Category: Windows Desktop
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Cortana is rather good
Windows 10 comes with Cortana, Microsoft’s voice input personal assistant. I am using it on my new Surface Pro 4 and it the voice recognition is very accurate. Since this device can be used in tablet mode without a keyboard having voice entry is very useful. Here is a list of things Cortana can do…
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Why you should use a Windows 10 PIN
Windows 10 suggests that you use a PIN to login to your computer and says that this is more secure than a password. These seems odd because obviously there are fewer possible values. This article explains the reasoning about PINs. In short, your Microsoft Account credentials are the crown jewels that you want to protect.…
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Registry hack to enable Outlook 2016 to connect to Office 365
Issue: Outlook 2016 (which I am testing) cannot connect to Office 365 Exchange. It is no longer possible to manually enter Exchange Server details. A valid Autodiscovery record is required. Use this site to find out which autodiscovery mechanism you are using. https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ Verifies that we do have a valid autodiscovery record and that we…
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VirtualBox on Microsoft Surface 3 (not pro)
I am testing a Microsoft Surface 3 (not Pro) this is obviously too underpowered for heavy VM use (i5, 8GB RAM is preferred) but it is worth trying out. My new Surface 3 now uses the Atom x7 processor but the Internet is unclear whether this device supports virtualisation because the processor specifications have changed over time. I…
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Microsoft Office 365 Excel is a mobile app platform
I help run an underwater hockey club. To smooth administration I wanted to create an mobile application to record attendance and the payment of weekly subs. My usual approach would be to create a WordPress application or perhaps a mobile app using Cordova to package an HTML and Javascript application. However I am trialling Microsoft…
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Fix for slow or hanging right click button
My daughter upgraded her Lenovo laptop to Windows 10 (hint – don’t do this until Christmas) and I spend several hours finding and installing drivers so it would work smoothly again. Having done so I found that the right-click button was very slow on the desktop. The problem was cased by the right-click button having…
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Windows Explorer is dead – OneDrive on the web is king
Microsoft really, really get the cloud. Windows 10 is a “Cloud first” operating system and as it matures and the interactions with Office 365 become ever smoother we are going to see great things. Dropbox has lead the way in cloud storage and it is almost perfect. Microsoft is playing catchup and has the disadvantage…
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Use Firefox not Edge if you only have 2 GB RAM
The best browser for 2 GB Windows 10 laptops is Firefox. Edge uses even more memory than Chrome, therefore use Firefox on low RAM devices such as the HP Stream 13. I have been testing Windows 10 on an HP Stream 13 using the Edge browser for the last week. I have seen high memory…
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Upgrading to Windows 10 may break Outlook 2013
I upgraded my HP Stream 13 to Windows 10. After a day or so I started Outlook 2013 and found that I could not send emails. After several frustrating hours I found out that this is a known issue. http://www.msoutlook.info/question/cannot-send-after-windows-10-upgrade and the fix is described in the link above.
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Development environments should be virtual machines
It is a fact of life that laptops fail. Last year the hard drive failed and I had to reinstall. Now my Dell Studio 1558 got a blocked fan and my repair was unsuccessful. My data is intact on the hard drive but the I am going to have to restore to a new device. It…
Dr James Bayley 