Windows 10

Earlier this year Oracle ORCL 51,03 +0,81 +1,61% announced starting with JDK 9 (eta September 2016), they will remove the plugin support. They are encouraging developers to move towards the plugin free Java Web Start technology. Oracle’s reasoning for this move has to do with more and more browsers removing support the 20+ year old Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugin technology. GoogleGOOG 1.095,06 -3,65 -0,33% Chrome no longer supports NPAPI plugins such as Java and Silverlight. Google has partnered with Adobe ADBE 257,79 -0,02 -0,01% to include an integrated version of Flash within Chrome. The Windows 64-Bit version of Firefox also does not…

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Windows 10 BSOD Becoming More Helpful

Nothing worse than getting a Blue Screen of Death aka BSOD when Windows has a critical crash due to hardware or software issue. Worse yet, the screen contained a cryptic message about what went wrong along with a long hexadecimal code. Coming in the Windows 10 Anniversary Edition Update (August 2016), the BSOD will include a QR code which can be scanned by a smartphone or tablet. However, Microsoft has an opportunity here for aiding self-support when it comes to problem-solving a Windows installation as it could offer assistance via a website or even a dedicated app for troubleshooting using…

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update

It has been about 3-months since I last posted. I had to retire the machine I was running Windows 10 on, an old Dell Optiplex as it was having hardware issues. I did not want to be putting money into a system that is over 10-years old, especially since I only paid $25 for it last year. Yet, I currently do not plan on upgrading anytime soon to Windows 10 on either of my two machines (Gateway Windows 8 Desktop and HP Windows 7 Laptop). Still not sure what I am going to do as I would like to try out Windows 10…

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Microsoft MSFT 108,22 +1,32 +1,23% has announced on the Windows Blog they will stop supporting Windows 7/8.1 on computers running the latest chips from Intel INTC 51,66 +0,85 +1,67%, AMD or Qualcomm QCOM 50,83 +0,54 +1,07%. Specifically these are listed as ‘Kaby Lake’ (Intel), ‘Bristol Ridge’ (AMD) and Qualcomm’s ‘8996’ (the base for the Snapdragon 820). Between them these chips will dominate sales of all new desktops, laptops, hybrids and tablets in 2016. This means for user of devices using these chipsets as well as the current generation Intel Skylake processors the Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 deadlines of January 2020 and…

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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 108,22 +1,32 +1,23% 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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This very odd statement is from Microsoft MSFT 108,22 +1,32 +1,23% 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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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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