What Free Upgrade To Windows 10 Means For You

The Windows 10 event was huge and not just because it listed a lot of new changes that are to be implemented in the next Windows 10 build or because of Cortana but also because of the HoloLens announcement and the news that Windows 10 will be free for everyone running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1. I’m still very excited about the HoloLens preview and the mind blowing Minecraft integration shown but apart from that this news of the free upgrade is a major point of interest for me, and possibly for many other people. Here’s a look at what the announcement means for both consumers and for Windows as a product.

The Free Upgrade

Windows 10 is going to be free for one year after it has been released to anyone running any version of Windows 7 and up. You will be allowed to upgrade easily. Windows Vista users have been left out of the free offering. This upgrade will be permanent meaning you cannot downgrade to Windows 7 again with your old license. The upgrade will be free for the first year of the Windows 10 launch and any upgrades made after the year expires will cost you.

Why You Should Care

Many new laptop models are built entirely for Windows 8 at present with very few still coming with Windows 7 pre-installed. This announcement means you’re entitled to a free OS upgrade and if your current Windows 7 license is OEM restricted, you can still get in on the action without shelling out money for Windows 8/8.1 or buying a new device.

If you were considering buying a new system the same time you upgrade to a newer OS, you might want to rethink the decision to do so, especially if your current one is working well and a new OS was all that was motivating you to get a new laptop. For me personally, this announcement has made me reconsider buying a not only a new laptop, but also persuaded me not to shell out a ridiculous amount of cash on a MacBook which I was considering because I didn’t want to wait until Windows 10 came out. The announcement has persuaded me to wait.

This upgrade is going to be permanent. It is likely Windows 7 will cease to be available for purchase and your current license may be all that remains of an authentic Windows 7 license. Since the upgrade is going to be permanent, it’s a big decision to make and you might want to do a Windows 10 test run before you make the plunge. You do have a whole year to decide what you want to do but once you upgrade, there is going to be no way back.

What This Means For Windows

A while back, Apple used to charge for OS upgrades. I remember Mountain Lion cost something around $20 but the last two upgrades have been free. Windows 8 had a price tag on it and where it had its set of problems that contributed to users abstaining from an upgrade, the price might also have dissuaded some from buying an OS that was only half-cooked.

Microsoft is realizing that it needs people to upgrade  and that it is more about market share than profits at the moment. It is a very conscious effort by the company to get people to move to the newer version. Windows 7 is going to be pushed out and slowly made obsolete and this free upgrade will play a huge role. It lets users keep their currentPCs, and get the new OS with very little effort. The question is, will we soon see a decline in Window 7 market share as people upgrade to the much improved Windows 10? I personally think it’s very possible because Windows 10 has fixed just about everything wrong with Windows 8/8.1 and Free is a price that’s hard to beat. The new OS has plenty to offer anyone running Windows 7 which is now looking very dated.

Everything You Need To Know About Windows 10 Notification Center

As apps continue to grow more pro-active in how they communicate with users, the need to consolidate notifications sent by these apps is becoming more and more pressing. Smartphones have long had a unified notification system that allows users to review all notifications sent by apps and something similar is slowly making its way to the desktop. OS X has a notification center to match the feature of the same name on iOS, the Chrome browser has also streamlined notifications with its fairly new notification center, and Windows 10 likewise has followed suit. Notifications weren’t absent from Windows even as far back as Windows XP, they just looked really different. The new Windows 10 Notification center combines notifications and the charms bar into one very easy to use panel. Here’s what it can do.

The Notifications Center

To open the Notification center, click Notification the icon in the system tray. If it looks like a clear speech bubble that means you have no new/unread notifications. If it is filled out and white, it means you have new notifications.

Notifications are sorted by time under the head of each app that’s sent you a notification. At the bottom of the notification panel, you have toggles for the tablet and airplane mode, a button to switch to display settings, connect a device, manage Wi-Fi, VPN, and your location. You can also quickly open the Settings app. If you don’t see all these options (you likely won’t) click the ‘Expand’ option to view them all.

