Microsoft Windows - page 16

How crappy are Windows PCs these days? The most reliable, best performing, highly rated laptop for running Windows on is a frickin’ Mac: specifically, a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13. That’s the conclusion of a new report released by Soluto, purveyors of a cloud-based PC monitoring and management software suite, sampling data gathered for the first three months of 2013 from 150,000 portable PCs, and awarding them a score according to how many times programs on average crashed or hung, how long it took to boot up, how many background processes were running, and how many times it BSODed (or completely crashed).

As ZDNet’s Ed Bott points out, the laptops that were determined to be most reliable were the ones that ran clean installs of Windows, instead of bloatware-infected OEM installs. And surprise, every Mac running Boot Camp must use a clean install of Windows, making it the king.

Jeez, PC makers. This is just sad.

Source: Soluto

Our last “name your own price bundle” performed so well that we’re bringing a second one to our Cult of Mac readers. And once again we’ve delivered 10 top Mac Apps for a price that only you can name with The Name Your Own Price Bundle 2.0!

That’s right. You pay what you want for 3 different Mac Apps that will make you faster and more efficient on your Mac including: HoudahSpot, Elmedia Player Pro, and PhotoBulk. And, if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Snapz Pro X, CrossOver XI, DiskTools Pro, Gemini, Mac Blu-Ray Player, Musictube, and Paperless.

We’ve chosen three charities, Child’s Play, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons, that we believe make a significant positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help one of those charities – whichever one you choose!

There are plenty of Mac users out there that need (or want) to have a Windows OS installed on their trusted machine as well. The problem is that with the Windows environment comes a greater risk of infection from spyware, malware, and viruses. The Mac isn’t impervious to these, either, but when you’re trying to protect both sides of your Mac it can be a daunting – or expensive – task.

This Cult of Mac Deals offer makes it that much easier to do because we’ve got Bitdefender up for grabs – and for only $40!

Our last “name your own price bundle” performed so well that we’re bringing a second one to our Cult of Mac readers. And once again we’ve delivered 10 top Mac Apps for a price that only you can name with The Name Your Own Price Bundle 2.0!

That’s right. You pay what you want for 3 different Mac Apps that will make you faster and more efficient on your Mac including: HoudahSpot, Elmedia Player Pro, and PhotoBulk. And, if you pay more than the average price, you’ll also receive Snapz Pro X, CrossOver XI, DiskTools Pro, Gemini, Mac Blu-Ray Player, Musictube, and Paperless.

We’ve chosen three charities, Child’s Play, World Wildlife Fund, and Creative Commons, that we believe make a significant positive impact across the globe. 10% of your entire purchase will go to help one of those charities – whichever one you choose!

We’ve all seen those fake iOS devices that are being made in China, but did you know that Apple’s App Store is being cloned there, too? A service called KuaiYong, which means “use quickly” in Chinese, according to MIC Gadget, lets iPhone and iPad users download and install pirated iOS apps without jailbreaking.

The service has been around for almost a year, so how has it gone unnoticed for so long?

There may not be a lot of agreement on whether or not Mac sales are up or down right now, but one thing’s for sure: the overall PC market is dying, with the latest quarter seeing the largest overall contraction in PC sales in the last two decades.

That’s not to say you can’t make a lot of profit still selling PCs, but as the chart above proves, profit is no longer linked to volume… and as they do in the smartphone and tablet markets, Apple owns the largest share of the profit to be had.

EA and Maxis have today announced that their latest SimCity game is coming to the Mac on June 11, and pre-purchasing will begin tomorrow, April 11. The title will be available to download through Origin for Mac — which launched earlier this year — and those who have already bought the title on PC will get the Mac version for free.

This Cult of Mac Deals offer has something for every Mac user out there. Whether you’re trying to find files faster, take better notes, enable more effective window management, or level up your contact organization, The Mac Variety Bundle 3.0 has got you covered.

The bundle includes 9 top Mac apps – apps that are valued at $434 – and now you can get all them for an incredibly low price of just $42!

Google Now, the intelligent personal assistant that was introduced to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean last June, appears to be gearing up to make its debut on iOS. The feature will be integrated into the Google Search app for iPhone and iPad, according to a promotional video that was allegedly posted to Google’s official YouTube channel prematurely — before quickly being pulled again.

This review is slightly unusual: We already published a review of the same device a couple of weeks ago: the Logitech Easy-Switch keyboard. I liked the look of it so much that — on Killian’s recommendation — I went out and bought one of my own. Or rather, I bought one, returned one and searched the internet high and low for another one.

So why the “duplicate” review? Because I use a keyboard in a different way than Killian. Where he sits at the dining room table surrounded by iDevices and Macs, I work not only in different rooms but in bars (cafes), on buses, wherever I might be. So I figured I’d write a very different review.

Interested?

Wish you could access your computer located a thousand miles away?

