Andrew Tech Help

At 2am on Wednesday September 14th Australian Eastern Standard Time (9am, Tuesday September 13th United States Pacific Daylight Saving Time) Stephen Sinofsky stepped onto the stage to deliver the opening keynote at the BUILD conference, held in Anaheim, California. This keynote is probably the most important keynote that Microsoft has given in the 36 years of it's existence and was entirely devoted to revealing details of the next version of Windows, currently codenamed 'Windows 8'. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has described the next version of Windows as 'Microsoft's riskiest product bet' and with what was revealed during that keynote, his comments now make complete sense. Windows 8 is what Microsoft describes as "a re-imagining of Windows" and will include a major redesign of the user interface, developer platform, chipset support and tightly integrated cloud support. This article aims to detail some of the fundamental concepts that Microsoft is pushing in Windows 8 and explain why I think Microsoft's risky bet on the next version of Windows will pay off.

One of the worst things computer manufacturers have done for computer security is to include trials of commercial anti-virus software on computers they sell. This may sound strange, because having these computers going out of the factory with commercial anti-virus software means that they have protection as soon as they leave the factory, but it also means the user thinks they're protected, well after the software expires. The user doesn't have to pay for this software when they buy the computer and yet it's pre-installed and working, so most users assume the computer manufacturer sorted that out for them and that they will be protected for a long time. I often have to go out to people's computers and remove viruses that get onto people's systems because the anti-virus software that was supposed to be protecting them had expired (and therefore deactivated) rendering it useless. The process of resolving the problem is normally a 2 step process. Firstly I needed to remove the virus that managed to get on there (normally a virus pretending to be an anti-virus client which is actually trying to extort money out of the victim by holding their computer at ransom until they pay to "fix" the problem) using a program such as Malwarebytes and then remove the trial anti-virus, replacing it with a working anti-virus program. On April 15, 2011, Microsoft added a new tool to my toolkit which is designed to be much more effective than Malwarebytes and therefore replace it. The best bit is, it's absolutely free. This tool is called the Microsoft Safety Scanner.

The final version of Internet Explorer 9 was released today to the general public after 6 months of beta testing by around 40 million users. The key point I will emphasise now is that any previous perception or opinion you have about Internet Explorer needs to be forgotten when looking at this new version of the browser. Thanks to competition from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and a rapidly declining usage share for Internet Explorer, the team at Microsoft who build the browser have had to refocus priorities and rewrite Internet Explorer to be standards compliant, fast, simple to use and secure, to compete with the new competition that has emerged since the last version they released, and they've actually done a very good job with this version. So Internet Explorer 9 is radically different to all the previous versions of Internet Explorer and that's what this review is going to focus on: What Microsoft got right in this version! You can download the final version of the browser from www.microsoft.com/ie BUT I will note here that (as with the beta version I reviewed back in September) this version of Internet Explorer will not work on Windows XP. It requires Windows Vista with Service Pack 2 or Windows 7 to run and also note that there are a number of features that only work on Windows 7. So with that out of the way, let's have a look at Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft today launched a new feature on Hotmail that I think will change the way we hand out our email address to websites across the internet. Many people who are technically savy have for many years created 2 or more email addresses for themselves. One might be a personal address and one a business or address or more commonly, one is an email address for people and websites they trust and the other one is for people and websites they don't trust. These secondary addresses are somtimes known as disposable addresses, because if they become too spammy and bogged down with unwanted addresses, they just delete them and create a new clean one. Microsoft has just taken this concept and made it into something that anyone with a Hotmail address can set up in a couple of minutes. It's called Email Alias.