Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, perhaps in very late February or early March, a coworker pinged me to ask whether I was starting up another “Living with” series anytime soon. Yes, I told them. I was going to try switching from the Xbox One to the PC for my daily gaming needs.…

It’s that time of the week again where there is a new build of Windows 10 for those of you living in the Dev channel.

Happy Friday! Here’s a nicely diverse set of questions to kick off the weekend amidst our latest summer heatwave here on the East coast. Outlook.com Inbox tabs simont asks: Have you heard anything more about mailbox categories/tabs coming to Outlook.com and the Outlook client? Apart from the leaked screenshots a few months ago, Microsoft hasn't…

Microsoft dragged its developer base into a losing battle against open source and open standards that lasted for decades. And yet, despite its recent and thorough embrace of openness, Microsoft continues to provide new proprietary solutions to its developers and customers alongside its more open offerings, especially in Windows and other legacy products. Doing so…

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Intel’s NUC family of small form factor PCs. But I’m not just a fan: I’m a customer and a daily user too.

Modern PC-based operating systems---Windows, macOS, and Chome OS---are all inherently similar in that they provide a desktop, icons for launching apps and opening documents, inter-app communications capabilities, and some form of integration with cloud-based services, especially storage. But it’s the little differences that can really catch you up. And if you followed along with my…

The German government failed to migrate all its PCs to Windows 10 in time, and now it's going to have to pay Microsoft 800,000 euros for extended support.

With the end of Windows 7 support last week, I’ve returned somewhat begrudgingly to Windows 10. And you know what? It ain’t all bad. Which makes sense, since it includes a decade’s worth of changes that Microsoft’s made to the platform since the initial release of Windows 7. Many of them are even improvements. Yes,…

Well, it finally happened: With Microsoft issuing the final updates for Windows 7 yesterday as scheduled, I awoke today to a full-screen message warning me that my Windows 7 PC was out of support. But hundreds of millions of people will no doubt continue using Windows 7. So what will that look like? In the…

With Windows 7’s support end-of-life just days away, I find myself thinking about Windows 10, not Windows 7. I don’t miss it. Yes, there are little things that are better in Microsoft’s most recent desktop OS. Probably many of them. But the most striking thing about using Windows 7, really, is how familiar it is,…

Some readers seem to have missed the point of me going to the trouble of installing, configuring, and using Windows 7 here in January 2020. This isn’t about the first two of those tasks, installing and configuring. It’s about the third. That is, literally one-third of all PC users in the world---about 500 million people,…

After struggling for the better part of a month to get Windows 7 installed on my older Intel NUC---I’m currently using a newer model each day as my primary PC, with Windows 10---I’m now able to move to this aging OS fulltime as I had originally planned. I think. The issue, obvious in hindsight, was…

Using Windows 7 again is like riding a bike: Curiously uncomfortable at first, but then familiar, and then it all comes flooding back. And after finally getting several hundred Windows Updates installed---a big milestone for any new Windows 7 install these days---I moved on to other tasks. First up was the driver situation. I was…

With just two weeks left on the meter, I decided to return to Windows 7 so that I could ride it out into its final sweet sleep. Actually, I decided to do that back in mid-December. It’s just that I spent most of the time since then in a frustrated state of not being able…

Most Chromebook users will probably embrace Google products and services, and there are advantages to doing so. But for those of us coming from more Microsoft-centric environments, this transition can be a bit trickier. To date, I’ve done what I can to replicate the productivity apps I use most often in Chrome OS. But workflow…

While Chromebooks are compatible with USB-based docks, the experience is a bit limited and less than ideal in my experience. At least it does work, if partially: As I discovered recently, Chrome OS is incompatible with Thunderbolt 3, and I couldn’t get any of my Chromebooks to work with my Thunderbolt 3 Dock, even as…