Category: Microsoft

25 years ago today, Microsoft released the very first version of the operating system which now powers around 90% of the personal computers in the world. Even with the sweet analog clock to the word processing might of Write (and truly useful features like running multiple applications and a shared clipboard), Windows 1.0 failed to generate much excitement. It would take five more years -- ...

You can now browse the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace with Bing's Visual Search tool. According to the announcement, it only works in the US and UK -- but to make it work, after visiting the WP7 Visual Search, I had to change my location (in the top right corner) to "United States - English." Then I had to visit the Visual Search page again. Presumably this will also work if you live elsewhere, too. ...

The bods over at MacTech have been putting the Microsoft Business Unit's latest Mac offering, Office 2011, though its metaphorical paces, and have found that, on the whole, it's significantly faster than its previous siblings Office 2008 and 2004. App launches are around 70% faster from cold and 98% faster on relaunch, a noticeable and welcome improvement for the user. That's not all, common ...

Microsoft's workplace collaboration tool, Office Communications Server, just got a big upgrade and a new, less stuffy name: Microsoft Lync 2010. Like OCS, Lync connects the various Microsoft services in a workplace, including Office, Exchange email and Sharepoint storage. It's also a hub for instant messenging, voice calls and video calls. The major new stuff in Lync 2010 includes enterprise ...

Microsoft has made the first beta of Office 2010 Service Pack 1 available to testers. This is not a publicly released beta, and probably never will be -- it is ready for download by those who Microsoft has invited to test it and people who have registered to test it via Microsoft's Connect beta testing portal. The version number for this beta is 14.0.6011.1000. It doesn't boast any new ...

As of a few moments ago, you can now download Platform Preview 7 of Internet Explorer 9. The main focus of this update is the continued enhancement of the Chakra JavaScript engine; as a result, IE9 now leads the SunSpider benchmark by a few percent. Like its predecessors, this preview lacks any kind of useful UI -- but if you have the Beta installed, you can follow Lee's guide to hack the Beta ...

If you weren't aware, it's impossible to take screenshots with Windows Phone 7. Perhaps once it's rooted we'll be able to -- but until then, screenshotting apps for reviews is laborious -- you have to take a photo of the screen -- and the quality is inevitably low. So, looking for an alternative, I decided to do a video review of Office for Windows Phone 7. It's about 10 minutes long, and the ...

Using the consummate magic of Facebook Connect (or Windows Live ID), users of Microsoft's game portals can now stay in touch with their friends while they play Bejeweled thanks to a 'casual games hub.' From what I can see, this games hub takes the form of a 'dashboard' that wraps around each of the games, whether you play them on MSN Games, Bing or Live Messenger. Take a look at the screenshot ...

Facebook is making a major announcement on Monday, and while nothing is certain at this point it seems very likely that they could be unveiling Project Titan -- Facebook's take on Web-based email. Also a good bet: this new email platform will tightly integrate with Docs.com, which Microsoft and Facebook opened to beta testers earlier this year. With all the hubbub about email, an update on the ...

The Inside Windows Live blog has announced that Microsoft has temporarily disabled active links for Windows Live Messenger (WLM) 2009 users. Its motivation: to prevent the spread of a malicious worm plaguing users of the instant messaging program. An infected user who is chatting with someone else could unknowingly send a poisoned link to other users -- who then click the link and download its ...

It seems, thanks to one of Samsung's recent additions to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, that a jailbreak of Microsoft's latest mobile platform might come a lot sooner than anticipated. In a high-tech plot twist that even mother could've predicted, it turns out that Windows Phone 7 can run native code! Until today, it was thought that WP7 apps could only be written in Silverlight, an ...

It has just been discovered that it's possible to download any Windows Phone 7 XAP full application package directly from Microsoft's Marketplace server -- no need to use a Windows Phone 7 device or the Zune application. This is possible because the Zune application uses Atom XML feeds to get the applications' information, so it's fairly easy to grab a direct link to the full app package just ...

Microsoft has pushed an update to Security Essentials 2, which is currently in beta testing. While there aren't a vast number of forward-facing changes, there is one important one: the re-introduction of context menu scanning. Once again, you can right-click any file on your system to quickly check it for infection with MSE. When Security Essentials 2 is finally released, it will include ...

Not more than two weeks out of the gate, Microsoft has already released its first update for Office 2011 for Mac. A bug fix release, the update will take 110.5 MB of your precious hard disk space, but should stop unexpected quits and hangs. Some specific applications get a bit more attention -- Excel gets an update to its handling of revised data for formulae, plus improvements to the FORMAT ...

A few days ago, we were able to get Hotmail's new opt-in, full-session SSL (HTTPS) turned on, and now Microsoft has announced the general availability of the new feature. What we didn't know at the time is that the security upgrade has also been applied to other Live services -- including SkyDrive, Docs, Photos, and Devices. If you'd like to activate full session SSL (and we'd recommend you ...