Tag: windows

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‘New’ Windows 10 features inspired from other OSes

Every time I hear or read about one the ‘new’ features introduced in Windows 10, I can’t help but think ‘hang on, hasn’t [Linux|OS X] already had that feature for years?

The past few OS X releases have been minimizing the visual window decorations to have borderless windows and minimal icons, and Ubuntu 14.04 has done the same too (since it was released over a year ago). Seems to be the current fashion. I’m not a historian of UI design, but I had to dig back to around 2011 when OS X Lion I think introduced borderless windows, although windows in OS X have had this look n feel for long enough now that I’ve taken it for granted as normal.

One the features I’ve always missed in Windows that 10 now has is multiple virtual desktops, because this is something I always use in OS X and Linux – it seems like it’s always been there, and again, one of those features you take for granted. I like to keep related windows for one task on one desktop and windows for another task on another. Anyway, welcome to 1990’s, Windows 10.

If you want to see some more examples, itsfoss.com has a comparison of other ‘new’ Windows 10 features that have been borrowed from Linux.

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Windows 10 Activation Issues on Mac Parallels 9 and 10 for Bootcamp VMs

Parallels has a neat feature to allow you to create a VM from a bare metal install of Windows in the Bootcamp partition (rather than having it installed to a file representing a virtual disk on the host). This allows you to either natively boot straight from the Bootcamp partition, or boot in a VM running on a Mac OS X host.

For Windows 8.x, this worked fine even though Windows Activation saw the bare metal install and when running in the VM as two different installs. Previously one would activate as normal, and the other would require a call to the Microsoft number to get a new activation code. Once you had activated both, then you could boot either and both would be activated from one license.

On Windows 10 however, it looks like which ever you boot second, it sees the activation code already used on one of your Windows 10 devices, and then refuses to activate. This is discussed in this Parallels forum post here. So far it seems if you leave Windows 10 booted for ‘long enough’ eventually it will activate itself? I’m having this issue, so leaving my unactivated native boot up and running for a while to see whether it activates or not.

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Windows 10 – is it ready?

Only a day away from Windows 10 starting to rollout on July 29th, and people are wondering whether it’s really ready for release or not, or as The Register puts it, Microsoft are still playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with bugs before the actual release: “A number of nagging bugs have cropped up in the last few days that have some Windows 10 testers scratching their heads at just how an OS this raw can be considered production-ready.”

But if we’re prepared to accept’s Microsoft’s concept of ‘Windows as a Service’, this is all perfectly ok, because you’ll be getting a continual stream of Windows Updates to patch all the issues after the first release is pushed out. I’m not sure how this differs from any other Microsoft release of any prior release of Windows, but ok then, if you say so.

So your release forecast for tomorrow is: extremely buggy, with a very good chance of patches released later in the day.

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