Software & Apps - Page 17

For those who were around and used a PC back in the 1990s, you'll undoubtedly remember the hype surrounding the release of Microsoft's groundbreaking operating system, Windows 95. It was a strange time because the release of Windows 95 was treated like a new Star Wars movie or some sort of massive cultural event.

Microsoft spent an eye-watering $300 million on marketing for Windows 95, which in 2024 would be around $620 million - including a commercial that licensed The Rolling Stones' 1981 single "Start Me Up" because Windows 95 introduced the Start button. Microsoft also spent money producing the first "cyber sitcom," with Friends stars Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. It has not aged well.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that this week, we got a glimpse at a piece of history, with ex-Microsoft executive Brad Silverberg posting an image of the very first copy of Windows 95 that was sent to him straight from the production line.

Microsoft previously announced it was ending support for the world's most popular operating system, Windows 10, and now the Redmond company has announced a version of Windows 11 will soon be losing support.

Microsoft took to its blog on Monday to announce an older version of Windows 11 will soon be reaching its end-of-support date, meaning it will no longer receive any security and preview updates. The blog post states Microsoft will end support for Windows 11 22H2 on October 8, 2024, and after that date, users will need to update to Windows 11 23H3 to receive up-to-date security patches.

Notably, the PSA from Microsoft affects Windows Home, Pro, and Business users. Choosing not to update your Windows will result in your PC becoming vulnerable to viruses, malicious attacks, malware, and other forms of digital infiltration. However, if you are already using Windows 11 it's very easy to update by proceeding through the following steps: Settings > Windows Update > Check updates.

We've just received the latest cumulative updates for both Windows 11 and Windows 10, and interestingly Microsoft has debuted the new Copilot app in both of these desktop operating systems.

Why's that surprising? Well, thus far, the Copilot app - which changes the AI assistant from an anchored side panel, on the right, to a freely movable app window, just like any other application in Windows - has only been tested in Windows 11.

However, as well as debuting in the release version of Windows 11, the Copilot app has suddenly jumped into Windows 10, as well (courtesy of the KB5040442 update for the former, and KB5040427 for the latter). Although note that the rollout of the app is going to be a gradual one.

Microsoft has stuck with its decision to roll out more advertisements for its products into Windows 11, with the Redmond company issuing patch notes for Windows 11 version 23H2 and Windows 11 version 22H2.

As with every Windows update, Microsoft engineers have implemented a slew of bug fixes, general stability improvements, new features, additional support, and advertisements. We have previously caught glimpses of new advertisements in preview builds of Windows 11, where operating system beta testers found new ad placements in Windows 11's Start Menu and Settings. Redmond has rolled out the Settings advertisement for its Game Pass subscription.

The new update will add a Game Pass card to the Settings homepage, which will reportedly only appear for Windows 11 users that game. If a user isn't playing games on their PC, the card won't appear. As for other aspects of the new update, Microsoft has added the "Show Desktop" to the taskbar again, File Explorer is now capable of creating 7-Zip and Tape Archive files when a user right clicks a file, support for Emoji 15.1, improvements to account manage in the Start Menu, and much more.

The Registry is a fabled beast and many tales have been told about how you mess with it at your peril - though someone has taken that idea to extremes in Windows 10, and apparently got away with it. Well, sort of...

As you're doubtless aware, when it comes to any Windows how-to guide, if there's a step that takes you into the Registry to make a modification, it inevitably comes with warnings of dire consequences: Type carefully and don't make mistakes, as you might nuke your system with a slip of a key (or certainly cause something nasty to happen).

Well, how about if you changed every single value in Windows 10's Registry to zero? Does that count as messing about enough? Well, YouTuber 'Come on Windows' did exactly that, and you can see the results in the above video.

Several scenarios and reasons exist for regularly backing up an Exchange Server database, from data corruption to accidentally deleting files to system crashes to cybersecurity attacks. Microsoft's Windows Server Backup is part of Windows, a robust backup and recovery tool that lets users create regular backups of Exchange Server databases and select what to restore when needed.

