Day: December 11, 2017

OK, so it is available on Android… I will stick with Chrome!

Microsoft Edge on Android: Windows 10 browser spinoff clocks up million users

ZDNet – By: Liam Tung – “Just a week after coming out of preview, the Microsoft Edge app for Android has been downloaded at least a million times.

According to the Google Play Store, the Blink-based Microsoft Edge app has been downloaded between one million and five million times. The app has been available to testers for a while, but only reached preview in October before becoming generally available at the end of November.

The Microsoft Edge apps for iOS and Android aim to make Edge more appealing to use on Windows 10 by making it more convenient to sync the browsing experience across devices.

The app offers Microsoft’s ‘Continue on PC’, which allows users to pass a site, app, photos, and files from a phone to a Windows 10 PC.

Microsoft has also added a roaming passwords feature that allows users to save a password on the phone, which carries across to the PC, as well as a dark theme.

It’s likely to take a while for Edge app downloads to pass the five million milestone on Android, given that the app is only useful for the subset of Windows 10 users who actually use Edge on a PC.

While Windows 10 is now running over 500 million PCs, Edge currently only has a 3.6 percent share of desktops worldwide, according to NetMarketShare.

So anything Microsoft can do to boost appeal of Edge on the PC will be helpful in convincing more users to make the switch, either from Chrome or Internet Explorer 11.

It’s also working to expand the number of Edge extensions, which over a year after Microsoft enabled them now numbers 80.”

Do you have an HP notebook? If so, you may want to get the latest patch from HP! For the second time this year HP has announced that some of the “bloatware” that it puts on its systems before they are sold included a key logger that can lead to you losing your personal data or compromising your system.

This is another good reason that I wipe a system and reinstall the operating system when I get a new computer! Too many vendors that get paid for putting all this junk on the system before goes out the door have this junk on the PC that just slows it down! In this case, it’s actual malware! This is getting out of hand! Let’s fight bloatware!

HP systems that have this problem include HP G2 Notebooks, the HP Elite x2 1011 G1 tablet, HP EliteBooks, HP ProBooks and HP ZBook models, among others.

So, another good reason to keep your systems patched, whether by the vendor, or your standard operating system patches. We live in a really strange world!

Are you ready for a good tip about your Internet connection? This is going to sound really weird! But, think about it, your Internet router is actually just a computer. It may be running a proprietary operating system, it may be based on Linux, who knows? In any case, computers don’t run forever without running into an error. And, what do you do when a computer encounters an error? You restart it! So, the best thing you can do is occasionally restart your router on a regular, controlled, basis! Say, every month or so. If you do it in a planned fashion, you won’t be caught off guard when your router quits working.

I know this sounds silly, but if you make it part of your regular computer maintenance, like doing your backups and keeping a backup off-site (and I know you do that, right?) Then, your Internet connection will be solid and life will be good… Because we all need a good Internet connection, it is a function of life! Or, at least it is in these modern days… Am I right?