Recent Ask Paul Stories

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Thanks, as always, to everyone who chimed in with some questions this week. Here's a gigantic "Ask Paul"...

Thanks to everyone for the questions this week. I'm flying home from Hawaii today and overnight...

This week: Phones, Surface, Call of Duty, passwords, Microsoft Edge, technology nostalgia, and much more.

This week: GDPR, iPad Pro and entitlement, SMS Relay, smartphone case preferences, and Pixel 2 XL vs. Note 8.

I've received a few questions recently about using a Microsoft Account (MSA) to sign-in to Windows 10.

A reader email this week has me thinking about Microsoft's Signature PC program and whether this is still a recommended source for clean PCs.

As some of you may know, Windows To Go is a perk of Windows 10 Enterprise. So why is this feature available in Windows 10 Pro too?

A reader asked me this week whether Microsoft was preventing PC makers from adding their own recovery environments to Windows 10 going forward.

Good news: You can still use an Office 365 Personal offer to add time to an existing Office 365 Home subscription.

Microsoft has been plotting a major upgrade to its Outlook.com web email service for quite some time. But despite many delays, it appears that the upgrade is final accelerating. And many readers have questions about what is happening.

Starting with Windows 10 version 1607---which you get by applying the Anniversary Update---Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant, is no longer disabled by default. But what if you don't want Cortana? Is it possible to disable this feature anymore?

This is a bit random, but three readers have asked me the same question over the past week: What do I use to backup my PCs? It's a great question.

If you sign-in to your Windows 10-based PC or device with a Microsoft account, the personal photos and videos you store in OneDrive will appear automatically in the Photos app. But what if you don't want that?

Customers who upgrade to a new PC may understandably want to move their copy of Microsoft Office to the new PC as well. Is this possible? And if so, how do you do it?

With Windows 10 Mobile now shipping, it's time we revisit a long-standing issue with Windows phones: Is it possible to access Google services from Microsoft's mobile platform?

What if you rent a movie from Microsoft's Movies & TV service on your Windows 10-based PC and want to watch it on the Xbox One instead? Is that possible?

With Windows 10, Microsoft is instituting various devices limits that determine where you can use apps, games, subscription music and purchased videos.

In Windows 10, Microsoft has overhauled its media player apps with new versions. But the new Movies & TV app won’t keep playing when it’s minimized.

I've received a number of questions about the compatibility of Windows 10 with products like Windows Home Server and Windows Server Essentials.

With Microsoft surrendering the smart phone market to Android and iPhone, many Windows phone fans are wondering whether they should abandon the platform.

I get a lot of questions about Microsoft Surface: Should I wait for Surface Pro 4? Should I choose Surface 3 or Surface Pro 3, and so on. Let's take a look.

I'm getting a lot of incredulous email from readers who noticed a Get Windows 10 icon in their system tray. Why is Microsoft forcing a registration process?