Microsoft Exchange Server is Microsoft's email, calendar, messaging, voice, and contact platform for Windows, Outlook, web, and mobile. It is intended for businesses with a dozen, a hundred, or more employees. Its powerful storage and security features give organizations direct control over content, users, and archiving, so you can imagine how important it is to schedule regular backups. And have a process in place for restoring services.

Here's a simple step-by-step guide to using Windows Server Backup to create a backup of the Exchange Server and a guide on restoring and recovering an Exchange Server.

Microsoft Notepad isn't considered among the top text editor programs, but it's certainly one of the oldest and most widely installed.

Microsoft first introduced Notepad in May 1983, presenting it as a stripped-down version of the widely used Microsoft Word. The new piece of software arrived with the ability to bold, underline, and italicize text, and over the years, it slowly gained more features while still keeping its stripped-down initial design intention. One of the most requested features for Notepad is spellcheck, and while that may seem like a feature that should have already been added many years ago, it was once, and appears to be still, a big selling point for Microsoft Word.

However, 41 years later, Microsoft has decided to add spell check to Notepad, as the new feature has seemingly been rolled to Windows 11 Notepad versions 11.2405.13.0 and later. The feature was first tested back in March and works as every other spell checker works. If the spell checker believes a word has been spelled incorrectly, it will highlight that word with a red line underneath it. Users can right-click on that word and navigate to the "Spelling" option, where they will be presented with a list of possible correctly spelled words.

Copilot+ PCs have started hitting the market, and buyers are concerned that picking up one of these new AI-powered devices will mean some of their favorite software won't work, or at least won't work as well as it would on a traditional system.

Unfortunately, that appears to be the case, as the new Copilot_ PCs are based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X SoCs that use Arm architecture, which is different from the traditional x86 architecture that has been present in PCs for decades. Developers have spent with the x86 architecture, meaning software has been finely tuned and optimized to run on compatible hardware. Unfortunately, this means Arm-based SoC-powered devices will need to port or emulate software to make it compatible.

Copilot+ PCs suffer from this fate, and to combat this, Microsoft decided to create an emulator called "Prism,," which the company claims is capable of running x86 software at speeds comparable to native x86-developed software. However, those claims haven't convinced Samsung as the company issued a warning to its Korean customers regarding its GalaxyBook Edge 4 Copilot+ PCs not being able to run some common software such as antivirus apps and games.

Privacy is becoming more and more paramount in today's market of devices and software, with consumers looking now more than ever for privacy-focused products, or at least features in existing products.

A recently published Microsoft patent may have given us a look into the future of privacy when it comes to documents, or even just pages of text for that matter. The new patent describes a new type of encryption technology that makes it impossible for anyone to read the text that is on a device's screen that isn't the user of the device. The technology takes the text on the screen and encodes it, modifying letters and then combining it with the original body of text.

Next, the system uses eye-tracking technology to display only the encoded version of the document in the peripheral view of the reader while also making the focus point clear for reading. From the perspective of someone trying to read the text on a device, they would see a page full of jumbled letters and words that wouldn't make any sense. From the perspective of the reader, wherever they are looking in the body of text they would see clear writing.

After 41 long, hard years, Microsoft has finally updated the Notepad app on Windows 11 with spellchecking and autocorrect features.

After initially upgrading Notepad with the new and enhanced features back in March 2024 for insiders, the upgraded Notepad app is now official in Windows 11... very quietly, we might add. If you're old enough, Notepad first appeared the year I was born -- 1983 -- and hasn't had any upgrades in those 41 years, until now.

Microsoft baked in some updates to the Notepad app back in July 0218, with some wrap-around find/replace, text zooming, and line numbers with word-wrap enabled, but when Windows 11 launched in late 2021, we got a few more updates to Notepad. This included dark mode (so good), auto-saving and session retiring, and a pretty useful new tabbed interface if you're working with multiple files.