What Can You Do From The Notifications Center?

At present, the notification center lets you;

• View all notifications sent by an application
• Switch to an application by clicking on a notification sent by it
• Clear all notifications
• Toggle the tablet and airplane mode
• Toggle Wi-Fi on/off
• Open the Settings app
• Connect to a device
• Go to Location settings
• Go to VPN settings
• Go to display settings

What’s changed over the past builds? 

The Notification center in its current state works much like the notification center in OS X. It doesn’t slide out and push the desktop to the left when opened, instead, it slides out over the desktop. In the initial builds, the notification center was a bit of a mess with notifciations not being sorted properly and often not reporting which app had sent the notification. Additionally, the notification center did not occupy one fourth of the screen as a slide out panel. It was only as high as the number of notifications it had to show. Before build 9926, the Charms bar was still a functioning feature so these toggles weren’t a part of the notification center. It is possible the Charms bar might not make a come back and that in future builds users will be able to bring up the notification center by mimicking the same swipe gesture that was previously used to bring up the Charms bar.

How To Disable Login Screen In Windows 10

Your Windows PC, if you’re running Windows 8 or Windows 10, is tied to your Live account. When you login to your system you have to enter the same password that could open your Hotmail/outlook email account, log you into Skype, and even buy apps from the Windows App Store. Unfortunately, that’s also the only thing preventing access to your PC. If you aren’t too bothered about securing your computer with a password, and are just plain annoyed with having to login in repeatedly, there is a simple way to disable it so that you can just dive right in and start using your PC. Here’s how.

Right-click the Start button and select the Run option. Type netplwiz and hit enter.

This will open the User Accounts window. There are other ways to open this window; you can use the Control Panel as well. The Run dialogue is the quickest way to open it. If you have several different accounts configured, choose the one that you would like to skip the whole login and password option for. Uncheck the ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer’ and click Apply at the bottom.

Restart your system and you will see you no longer have to enter a password to start using it. Disabling the password has pros and cons of course, so be mindful that you’re taking a layer of security off your system and trading it in for convenience by doing this.

Create & Manage Windows User Accounts Or Permissions With A Basic UI

Windows is a powerful OS and with great power come lots of options to customize your OS so it works exactly how you need it to. It’s built to meet just about every need you might have on your personal or shared family computer. It’s hard to imagine an operating system without user accounts but for someone who isn’t too familiar with Windows account management, creating and managing these accounts might be difficult. Quick User Manager is an account creation and management tool for Windows that gives you a simple UI to manage permissions for a user account. You can change an account’s status to that of administrator or downgrade it to that of a simple user or a guest account. Additionally, you can prevent the user of an account from changing passwords with admin rights, as well as change the password for it, delete it, or hide it from the welcome screen.

Quick User Manager is a portable tool that works on Windows 7 and above. We tried it on Windows 10 and while it looked bad in terms of UI, it worked perfectly. Launch the app and it will automatically list all configured users on your system. The tool is best used from the administrator account. Select an account from the left column to edit it. You can change it’s password, set a password for it if one hasn’t been set already, remove a password, change the display picture for an account, or even delete the user.

Click the ‘Create user account’ button at the very bottom if you want to create a new account. The Account type i.e. the privilege it has, a password, and a photo to go with it are all set here. Once you’ve created the account, you can select it from the list that appears in the left column and set other restrictions for it or edit the ones you set while creating it.

Quick User Manager is great for anyone who doesn’t know much about managing accounts but would still like to be able to manage them without having to jump through a million hoops.

Microsoft, McAfee update antivirus software to protect against Superfish

Lenovo is working with Microsoft and McAfee to help protect its users from the security vulnerabilities created by Superfish's adware.

