ommoran

Hi Paul,

I was just reading your article “The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants” and had originally drafted this as a comment, but it was kind of too off-topic and too ranty. In any event, I hope you see this, as I’m in the throes of helping my partner upgrade away from her 2013 Macbook Pro. I would love to get her back on the MS side of the world, and she is really intrigued by the HP Spectre X360 (ash and copper – she loves the look). I’d also like her to take a look at a Surface Laptop, which here in Canada are only $50 adrift of the similarly equipped HPs – both are in the $1600 range with an 8/256 configuration, and are still less than the heart-stopping price of $1800 for the Macbook Pro 13″.

The only thing stopping her? iMessage. She’s on the laptop all day, working and not. She runs her own company. iMessage has become incredibly important to her workflow. And if she has no comparable program (I believe her when she says she isn’t married to Apple), she can’t make the switch. It’s inefficient for her to switch back and forth between a phone and a computer, and I can see that.

Is there anything even close on the horizon? Yeah, I’ve got cortana set up on my phone and laptop – and it’s flakey. There was a time under the Windows 8.x days (8.0 I think!) where I had this working perfectly with my Lumia. Now… it’s all gone. I have the Samsung thing, but that just virtualizes the whole phone. As an app, I have to hand it to iMessage – it’s simple, familiar, and gets the job done.

The heart wants what the heart wants. But for a technology company that is so concerned about productivity, MS needs to remember that they have to not just support phones because that’s where people are for some apps – they need to support ALL platforms with ALL apps so that if I’m using my computer, I don’t have to take my hands off the keyboard. Honestly, the more she talks about how she relies on it, the more I hate it every time I get a ping on my phone while I’m at the computer…

So... I get the Xbox One S as a gift for my family for Christmas.  It comes with:

- Halo 5 on disc

- Assassins Creed Syndicate on Disc

- Halo Master Chief Collection download code

- a 50 MS Store gift card valid at the online MS Store (not the Xbox Store), which I use to buy Minecraft and a bunch of add-ons for my kids.  Minecraft comes on disc a few days later, but the add-ons are all DLC.

Here's my gripe.  Seriously, I have to insert the physical media in order to play the games that I own on physical media?  They've downloaded to my drive, but for DRM purposes they have to see the physical disc rather than register my copy to my MSA through the store?

That is *bloody* annoying.  And I guess I'm just here to vent - unless someone knows how to circumvent that.

Hello everyone,

Does anyone know how to lock a particular font size for Outlook for Android?  It seems that (primarily HTML or RTF) e-mails come in at extremely small text sizes, and I either have to landscape or pinch and zoom to even read them.

Any help appreciated.

Hey there,

I'm a big fan of the Thurrott Daily round-ups, which happen about 2-3 times a week or so.  However, they are posted either on thurrott.com or Petri.com - and I end up missing the Petri ones, as honestly I rarely visit the sister site.

Can we get a header that lets us click on them and find all the recent ones?

I suppose that this is just a general rant, although I remember Paul talking about this on WW, and I tried to find a related article but was not able to do so. 

I have two Microsoft accounts.  One, which is connected to the majority of my MS services, including my 1.xTB Onedrive account.  I really started to use it when I got my first Windows phone at the end of 2012, and I attached to it my most used e-mail address, which is a gmail box.

The second account, which was created when I set up my Xbox 360 in 2011, is attached to my isp's e-mail address for no specific reason.  I'd just moved in, blah blah blah.  It seemed the right thing to do.  So, that's where my gamertag is - and nothing else.  Everything else - OneDrive, my Office 365 subscription - is attached to my gmail account, along with (apparently) a gamertag of Player7xxxxx or whatever - a generic number.

Normally, it's not a problem.  This weekend, I logged into Xbox Live on my pc to redeem a code for Halo Master Chief Collection that came with my new Xbox One S (ordered through the store, with my main MSA).  Ok, click here... what?  WTF happened to the game?  Re-enter the 25 digit code... already claimed.  What?

That's when I spot that, because I was logged into Onedrive with my main account, once I clicked "redeem code" with my Xbox MSA, it flipped my login to the main MSA.  Now, my non-Xbox MSA has my Halo Master Chief.  (No problem, as I can log in with that on the xbox and download it.)

That said, that is a pain in the donkey.  I recall Paul mentioning, probably two years ago, that MS was working to have some facility to "merge" two MSAs.  That would, in fact, be delightful, as I'd rather not have the separation of the two accounts at this point.  Has anyone heard anything further about merging two accounts?  Is this actually on the horizon, or is this another hard computer science problem?

Hi everyone,

I'm curious as to the experiences of anyone that has tried the Happague digital OTA tuner with an Xbox One or One S.  I'm looking at getting an S for the kids for Christmas (shhhh... it is *so* for them), and as I cut the cords some time ago, I'd like to try this out.

Any advice or pitfall warnings are also appreciated.  Thanks!

Martin

I know that this was a feature that a lot of people did not like, but it is one that I quite enjoyed.  It seems that the updated UWP apps no longer support the Facebook Profile Sync.  Is there any possibility that that feature will return?

I know I'm one of about 4 people that actually liked it, but...