Category: MSFT

  • Five myths about Apple’s tax avoidance

    Tuesday’s hearing on Apple’s tax avoidance schemes made for pretty good Washington, D.C. theater. Apple CEO Tim Cook was friendly and forthcoming and most of the senators went out of their way to proffer their love of Apple products. So I doubt the hearing will help advance the much needed cause of corporate tax reform…

  • Yikes, Microsoft’s Time Machine clone leaves out tons of important stuff

    (Updated to include a way to unhide files and add them to a “library” for backup) Basically, this post is a warning to anyone using the new File History backup program in Windows 8. The program is severely limited because it will only back up files in a few preset locations that can’t be expanded.…

  • One of these things is not like the other: Apple store, Microsoft store

    I was an hour early for dinner with fabulous wife Whitney Connaughton and friends last Friday so I thought I’d tool around the local Apple store for a bit. The Back Bay Apple store in Boston is a thing of beauty — and it only took two years to get Boston’s historical commission to approve…

  • Microsoft has great news for retina display Mac users

    One of the biggest problems for Mac users wanting to upgrade to a retina display has just been resolved. Microsoft issued version 14.2.4 of its super popular Office suite today expressly to include support for the higher resolution display. That means millions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint users on the Mac can now safely upgrade…

  • A Mac user’s travels in Ultrabook land

    I spent the long weekend with my family tooling around Cape Cod, which ended up offering two unexpected opportunities to sample the latest and greatest light weight laptops, or ultrabooks as they’re known, in Windows land. My 13″ MacBook Pro is getting near replacement age and I’m keeping an open mind so far about which…

  • Reality Bites: DOJ takes down Apple, publishers ebook defenses

    Since the Department of Justice stood up for fans of digital books a few months ago and sued the major publishers and Apple over their 2010 conspiracy to raise prices, the amount of whining, spin and flat out lies emanating from some of the publishers and Apple has been both impressive and depressing. That so…

  • New version of Civ? New Windows box

    Well, it happens every four or five years and it’s happening again. Firaxis is about to release a new version of the extremely fun and highly addictive computer game Civilization (Civ V, if you must know) and so we need to build a new Windows PC. It could be months or even years before the…

  • New AppleTV may be great but it solves nothing

    “I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.” Steve Jobs gives great gadget and he was in fine form on Wednesday…

  • Apple makes deleting a Boot Camp partition super easy

    A couple of years back, when I upgraded the hard drive on my then-new Macbook Pro, I used Apple’s incredible Boot Camp software to install Windows Vista. Using Boot Camp, you’re not just simulating running Windows under Mac OS X — you can actually boot up into “pure” Windows on your Apple hardware. The only…

  • How much old software do you really need to save?

    Even after the great closet clean-out of December, 2007, my closet is still kinda full. Well, very full actually. One of the things it’s full of is old software program disks and manuals. In this corner, we have the game Master of Orion II for Macs, issued in the mid-1990s. That’s fine as there’s also…