Microsoft's Windows Defender and McAfee's antivirus software were both recently updated to remove Superfish's adware from affected Lenovo PCs, according to the company,

SEE ALSO: Lenovo CTO admits Superfish put users at risk, talks damage control

The update to Microsoft's Windows Defender was first spotted by security researcher Filippo Valsorda. It will automatically uninstall Superfish and reset the affected security certificates to remove malicious ones that may have been installed as a result of the adware.

In a statement, Lenovo confirmed it was working with both Microsoft and McAfee — in addition to developing its own tools — and promised the company would continue "learning from this experience."

We are working with McAfee and Microsoft to have the Superfish software and certificate quarantined or removed using their industry-leading tools and technologies. These actions have already started and will automatically fix the vulnerability even for users who are not currently aware of the problem.

We apologize for causing these concerns among our users – we are learning from this experience and will use it to improve what we do and how we do it in the future. We will continue to take steps to make removal of the software and underlying vulnerable certificates in question easy for customers so they can continue to use our products with the confidence that they expect and deserve.

The updates come as Lenovo is under increased scrutiny for its handling of Superfish's adware. Earlier int he week, security researchers discovered the vulnerability, which puts sensitive user information at risk. The adware has come pre-installed on some Lenovo PCs as far back as 2010,

Where Is The Charms Bar In Windows 10?

Windows 8 was heavily criticized for removing the start button. So loud was the dissension that Microsoft had to yield to it and the start button made a come back in Windows 8.1. Windows 10 brings back the Start Menu though with a very modern look so it seems things will be returning to a new normal with the next version, right? Nope. Once you’re done exploring the new Start Menu in Windows 10 you might start wondering where the Charms bar (introduced in Windows 8 and much loved) is. The very short answer to that question is that it’s gone but not missing. Here’s what has happened to it.

The Charms bar incorporated five major functions; Search, sharing, devices, settings, and switching to the Modern UI start screen. With the return of the Start button and the Start menu, Windows 10 no longer needs Start button. The addition of Cortana and the Search bar negate the need to have a search feature in the Charms bar as well. We’re left with sharing options, connecting to devices, and quickly going to Settings.

All this, and more are now taken over wholly by the new Notification Center in Windows 10. Check out the bottom of the Notification Center panel and you will see most of the toggles previously housed in the Charms bar including Airport mode, Wi-Fi switch, a link to the Settings app, and even one directly to Location settings. Additionally, the Sharing and Devices options have been moved here. Click Expand toview them all.

The Windows 10 Search bar and Cortana have indeed negated the need for a search feature in the Charms bar but that particular search wasn’t just a system-wide search feature. It was also context sensitive search and that’s what’s missing even from the Notification Center. Context search for apps has not disappeared, it’s just moved. Open an app and click the hamburger icon at the top left. Select the Search option to bring up a search panel on the right.

This search is set by default to ‘Everywhere’ but you can open the drop-down menu and instead select only the current app to search in.

Lastly, the Settings charm held one very important function; shutting down your PC. That too has moved to the Start Menu. Alternatively, you can right-click the Start button and select Shut down from the context menu.

There you have it; a Windows version that is devoid of the Charms bar but still offers you every single functionality that was present in it.

How To Remove/Disable Web Search From Windows 10

Microsoft has been improving Bing search for quite a while. I almost sometimes consider giving it a second try. Likewise, it’s been improving Internet Explorer to match the performance of other more popular browsers. Windows 10 will come with a nice new version of Internet Explorer and for those familiar with the new Search feature, Bing will be the one and only search provider that you can use to search the web from the Search bar. The Search bar in Windows 10 combines local search and web search. Where it’s annoying enough that you can’t use something other than Bing, it’s also annoying that you can’t easily opt out of web search and web results and have it run local search only. We say there is no easy way to opt out of it so that means there is a way to opt out. Here’s how.

