Windows Archive

Some Windows 10 users are having problems with their Pro licenses today, as users on the company's Community Forums and Reddit are reporting that their Windows 10 Pro systems are saying they are not activated, and telling users to install Windows 10 Home instead. Most of the reports appear to be coming from users who obtained the Windows 10 license thanks to the free upgrade path Microsoft offered back in 2015, suggesting that the issue is somehow related to it.

According to some of the reports, while the system says that users have a Windows 10 Home license, the Microsoft Store link in the settings page blocks them from attempting to buy a Pro license.

Microsoft has just released an Emerging issue announcement about current activation issue related to Pro edition recently. This happens in Japan, Korea, American and many other countries.I am very sorry to inform you that there is a temporary issue with Microsoft's activation server at the moment and some customers might experience this issue where Windows is displayed as not activated.

Our engineers are working tirelessly to resolve this issue and it is expected to be corrected within one to two business days.

How can I stop Windows 10 updates? Whether it’s preventing Windows 10 from kicking off a critical update during a presentation, or deferring Microsoft’s Windows 10 feature update because of worries about data loss, it’s a question we’ve all asked. You shouldn’t block all Windows 10 updates. But you can manage them.

The remaining Windows Phone community have a lot of thanks due to Rene Lergner a.k.a. Heathcliff74, who created the Windows 10 Mobile unlock solution that finally broke Microsoft's bootloader protections and who allowed such crazy developments such as full Windows 10 on ARM.

He's gotten a bit busy however and will not be able to give the project his full attention any more.

Like any good hacker in that position, instead of just disappearing, he has made his project, WPInternals, open source, meaning any good developer can take over his work, to update, modify or bug fix.

One potential solution is an Arm port of Chrome, as opposed to emulating the desktop (x86) version of the browser, but is Qualcomm working on this?

"We are," Qualcomm senior director of product management Miguel Nunes told Android Authority on the sidelines of Arm TechCon. "We're still working with the different OEMs and designs. I expect you'll see it probably around (the) second half of next year. Every OEM will decide whatever their launch timeline is, but we're actively working on it."

Developing a Chrome-like testing infrastructure for something as complicated and sprawling as Windows would be a huge undertaking. While some parts of Windows can likely be extensively tested as isolated, standalone components, many parts can only be usefully tested when treated as integrated parts of a complete system. Some of them, such as the OneDrive file syncing feature, even depend on external network services to operate. It's not a trivial exercise at all.

Adopting the principle that the Windows code should always be shipping quality - not "after a few months of fixing" but "right now, at any moment" - would be an enormous change. But it's a necessary one. Microsoft needs to be in a position where each new update is production quality from day one; a world where updating to the latest and greatest release is a no-brainer, a choice that can be confidently taken. Feature updates should be non-events, barely noticed by users. Cutting back to one release a year, or one release every three years, doesn't do that, and it never did. It's the process itself that needs to change: not the timescale.

Microsoft's rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update has arguably been one of its most troublesome releases in recent times. While previous updates have also had issues, this one boasted particularly serious ones such as user files being deleted, bugs in the Task Manager, Intel driver incompatibility, internet connectivity issues, and more.

Following widespread reporting of these issues, Microsoft has now pulled the Windows 10 October 2018 Update from circulation.

Today we're very pleased to announce that an optimised Ubuntu Desktop image is available from the Hyper-V gallery. This will give an optimum experience when running Ubuntu Desktop as a guest on a Windows 10 Pro desktop host. From the Ubuntu Report data we know that a lot of people are using Ubuntu as a virtual machine, and so we want to make that experience as seamless as possible.

Microsoft started testing a warning for Windows 10 users last week that displayed a prompt when Chrome or Firefox was about to be installed. The software giant is now reversing this controversial test in its latest Windows 10 preview, released last Friday. The Verge understands Microsoft no longer plans to include this warning in the upcoming Windows 10 October 2018 Update that will ship next month, but that the company may continue to test these types of prompts in future updates.

Windows 10 insider build 17744, which will be available in next month to the public as Windows 10 2018 October update has warned a user when he tries to install Firefox browser to open and use Microsoft Edge. We know Windows 10 nudges to use Edge as the default browser, but this is definitely different. A user shared about this on Twitter, here is what the dialog informed the user.

As previously announced, Windows 7 extended support is ending January 14, 2020. While many of you are already well on your way in deploying Windows 10, we understand that everyone is at a different point in the upgrade process.

With that in mind, today we are announcing that we will offer paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) through January 2023. The Windows 7 ESU will be sold on a per-device basis and the price will increase each year. Windows 7 ESUs will be available to all Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise customers in Volume Licensing, with a discount to customers with Windows software assurance, Windows 10 Enterprise or Windows 10 Education subscriptions. In addition, Office 365 ProPlus will be supported on devices with active Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) through January 2023. This means that customers who purchase the Windows 7 ESU will be able to continue to run Office 365 ProPlus.

As a part of our Windows device life cycle, Microsoft Store will soon stop accepting new apps with Windows Phone 8.x or earlier or Windows 8/8.1 packages (XAP and APPX). Soon after that date, we will stop distributing app updates to Windows Phone 8.x or earlier and Windows 8/8.1 devices; at that time, updates will only be made available to customers using Windows 10 devices.

The PowerPC is a RISC processor architecture which grew out of IBM's POWER architecture. Windows NT support was introduced in Windows NT 3.51, and it didn't last long; the last version to support it was Windows NT 4.0. Despite not being supported by the flagship operating system, it continued to be supported by Windows CE, and a later version of the PowerPC was chosen as the processor for the Xbox 360.

As with all the processor retrospective series, I'm going to focus on how Windows NT used the PowerPC in user mode because the original audience for all of these discussions was user-mode developers trying to get up to speed debugging their programs on PowerPC.

VMS doesn't have different OS personalities, as NT does, but its kernel and Executive subsystems are clear predecessors to NT's. Digital developers wrote the VMS kernel almost entirely in VAX assembly language. To be portable across different CPU architectures, Microsoft developers wrote NT's kernel almost entirely in C. In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities.

Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. Table 1 lists a few VMS terms and their NT translations. Although I won't go into detail, I will discuss some of the major similarities and differences between Windows NT 3.1 and VMS 5.0, the last version of VMS Dave Cutler and his team might have influenced.