Microsoft

Reports suggest Microsoft is working on a new web browser as an alternative to Internet Explorer. Both the scope and timescale of any changes have not yet been confirmed, but it's suggested the launch will coincide with the release of Windows 10. ... Most rumors reference two codenames for the project: Trident and Spartan. The two names refer to the same strategy: to make Microsoft's web browser better and easier to use on modern websites, while still being able to run web pages designed for legacy systems. Trident is the web browser engine which already exists and is part of Internet ... (view more)

Microsoft has released a Windows 10 Preparation Tool designed to integrate Windows 7 and 8 computers for testing Windows 10 more easily. The tool also coincides with a big update to Windows 10 Technical Preview which is due January next year, and ... will include many features that are most important to home computer users. (Source: winbeta.org ) Currently, Windows 10 is in its Technical Preview stage. That means many features are new and being tested by thousands of people, and the operating system itself is not fully functional. In all likelihood, the Technical Preview is full of bugs and has ... (view more)

The first consumer features of Windows 10 -- albeit very much still in test mode -- may be just a few weeks away from public unveiling. Recent leaks suggest that the virtual assistant Cortana may be extremely prominent in the new system. Cortana is ... a voice recognition feature already present in Windows Phones and works somewhat similar to Apple's Siri and Google Now. The Windows 10 Consumer Edition Preview is expected to officially roll out to public testers in late January, 2015; some analysts suggest it will likely be on January 21st, as that is the date of Microsoft's next press event. ( ... (view more)

Microsoft has warned that a recently released security update may be incompatible with test editions of Windows 10 and MS Office . The advice came from Gabe Aul, who is general manager of engineering for Windows. He posted a series of four messages ... on his Twitter account, rather than posting it onto Microsoft's official news blog. The messages read: "We just made a tough call after working through the night that I thought I should share with you. We have a security update going out today, and the installer fails on [Windows 10 build 9879 if Microsoft Office] is installed. Rather than ... (view more)

Dell President Renee James says Windows 10's impact on the struggling PC market will be huge, with the release of Microsoft's next operating system (OS) leading to an estimated 600 million PC upgrades. James, who recently spoke at the Credit Suisse ... Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, says there are hundreds of millions of PCs out there that are four years old or older. James says that many of the owners of these aging PCs have been putting off an upgrade because they simply weren't wowed by Microsoft's last operating system, Windows 8. Microsoft Being " ... (view more)

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is selling two Windows 8 laptops that are both priced at $199 . It's seen by some analysts as a way to counter the low-cost Google Chromebook range . The two models are the HP Stream 11 and Stream 13 , which model numbers are ... respective of their screen sizes. The Stream 11 has a permanent price of $199; the Stream 13 is normally $229 but will have $30 off for a limited period as part of the Black Friday sales season. To sweeten the deal, devices purchased directly from Microsoft will also receive a year's subscription to Office 365 Personal (the online edition of ... (view more)

Microsoft is facing a storm of protest over its decision to remove a popular feature from its OneDrive cloud storage service. The change is set to take shape when the company's next operating system, Windows 10 , is released next year. In Windows ... 8.1, OneDrive shows ' smart files ', otherwise known as ' placeholders ' stored on the cloud, but not available on a local device. If a user decides they want to view or edit that file and double click on it, OneDrive begins to download the file to local storage. The advantage of smart files is simple: they let users view the entire contents of ... (view more)

Microsoft has begun public testing of a new presentation application that could one day replace its incredibly popular and widely used MS PowerPoint. The main focus of the tool, named Sway, is to remove the barriers between presentations on ... different computing devices, such as smartphones and PCs. The idea of Sway is that it shouldn't matter what type of content you want to build into a presentation, or what device you want to show it on. That's a major contrast to MS PowerPoint, where it can be difficult to bring together multiple file formats or to create presentations that look the ... (view more)

Microsoft has patched a security vulnerability that somehow evaded detection for roughly twenty years. The bug has reportedly existed in every single version of the Windows operating system since Windows 95. According to reports, the bug can allow a ... hacker to execute code remotely when a user visits a malicious website. IBM security expert Robert Freeman says the bug is related to a flaw in VBScript, which first debuted with Internet Explorer 3.0 in the late 1990s. Freeman says that the bug remains invulnerable to Microsoft's anti-exploitation tools, otherwise known as the Enhanced ... (view more)

Microsoft has launched a new tool for MS Outlook designed to make it easier to deal with email overload. It will be available for business users at first, but could later be rolled out for home users. The feature will be available as part of Office ... 365 for business: that's the online edition of the Office suite, which is automatically updated when Microsoft adds new features or makes changes. The name of the feature comes from the problem Microsoft is trying to tackle: Clutter. That's meant to describe the category of emails that are from legitimate senders, but which you don't ... (view more)