Windows Archive

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.

This is the first of a series of posts in which we'll explore all things command-line - from the origins of the command-line and the evolution of the terminal, to what we're doing to overhaul and modernize the Windows Console & command-line in future Windows releases.

The Andromeda device runs an experience tailored for its unique form-factor, which is built on top of Windows Core OS. This tailored experience is known as Andromeda OS and includes no legacy UIs and bloat. Microsoft is doing the exact same thing with Surface Hub 2, which also runs a custom tailored version of Windows Core OS known as Aruba and built specifically for that large collaborative device form factor.

Therefore, it's important to stress that Andromeda OS is unlike any version of Windows 10 available on the market today; it's an entirely new Windows OS experience powered by CShell that's built from the ground up for mobile dual-screened multitasking. Because of this, Microsoft needs more time to ensure the OS is well-baked.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming how businesses gather and use data to develop competitive insights and create new financial opportunities. As IoT technology matures and our partners gain more experience, they are evolving their business models to increase the overall return on investment of their IoT solutions. This includes adding recurring revenue, enhancing security, and reducing support costs.

At Computex a few weeks back, we announced Windows 10 IoT Core Services, which enables our IoT partners to commercialize their solutions running on Windows 10 IoT Core. We are now excited to announce the public preview of this service along with details on purchasing and pricing. As described in our previous blog, IoT Core Services provides 10 years of operating system support along with services to manage device updates and assess device health.

Microsoft is giving its Notepad app for Windows a surprising amount of new features. While the software giant hasn’t updated Notepad for years, the next Windows 10 update will include some highly requested additions. Microsoft is clearly listening to Windows 10 users who use notepad for development, logs, or simple text manipulation.

You’ll soon be able to do wrap around find and replace alongside the ability to zoom into text by holding down the ctrl key and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Microsoft is also adding in extended line ending support so that Unix/Linux line endings (LF) and Macintosh line endings (CR) are supported in Notepad. The status bar will now be enabled by default in Notepad, and it includes the ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled.

Synaptics and AMD today announced that they're teaming up on a biometric security solution for consumer and business PCs built on AMD platforms. But for Microsoft watchers, the most curious portion of the announcement is that the biometric tech is squarely focused on a mysterious "next-generation operating system" from Microsoft.

It's not entirely clear what the biometric security OS is that Synaptics is referring to, as Microsoft itself hasn't announced any forthcoming releases. However, it could be related to a Microsoft project called Polaris, a more modern version of Windows 10 for desktops that Windows Central senior editor Zac Bowden reported on earlier this year.

Built on an internal project called Windows Core OS, which aims to turn Windows into a modular OS, Polaris is said to focus on desktop, laptop, and 2-in-1 form factors. The goal of Polaris is to provide a shell that Windows users are familiar with, but while leaving behind legacy components in favor of UWP apps. According to our reporting, Polaris would still be able to utilize some form of virtualization to run Win32 programs. However, dropping legacy cruft would, in theory, allow Microsoft to create a more secure version of Windows 10.

Just over three years since the launch of the surprisingly good Surface 3, Microsoft has finally refreshed this category with a new device, now called the Surface Go. The Surface Pro series has been very successful for the company, and they've decided it's time to offer an entry level Surface again. The Redmond company has been working on trying to win back the education market, so a smaller, lighter, and most importantly, less expensive Surface makes a lot of sense.