Open Control panel, take a minute to admire the new look and then search for Group Policy, select the option to Edit Group Policy to open the Local Group Policy Editor. Alternatively, you can use the search feature to find the option. The feature is split into two sections; Computer Configuration, and User Configuration. You’re going to be concerned with the Computer Configuration section. Select Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Search.

When you now use the Search bar, the search will only be done locally, and only local results will be shown. There should definitely be an easier or more precisely a more obvious way to disabling web search. It isn’t something that Windows users are accustomed to so where Microsoft is attempting to warm us up to new features, it should consider adding an opt-out ‘Nope’ button in case we don’t like something. Disabling web search will make the search feature itself faster and that alone is a good reason to disable it.

How To Name App Groups In Windows 10 Start Menu

App tiles were a great addition in Windows 8, they were live and always updating with the latest news or notifications. In Windows 8 you could easily group several tiles together for a cleaner more organized Start screen. Good times. Windows 10 has a fresh take on the Start menu but it retains many of the Start Screen features such as grouping and resizing the live tiles. The new addition in Windows 10’s Start Menu is that you can name your app groups. The group title bar serves as a great way to drag and rearrange an entire set of apps.

Rearranging apps is simple enough; click and drag them around to break them away from their current group and set them in a group of their own. Right-click the app tile and go to the resize option to make it smaller or larger.

Notice that when you move your mouse over the dividing area just above a group, a black box with an ellipse appears. Click it and it can be edited. No name is given to app groups by default and they are instead kept empty. Type a name and click outside the box

The app group is easier to reposition if you drag it using the group’s name bar. All app tiles go with it.

Here’s to hoping they might add a background color feature to the group name bar to make it more appealing, visually.

Get Adobe Acrobat Reader To Remember Your Place When Reading PDFs

PDF files are some of the most common files found online and Adobe Acrobat Reader is one of the more popular programs used to read these files. It’s also used to read some of the e-book formats that it supports. The popularity of the format is no surprise since it was created to make rendering and reading documents online easy. Acrobat Reader has the name advantage going for it. If you use Acrobat Reader to view PDF files, long ones at that, then you might find it far more useful if the program could actually remember your place. It’s not like you have a physical book in your hand and you can turn the corner of the page to mark your spot. Here’s how to get Acrobat Reader to remember where you were last reading.

Open Acrobat Reader. You can simply have the program open or you can open a PDF file, it makes no difference in either case. Go to Edit>Preferences or just hit Ctrl+K to open the program’s preferences window. Go to the Documents tab and check the ‘Restore last view settings when reopening documents’option.

You can now continue reading and each time you open a file that you had been reading, it will open to where you last left off.  It not only remembers the correct page but also the position. I really wish this setting had been made more obvious. With the Bookmark and pick up where you left off feature in Word 2013 being so useful, this is something that should definitely be made easier to spot.

How To Get Certificates From MCP.Microsoft

*Note : Don't Close any tab*

STEP 1:

        LOG IN to www.certiport.com 

If you forgot your user name or password, click "I cannot access my account". It will get you a new window and ask some details. Fill all details and then you will get your user Id and password.

STEP 2:

           In certiport website click My Profile

STEP 3:

Click "Programs".

STEP 4:

Click on the circled "Edit Registration Data".

STEP 5:

Copy the Microsoft certification Id and open a new window

STEP 6:

Go to www.mcp.microsoft.com and sign in with your Microsoft account. If you don’t have, then create a new Microsoft account and sign in with that account.

Step 7:

Your access code was an expired one.

So to get a temporary one, click the circled one.

Type the MIC ID, First Name, Last Name by copying that details from the previous window and give mail Id. 

STEP 8:

The new temporary access code will be sent to your mail Id 

copy that and paste in the below window with your MIC ID.

STEP 9:

A New application form will open and "fill your personal details" and the "mandatory questions" as below.

Then click next.

STEP 10:  

A new webpage will open and "click download and purchase".

Step 11:

Fill the details as per the below images.

STEP 12:

Click "Download".

   THANKS FOR READING!!!!