The worst thing when you’re trying to help someone remotely with a sick Windows PC is to try and talk them through writing down the interesting/useful parts from Blue Screen of Death. Luckily, by default, Windows will write out a dumpfile to c:windows by default (you can enable/disable this from Startup and Recovery settings in My Computer / Properties). To read these files, install the Windows Debug Tools from here (link), and then from the command line use ‘dumpchk’ to read the dump file. The useful part of info you can grab from the output is the one line that says something like ‘Probably caused by [driver name here]’ – once you’ve got this a quick Google will tell you what it’s a driver for, and then hopefully thats enough to tell you what hardware/driver is causing the issues (assuming it’s a hardware/driver issue).
Internet Explorer losing market share to practically every other browser
Internet Explorer is losing market share, not to any one particular other browser, but more interestingly, almost every other browser is gaining while IE is losing. Firefox, Safari and Chrome are all gaining market share while IE is losing.
The 2000s – the decade Microsoft lost their way
I’ve been saying this for a while now – it just seems that Microsoft has become increasingly complacent and has lost their way. They doesn’t seem to be anything new coming from Microsoft – everything they release just seems to attempting to have a slice of the ‘me too’ pie. Vista and Windows 7 are no-where as revolutionary as prior Windows releases before it. The XBox (both versions) are just an attempt to get a foot in the door of console gaming (the first XBox was nothing more than a PC in a black box anyway – definitely nothing revolutionary there), Zune is trying to cash in on the iPod’s success, and Microsoft have been talking for ages that Windows Mobile will take market share back from the iPhone, but where is it? They’ve got a gargantuan task ahead of themselves to lift Windows Mobile up to the standards of anything remotely close to the success of the iPhone since, no-one wil argue this, Windows Mobile is a steaming pile of turd. And now they’ve got a new competitor in the form of the Android platform, who’s popularity is accelerating. If you’re asked to name an innovator in IT, I bet you Microsoft is not going to be the first company that comes to mind. That’s a sad change in a way for a company that was ‘the’ company in everything regarding PCs and PC based operating systems. But maybe that’s part of the problem. The world is moving on, the way we access and use information is changing, and Microsoft has put all it’s eggs in one basket relying on the success of it’s PC based operating system, but the world is changing, and Microsoft is failing (and probably has already failed) to keep up.
The Register has the same conclusion – read their assessment of the company that ‘lost their mojo’ in the 2000s here.
Study says iPhone users are delusional
This has to be the funnies thing I’ve read for a long time, and it’s only so funny because thinking about some of the iPhone users I know, it’s perfectly true.