Category: Windows 8

How to Fix Windows Activation Error 0x80072F8F

The last thing you want to see during a Windows installation is an error message and particularly one which might not give you any helpful information on how to correct it (and not many Windows errors fall into that bucket). Anyway, this is a simple yet frustrating problem that I came across recently and I …

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Windows Live Brand to Sunset

It didn’t seem all to long ago that the Windows Live brand arrived to replace the tried but true MSN brand (which originally stood for Microsoft Network back in the old days when it was an ISP). Time does fly when we now realise that the Windows Live brand was introduced about seven years ago. …

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Slow or Infinitely Long Shutdowns on Mac OS X

Just thought I’d share a potential solution for a problem that I faced today. The copy of Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro had never been activated and given that I hadn’t used it in ages I thought I’d wipe it and replace the Windows installations on the laptop with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. …

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Will Existing Windows Phone 7 Devices Be Stranded?

If Microsoft is good at any one thing at the moment, it’s muddying the waters and casting doubt on the fate of existing devices and potential upgrades. I’m talking about nothing other than the uncertainty surrounding existing Windows Phone 7 devices and their ability to receive an upgrade to Windows Phone 8 (which will be …

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How to Shutdown Windows 8

I have had a number of people who are trying out Windows 8 that are stumped by how to actually execute a shut down. Since Windows 95, you could shut down a computer by clicking “Start” then “Shut down” but with Windows 8 that doesn’t work as the Start Menu has been replaced with the …

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Silverlight on the Rocks

Many people will have no idea what Silverlight actually is or what it does but for the rest of us it was the Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Adobe Flash which was never really unseated as the premier platform for Internet applications. Silverlight did see some usage in Windows Phone 7 but its future has …

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BitLocker and iPods – Will They Blend?

Leading on from yesterday’s article about BitLocker and the unfortunate situation that Mac OS X users find themselves in when BitLocker to Go is enforced at work when using USB devices we should also consider one popular USB device, the iPod. It may be a lesser known fact that iPods will use either HFS+ or …

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BitLocker Drive Encryption and Mac OS X

Earlier in the week, a colleague of mine had his work laptop upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows XP. To many of us this would seem to be a welcome change but for some this could actually be a complication. As part of the changeover, “BitLocker to Go” drive encryption is enforced on USB drives as …

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Windows 8 Tablets Can Beat Retina Displays

Today, Microsoft published a blog entry about Windows 8 and its requirement and ability to scale to different screen sizes and resolutions with differing ranges of pixel density. One interesting thing caught my eye which was this diagram. The thing that interested me most was not what was on the right hand side of the …

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Internet Explorer 10 x 2 = ?

Here’s something else to bear in mind for people trying out Windows 8 and the two different versions of Internet Explorer 10. If you don’t know already there are two versions of Internet Explorer 10: the Metro-style app and the traditional desktop app. More confusingly, these two instances of Internet Explorer 10 are not named …

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