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Firefox 19 is now available to download to your Mac, introducing the long-awaited PDF viewer that will allow you to open PDF files within the browser — rather than downloading them to open them in Preview. The release hasn’t yet hit Mozilla’s website, but you can get your hands on it by visiting the company’s servers.

Skype has today launched its new Video Messaging service on Android, iOS, and Mac. Available to those in the United States and the United Kingdom initially, the feature allows users to send their friends videos up the three minutes long when they have a lot to say.

Intuit has today released QuickBooks Online for the iPad, a free app that allows QuickBook subscribers to manage their customers, invoices, estimates, and expenses on the go. Intuit’s customers have been increasingly turning to mobile devices to manage their finances, so its new iPad app is sure to be a big hit.

We’ve been hoping for a quick and painful death to Flash for a while now. It’s been slowly coming, but we’re getting closer to the day of no longer needing the crash crazy, disease injecting plugin.

Flash is still everywhere though even if you don’t want it to be, and it’s still causing problems. Adobe announced yesterday that they’re releasing an emergency patch for Patch player to fix vulnerabilities that are being exploited to install malware on Apple’s Macintosh platform.

Yesterday, we spent some time with Terminal commands that tweak the Finder in different ways. Today, we’ll look at some commands you can issue in the Terminal to mess around with the user interface. Let’s get started.

The upcoming evasi0n jailbreak that will will allow users to hack iOS devices running Apple’s latest iOS 6.1 firmware has been completed for Mac and Windows ahead of its public release. The team behind it the exploit confirmed the update on Twitter this morning. All that remains is the Linux client and “some testing.”

EA’s Origin platform is finally making its way to the Mac, starting with an open alpha release that’s available to download from today. Although it’s open to the public, only “a few thousand users” in North America and the United Kingdom will gain access to it, according to EA — those who get in will be gifted a free copy of Bookworm, a popular word-puzzle game from PopCap.

Earlier this month, Melinda Gates told an interviewer in the U.K. that “of course” her kids asked for iPods for Christmas, but the Gates won’t give their children Apple products because “the wealth from our family came from Microsoft so why would we invest in a competitor?”

This isn’t the first time Melinda Gates has piped up on the subject of giving her children Apple products. Two years ago, Melinda Gates took part in another interview in which she said that she had “gotten [the] argument” that her children should be allowed to have an iPod. She said that her response was to say, “You may have a Zune.”

Today, the FOX Business Network did an interview with Bill Gates, in which he says his children have never asked for an Apple product in their lives. Ever! Someone’s lying.

There has been a lot of talk over the last few weeks about how Apple is failing. That the iPhone isn’t cool anymore, and that basically Apple is just too old and stubborn to be successful.

We won’t know until tomorrow how many iPhone 5s were sold last quarter, or if there’s any truth to the claims that Apple is stumbling, but if Verizon’s financial report is any indication, Apple’s probably doing just fine right now.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system is often mocked for its blue screen of death, the dreaded error message that appears on an all-too-often basis when attempting to work the computer too hard. And now it seems the company’s Windows Phone platform has a nasty error message of its own.

This particular error message, spotted on the HTC 8X, rather hilariously asks you to “insert your Windows installation disk” and “repair your computer” to continue.

This is the biggest bundle of designer assets Cult of Mac Deals has ever featured, so whether you’re a designer or developer these vector sets and elements, t-shirt designs, Illustrator styles, Photoshop add-ons, texture packs, HTML5 templates, and more will save you hours of work over a lifetime of use. So – simply put – The Super Holiday Designer Bundle more than pays for itself.

This is a truly unique and exclusive bundle from Designious, DesignTNT and Vectorious that contains over 2,600 resources worth $5,158. It includes much more than just Holiday design, and now you can get it exclusively for $49!

One frustrating aspect of Boot Camp is that it doesn’t support hard drives larger than 2.2TB. That means that if you custom install a larger hard drive, or order a new iMac with a 3TB hard drive, you won’t be able to use all of that space to run Windows. Luckily, there’s now a partial fix, thanks to the developer of Winclone.

If you pop into your local Microsoft store and ask for a demonstration of Windows 8, there’s a chance the store assistant will disappear and send over an 11-year-old child to help you. That’s what the company is doing in Portugal in an effort to prove its new operating system is so intuitive, even a child can use it. Either that or it’s taking advantage of cheap child labor.

Following the launch of Windows 8 and the Surface RT, Microsoft’s head of Windows, Steven Sinofsky, abruptly left the company. Some assumed Sinofsky would become the next CEO so it left many to wonder about the fate of Windows 8 and the approach they will take to software in the future.

Julie Larson-Green has been tapped to replace Sinosky and she’s started her reign by talking to the media about what makes Windows 8 special. While many view Windows 8 and the Surface RT as responses to the iPad’s popularity, Larson-Green claims that Microsoft totally didn’t even think about the iPad and iOS when designing Windows 8.