As stated before Windows 8 is an operating system that looks to turn your computer into a machine more like a tablet at times.  Even if it’s a laptop or a desktop PC it pushes the touch screen environment on the users and even gives them the ability to use apps that are based on the tablet model.  This has positive elements (such as the Smartglass integration with the Xbox) and negatives, like the initial strange learning curve when it comes to using the user interface.

Windows 8 a…

Visual Studio 2012 is a very good tool to use when creating websites, especially ones that use Microsoft’s coding languages such as C#.  When testing these websites it’s almost essential that testing is done in all browsers that you want to guarantee as usable with that site.  From experience I’m sure you know that although browsers do follow the same standards there are many times that things look different, or even break.

One of the least found problems now of course is the dread…

In Windows 8 you have the two modes, which are the new tablet interface and the desktop (unless you are running on only RM which does not feature this).  You’ll notice that when you are running tablet applications you tend to get quite a list (which you can find by moving your finger, or mouse to the left hand side of the screen).

It’s possible to switch between these, even though this is regarded as the “application history” because although the fact it’s called a history makes yo…

With Office 2013 there are lots of updates that users just can’t wait to play with.  One of these is the option to view and edit PDF files in Word 2013.  As you may know there are other free options that you can use to edit PDF files, and of course Abode’s own viewer to just view the file and edit it, but it’s still a nice feature to be finally open up a PDF in an editable version.

There are going to be downsides to the ability to edit the PDF files of course, there is a conversion…

Using Windows 8 you learn something new every day, this is either luck or the fact that Microsoft have hidden shortcuts into the operating system and they are not intuitive to find out.  There are examples of some things that should be easy to find are in fact hidden away.  This can be annoying, but it’s also just a case that it’s down to the design of the system.

Shutting down the Operating System is one of those problems, to get to it you have to go through the right hand menu on…

If there is one thing people notice when they load up Windows 8 it’s the lack of DVD/Blu-ray player software.  This is quite a puzzle as to why Microsoft chose to do this, we can guess of course as there are reasons like the fact that Windows 8 is designed for tablets and won’t have an optical drive but the fact is that a lot of Windows users will still be puzzled by this and will look for ways to get playback back.

If you want to move away from Microsoft’s software then this is po…

The technological world wants us to move away from the mous and keyboard as a user interface and move into the era of the touch screen.  This is ok, however, time does move on but until everybody moves with the times and gets with the touch interface we’ll still have the mouse, keyboard and other devices that keep us productive.  There will be some people (quite a few) that will stick with this way to work with their computers because part of the work they do just won’t work with just a …

Now that Office 2013 is coming there are some nice additions to the tools that we can play with.  With Outlook 2013 it’s possible to personalise your experience and make it much friendlier to you, this includes connecting through your social networks to add faces to the people who email you and contact you.

What is nice about this feature is that if you connect to LinkedIn for example you will be able to retrieve their image and use it to personalise their emails even without havin…

With windows 8 just being released I decided to do a fairly basic how-to that would look at the new start menu interface showing how you can become comfortable with it.  It’s a known fact that the menu as we know it has now gone and we have a replacement that is an actual screen of tiles where you select what you want to use.  This is to make it more useful on tablets, but still make it easy to use on a normal desktop/laptop system.

The interface can be quite jarring at times if yo…

Playing around with Windows 8, I’ll admit I’m the geekier tech minded user.  I love to see stats about usage, how good the system is working and just how it can be improved.  That is why under the hood of Windows 8 there are some pretty interesting tools to allow you to see just what is going on.  One of these things is the redesigned Task Manager.

Using Windows 8 on a desktop computer is a strange experience at times, it’s obvious that it’s been designed to run on a tablet or at l…