January 2012

Sometimes, for whatever reason, we all feel the need to restart our pc. It might be that we've loaded it with too many programs, too much junk and it's just not running as smoothly as we'd like. Or it might be that we want to start over again, from scratch.

At the moment, whilst we can re-install Windows 7 and Windows XP, we often choose not to as we don't really want to lose all our data. Plus, resetting can take hours and every PC seems to be different in how we set about resetting.

Way back in January 2009 Microsoft launched the Windows 7 Developer Preview and within three weeks Windows 7 was being actively used by 0.13% of PCs as their operating system of choice. Windows 8 Developer Preview was launched on September 13, yet now over two months later, only 0.03% of PCs are using Windows 8 as their operating system, according to figures from Net Applications and reported on Computerworld.com.

What is more disappointing for Microsoft is that over 3 million copies of the Preview were downloaded by users between September 13 and December 7, so what is happening to these downloads?

Hanging On for Beta?

More News on the App Store Ahead of Beta Launch in Feb 2012

Addressing developers earlier this month, Antoine Leblond announced that the first version of the app store will go out to consumers in the Beta launch of Windows 8 in February 2012.

Leblond also revealed the revenue sharing model for apps sold on the Windows 8 app store. 70% until the app has reached $25,000, then 80% thereafter.

Images from Win8China seem to confirm that in the latest beta version of Windows 8, users can choose the color of their start screen.

In the Developer Preview the only thing you could change was your PC name and the colors of the tiles, not the color of the start screen itself. So this is already a definite improvement on the Developer Preview and is starting to give us a better, working idea of what to expect from Windows 8.

Did you know that most of us have to share our computers our laptops? According to research from Microsoft 72% of us share our PCs and 49% share our laptops.





That is understandable, both in the home and the office. Especially in the home where again, Microsoft's research shows that most homes only have access to one PC.

Microsoft has confirmed that tablets using Windows 8 OS will not use Flash but instead use a HTML 5, plug-in free Metro browser. At the moment, as far as we are aware, Adobe Flash will still be supported on the Windows 8 OS for both laptops and PCs.

Although this news seems shocking, it is in fact not that surprising. As Dean

Yet more news from Microsoft on their new picture password system. Following the announcement of this new way of signing in to their PCs Microsoft has, unsurprisingly, received a lot of comments and feedback, many of which were concerns over the security of the new gesture based system of signing in.

As well as coming up with a new secure way for users to log-in to their PCs, the picture password, Microsoft has been working on ways it can help users to create and store unique passwords for all their other online computing needs.

In a post on the MSDN blog, Dustin Ingalls, a group program manager on the security and identity team, talked about how Microsoft wanted to "help you manage your digital identity in a way that is both convenient and secure."

Most of Us Only Use 6 Passwords