Amazon Web Services, one of the biggest cloud computing services in the world, has been selected by a government to build a special cloud.

The Australian government has tapped Amazon Web Services to enter into a 10-year partnership with the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) to build a "Top Secret (TS) Cloud for the Australian Government." The Australian government announced it would be spending $2 billion AUD, or $1.35 billion USD, over a 10-year period, and the cloud will be designed to improve the Australian government's ability to share and analyze its most classified data.

The announcement mentioned plans to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning across the cloud and that once the secure cloud is completed, the nation will be able to better connect with other intelligence agencies to share data, specifically the United States. The Register has pointed out some important points about this cloud. First is the lack of details surrounding its construction and ownership, how it's run by Amazon Web Services but also completely secure, and where the cloud will be housed.

Microsoft announced it was officially ending support for the world's most-used operating system, Windows 10, in October of next year, and while the initial announcement didn't cause much of a change in terms of operating system market share, we have now seen a slight decrease in Windows 10's user base and a spike in Windows 11's.

In December last year, Microsoft announced it was officially ending support for Windows 10, which at the time had a market share of 71%. Moreover, at the time of the announcement, Windows 10's market share hadn't changed in the past two years, indicating Windows 11 adoption was stagnating. Furthermore, Statcounter reported earlier this year that Windows 11 was the first OS to lose customers mid-cycle.

Furthermore, in May this year, Windows 10 climbed nearly 1% in market share, causing Windows 11 to dip down to 25.68% market share. The shift in users indicated Windows 11 users went back to Windows 10. However, that seems to be changing now, as Statcounter reported in June 2024 that Windows 11 increased its market share by 2.14%, jumping up from 27.67% to 29.71%.

Akamai has published a new 2024 report on web traffic and found that 42% of all traffic is generated by bots, and considerable percentages of these bots in sub-sections of the internet are "high risk".

The newly published study focuses on "scraping bots," which are designed to locate and harvest data from content that is then used in future cyber-crime-related endeavors. Notably, Akamai is one of the biggest content delivery networks on the planet, with its place being alongside Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. As for the report, Akamai found the e-commerce section of the internet is plagued with "high-risk" bots and is the most affected industry on the internet. 65% of the discovered bots in this sector were deemed to have malicious intent.

So, who benefits from these bot scrapers? These types of bots are commonly used by competitors within markets to gather data on their competition, such as prices, inventory lists, descriptions, and other valuable data. With this data and likely the involvement of a generative AI tool, the competitor is then able to implement changes that target competing businesses, thus affecting the bottom line of both businesses.

Microsoft has slowly been changing Windows 11 to feature more advertisements for its products, pushing users to adopt its services such as OneDrive, Microsoft 365, Xbox Game Pass, and more.

It was only last week Microsoft was caught turning on automatic OneDrive folder backup in Windows 11 without asking for the user's permission. New installs of Windows 11 were automatically found to have OneDrive backup on, meaning folders such as Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos will automatically sync to a user's OneDrive account. Additionally, Microsoft recently took a step toward removing local Windows accounts.

Now it's been discovered that Windows 11's Start Menu is going to get slightly louder with advertisements for Microsoft's products, or at least that is what the latest test versions of Windows 11 that's available to Windows Insiders reveal. Build 26120.961 has introduced a redesign to the Start Menu, as users will be able to easily navigate to their Microsoft products, such as Microsoft 365, Xbox Game Pass, and OneDrive cloud storage. The above image showcases the difference between the Windows 11 builds.

Windows 11 has just edged closer to toppling Windows 10 as the most-used operating system, at least for PC gamers who are on Valve's Steam platform.

Yes, the monthly Steam hardware survey figures are in, and when it comes to operating systems, in June 2024 Windows 11 notched up its overall share to 46.63%, which represents an increase of 0.55% on May.

