Skip to main content

August 2015

Microsoft releases Windows 10 patches KB3081452, KB3081448 and KB3081449

Microsoft has just pushed out up to three new patches for the retail version of its Windows 10 operating system.

Windows 10 users who have not modified Windows Update settings may notice them when they run a manual check for updates.

The patches in question are the following ones:

Windows 10 stats: 75 million devices, 6x more app downloads per device

So how is Windows 10 doing? Microsoft has been rather tight lipped until now about the operating system's overall distribution and related figures. The only figure that Microsoft released was that Windows 10 was running on more than 14 million devices after the day the operating system launched.

Chrome defers media playback in background tabs

Google landed a new feature in Chromium and Chrome Dev today that will defer media playback in background tabs until those tabs are selected.

Depending on how you use web browsers, you sometimes may hear audio playing in the background, for instance when you load new tabs in the background or when you restore a browser session with dozens of tabs of which some include autoplaying media elements.

Videos may start to play automatically on those tabs, ads may play with media elements, or audio may start to play.

Calculate the Windows Experience Index on Windows 10 with ExperienceIndexOK

Microsoft introduced the Windows Experience Index in Windows Vista to benchmark the performance of the computer and compute base scores which customers could use to determine whether their device was fast enough to run software.

Scores ranged from 1.0 to 5.9 on Windows Vista and from 1.0 to 7.9 on Windows 7. While the test did benchmark and score individual components of the PC, for instance the graphics card or hard drive, a system's base score was always set to the lowest resulting subscore.

Word Safety checks words for unwanted meaning in foreign languages

One of the most difficult things when it comes to creating new websites or services is to find an appropriate name that sounds great.

Not only are all the good names taken usually, you also have to take connotation and meaning into account.

If that would not be difficult enough already, you need to make sure that the selected word or phrase has no negative meaning in foreign languages if you plan to make it available to a worldwide audience directly or at a later point in time.

Gog Galaxy 1.1 with rollback and new installation options

Everyone is on Steam it seems these days if they are gaming on PC but there are several other platforms available besides Steam. There is uPlay and Origin for instance which are managed by Ubisoft and EA respectively.

Gog is different from all these platforms as it does things quite different. Initially launched as a platform to resurrect old games so that they can be played on new versions of Windows, the service has evolved over time to become more than that.

Huawei P8 Lite Review

The Huawei P8 Lite is a mid-range phone that stays true to the overall style of Huawei's high-end P8 smartphone.

The unlocked device is priced at $249 in the US and at €249 in Europe. Included in the package is the phone, a micro USB cable, a wall charger, 3.5mm headset, and a quick start guide.

Please note that the specs of the device may differ based on the region it is offered in. The P8 Lite may run Android 4.4 or 5.0, and may be powered by an 8 core HiSilicon's Kirin 620 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC.

Fix Search not working in Windows 10

I have experienced a strange issue on a system running Windows 10 Pro in the past couple of days. Windows Search would suddenly stop working and return no result at all. As soon as I started typing a search term it would display the "searching" animation but no matter how long I waited, it would not stop and results would not be displayed anymore.

My first thought was that this had something to do with privacy tweaks that I applied but since search was working fine sometimes, it looked to be another issue.