By pairing a Chromecast with devices Home speakers, you can have music follow you across the house. You can also ensure those in other rooms can hear the audio without ramping up the volume. However, the functionality gets stronger once you consider other Google services. You’ll be able to listen to audiobooks anywhere in the house. The screen will also display information about what’s playing, which could be useful....
1 How to Remove a Windows Service2 How to Disable a Service or Turn Off Location Services What is a Windows service? A service in Windows is essentially just another type of program. Rather than being presented to you on-screen in the form of a GUI, it runs in the background, sometimes continuously, to enable things like networking tasks, or intermittently to check for updates. Though services have seen a lot of criticism over the years for the slowdowns they can cause, Windows 10’s are much more finely tuned....
1 How to Disable/Enable SMB1 via Windows 10 Control Panel2 How to Enable/Disable SMB1 with PowerShell What is SMB1? SMB is a network communications protocol that helps with file sharing, printing, and various other tasks between two nodes on a network. Microsoft first adopted SMB1 way back in 1990, making it pretty antiquated and oftentimes insecure. The protocol is now up to version 3.1.1, and later versions generally do everything version 1 did and more....
1 How to Download MP3 files from Spotify with Sidify2 How to Download Spotify Songs as MP3 using Tunefab Music Converter3 Extra: How to Record System Audio with Stereo Mix4 Extra: How to Record Audio on Windows 11 or Windows 10 How to download songs on Spotify? Use a Spotify downloader While you can download songs from Spotify using its premium feature, you may have noticed that it doesn’t download to MP3....
The Windows TRIM command is a way for Windows to tell you SSD which of its data blocks aren’t being used anymore. The SSD can then wipe these data blocks and marks them for rewriting again. This speeds things up – without SSD trimming, the SSD will have to wait for the blocks to be wiped as it tries to copy data to that area. With it enabled, the blocks will have already been wiped and it can continue immediately....
1 How to Reverse Touchpad Scrolling in Windows 102 How to Invert Mouse Scroll in Windows 103 How to Adjust Windows 10 Precision Touchpad Gestures and Change Mouse Sensitivity In such cases, it’s necessary to know how to reverse scrolling direction in Windows 10. You can reverse touchpad scrolling the easy way Thankfully, Microsoft knows that there are two camps when it comes to scrolling: those who scroll up to go up, and those who scroll down to go up....
Senators are pushing for a ban of Kaspersky Lab anti-virus services within the military. The proposal is because officials are concerned the Russian company “might be vulnerable to Russian government influence,” Reuters reported Wednesday. The Department of Defence budget rules draft included the proposal. The draft was recently published by the Senate. Several Kaspersky Lab employees were visited by the FBI on Tuesday, although it is understood no arrests were made....
LinkedIn purchased Lydna.com in 2015, while Microsoft’s acquisition of the professional network began in 2016. However, while universities and enterprises are able to opt-out of LinkedIn account creation for the switch, libraries have no choice. This is causing some concerns. Some feel that Microsoft is using its learning service to push users into a LinkedIn account when they have no interest in the platform. As well as this, the change could have privacy implications....
Microsoft says its recently launched platform will be available to US Government organizations next year. The company wants to enhance its cloud infrastructure collaborations with the United States Government. No solid date has been given, although Microsoft 365 will be made available for all US Government organizations in 2018. The roll out will begin with aerospace companies, defense industry, and government contractors. Additionally, Microsoft Teams will get 365 integration for US Government environments next year....
“With this increase in agility and portability, containers are helping to make applications the new currency in the cloud. At Microsoft, we’ve seen explosive growth in both interest and deployment of containerized workloads on Azure.” The acquisition of Deis will integrate into the company’s existing container strategy and enhance it. Deis provides extended tools to customers, allowing them to improve agility and efficiency of apps. The company will bring its open source technology expertise to the Azure team....