Windows 10 slid by almost a whole percentage point, dropping 0.93% to finish on 49.42%, still in the lead, but not by much.

Windows 11 users know how much bloatware, or useless programs, Microsoft's most recent operating system comes with upon its first installation. There are many tools out there to remove this bloatware, but imagine if Windows 11 could be installed at its most rudimentary level.

Another big problem for many Windows 10 users is the stringent hardware requirements for Windows 11, but what if those were gone as well? Introducing Windows 11 "Government Edition," an unofficial version of Windows 11 that doesn't have any bloatware at all and dramatically reduces system requirements. It should be noted that despite the name, Microsoft hasn't officially released a "government" version of Windows 11, and this "Government Edition" is likely a community-developed project.

How does this unofficial version of Windows 11 stack up against the official version? The Government Edition reduces hardware requirements significantly, enabling older PCs the option of upgrading. For example, based on the above screenshots the OS keeps RAM usage at around 1.2GB on a system that only has 4GB of RAM. Additionally, the Government Edition removed bundled applications such as Microsoft Edge, Windows Security suite, Camera, Media Player, Paint and more.

Windows 11 just got yet more adverts, you'll be unsurprised to find out, as Microsoft seems very keen to push as much promotional activity as it can get away with in the OS.

This time around, rather than sneaking ads into the core Windows 11 interface, at least they're tucked away in an app - the Weather app to be precise (which is a stock application installed with the operating system).

The bad news is that these adverts - which were introduced via a server-side update, Windows Latest reports - follow you around wherever you may scroll, like something out of a horror movie. Alright, a spy movie might be more fitting, though the idea of inescapable adverts trailing you everywhere certainly seems a rather horrific prospect to us.

Opera GX, the self-described 'browser for gamers' (it has a built-in VPN and other gamer-friendly features), is ramping up its AI support with new features. The browser's built-in AI assistant, Aria, was previously part of the experimental AI Feature Drops program for the Opera One browser and is now part of Opera GX. Let's go through Aria's capabilities.

The first is image generation, powered by Imagen2 by Google. If you've used an image generation tool before, this will be pretty straightforward, as Aria will turn text prompts into images with a 'regenerate' option to refine the output. Users will be able to generate up to 30 images per day.

Second is AI Voice Output, powered by Google's WaveNet model. This will give users an AI-powered screen reader while using Opera GX.

Windows 11 recently had an update paused because it was causing some PCs to get stuck in a reboot loop, but Microsoft has now resumed its rollout - only to run into another nasty glitch that breaks the taskbar.

This is not a good look, obviously enough, although in fairness to Microsoft, the update in question is an optional one, so you don't have to download it. And the way things are going with the June preview update (KB5039302), you'd probably be best giving it a wide berth for now.

As mentioned, the preview update is now rolling out again, after Microsoft has put a block on PCs that could be affected by the reboot debacle (those running nested virtualization, we're told).

Microsoft has been pushing Windows users to conform to the operating system in the way they intend or, as the setup states, in the way the company "recommends." To achieve this goal, Microsoft has made it increasingly more difficult for users to dodge its services, which the large majority depend on using the operating system with a Microsoft Account.

In a new report from a Neowin user, Microsoft has seemingly been caught quietly changing the setup for Windows 11 in new devices, particularly with OneDrive, the company's cloud storage service. According to the user Microsoft has now automatically enabled OneDrive folder backup without asking the user's permission, meaning folders such as Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos will automatically sync to a user's OneDrive account.

Previously, users would receive a Windows notification asking if they would like to turn on automatic folder backup in OneDrive, which is actually quite a good feature when it's used correctly - and with consent. However, it appears from reports Microsoft has just turned on the feature without asking anyone or letting anyone know, which has resulted in many users reporting their desktops filling up with green checkmarks appearing next to files and shortcuts - verifying those files have been uploaded.