apple, Microsoft

One of the things that irritates me ever since I started using Windows is software installations on the system. You are probably wondering what’s irritating me. The core problem for me is that there are no general software installation rules on the system. Software by default gets installed mainly into two directory structures. First the [...]

Categories: ask the readers

Despite the popularity of Apple’s iPad and the booming market for Android tablets, there are still plenty of Windows 7 tablets out there.  The latest is Acer’s W500 hybrid tablet, a 10.1 inch tablet based on a 1GHz AMD C-50 processor, 2GB of DDR3 ram and a 32Gb SSD.  It also comes (optionally) with a [...]

Categories: Hardware

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the next version of Windows running on ARM processors at only 1GHz.  Many people have been sceptical, few more so than myself.  Rather than be a naysayer however I decided I’d find out if Windows really could run on processors with this little grunt so Microsoft kindly sent [...]

Categories: Hardware

Jump Lists are undoubtedly one of the most secret efficiency tools that Windows 7 possesses. As you may already know, with previous versions of Microsoft Windows, the Start Menu showed a list of recently accessed files and documents that allowed users to navigate to them with a single click. But with all its ease, this [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic, Windows

Changing file and folder permissions under Windows is not a comfortable process. You need to click through various menus before you can make the modifications that you want to make. This may including changing ownership of a file or folder, or changing access permissions for a registered user or the system account. The free software [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

Windows has always had what many people believe to be an unconventional and frustrating method of addressing physical hard disks.  I’m talking here about drive letters.  These virtual constructs, I can only really describe them as that, are pointers to the actual names of the disks in your computer.  This works in a different way [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

Sometimes when you need to perform diagnostics on a faulty or malfunctioning copy of Windows, Safe Mode is too restrictive, too frustrating in use and unable to provide an environment that has the functions or permissions you need to repair the problems that you’re facing with Windows. One of my favourite alternatives here has existed in [...]

Categories: Tutorials Basic

The sheer volume of excitement about Windows 8 has taken me quite by surprise with more leaks than we ever saw with Vista or Windows 7 in the same time-frame.  The excitement and hype easily matches that of Google’s Chrome OS in the same period of its development, even though when the operating system finally [...]

Categories: Apple, Google, Google Android, Google Chrome, iPhone, Linux, Mac, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Windows