The company will be discussing these changes at Strata + Hadoop World. The new capabilities further Microsoft’s plans to integrate HDInsight and DocumentDB services into a seamless developer experience. For Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft has introduced real-time data science with Apache Spark. The Spark connector allows real-time exploration of global distributed data within DocumentDB. Apache Spark drives more efficient problem solving for data science customers. In a blog post, the company says data can be persisted and retrieved with DocumentDB, allowing for more efficiency: “The Spark to DocumentDB connector efficiently exploits the native DocumentDB managed indexes and enables updateable columns when performing analytics, push-down predicate filtering, and advanced analytics to data sciences against fast-changing globally-distributed data, ranging from IoT, data science, and analytics scenarios....
The solutions will roll out in the second half of this year with various features. In cloud-based InTune environments, users can look forward to the following additions: “Readiness and Compliance Reporting Dedicated: encryption reports that help admins understand the encryption status of their device estate; reports if devices can be successfully enabled with BitLocker. Configuration: Granular BitLocker configuration that empowers admins to manage devices to their intended level of security....
In this Office release, users will see changes made to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. For Word, Microsoft has introduced a new feature called Mobile View. As the name suggests, this manages how the app interacts with mobile screens. Specifically, Word should not automatically adjust a document to an iPad screen. When using Word on iPad in Split View users have previously had to resize the document when adjusting the screen....
WindowsLatest reports users are facing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes, alongside smaller issues like program crashes and slow performance. It seems the KB4566782 security update is causing a range of issues. For example, users are experiencing system slowdowns, longer boot times, and a drop in FPS counts. Other complaints include hard drives crashing, File Explorer freezing, and system shutdowns. Oh dear, Microsoft. It seems every month, Patch Tuesday releases result in an array of issues in Windows 10....
The outage was almost a blanket loss of service across all Azure regions. 26 out of 28 data center regions were affected by storage issues. Microsoft announced the problem on a status page update. The company was active through the evening fixing the issue and keeping users informed. “Starting at 22:42 UTC on 15 Mar 2017, customers using Storage may receive failure notifications when performing service management operations – such as create, update, delete – for resources hosted in this region,” Microsoft said on its Azure status page....
While Google Search has been absent from China for some time, Bing has been available. Microsoft has largely been adept at working with Chinese authorities to ensure its services are available to the country’s 1.3 billion people. Last night, Microsoft confirmed Bing has been blocked following users in China were unable to access the search. “We’ve confirmed that Bing is currently inaccessible in China and are engaged to determine next steps,” a company spokesperson told TNW in an email statement....
The upside of this enhancement is calls are now supported directly from the list of phone numbers. To use the feature, head to the contacts and the option to call is now available. As always, Microsoft has issued a changelog: Call on Skype from the phone book – Now you can call people on Skype directly from the phone book. Go to your contacts and look for the option to call a contact using Skype....
Owners of Xbox One can now access all their OneDrive files through their console, not just their photos and videos. The Windows 10 OneDrive app lets users work with their personal and work files while they’re on the go. Word, Excel and PowerPoint support On top of bringing the OneDrive UWP app to Xbox One, Microsoft has also released an important update for the application. Users of OneDrive are now able to open and save OneDrive files in the Office apps Word, Excel and PowerPoint....
Microsoft launched Chromium Edge saying it will come to Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, as well as macOS and other platforms. It now seems Mac machines will get preference over aging Windows PCs. Some comments suggest Microsoft is neglecting older Windows versions in favor of a rival platform. However, if Chromium Edge comes to newer macOS versions before it does legacy Windows builds, it makes total sense. Let’s not forget the company is cutting support of Windows 7 entirely next year and Windows 8/8....
1 Cortana Skills Kit website still accepting signups2 Harman Kardon & Cortana So far, Cortana has received positive reviews and according to Microsoft’s circulated email, its AI assistant has the largest current user base across all voice assistants. That user base could grow even more when the Cortana Skills Kit becomes available, however, Microsoft hasn’t announced a release date yet. Cortana Skills Kit website still accepting signups The CSK was supposed to receive a broader availability in February 2017....
