Technology Ramblings

Today - December 17, MS released it's second Cumulative Update to Windows 10 Mobile build 10586.  This one is called 10586.36.    As I mentioned in my original November 18 post on Windows Mobile 10 - there appeared to be a lot of last minute releases and while I did not really experience any problems with my Lumia 635s & 735 - obviously some folks did and it also appears there were a few issues with the new 950/950XLs as well.. So first there was 10586.11, then 10586.29 and now 10583.36.  Also the expected release of Windows 10 Mobile to non Windows Insiders has also been delayed until January... So what's going on ? To be honest I'm not 100% sure.  But I have a few thoughts about this issue. As I mentioned I had no issue with any of the above mentioned builds on my Lumia 3x series devices.  All downloaded and installed with no issues and I had no problems with either.  As with regular Windows 10 - MS has been pretty tight lipped about what the fixes are - so no

I recently took advantage of an MS Holiday offer and purchased Office 365 Home for my family for $89 for 1 year.  For years and years I relied on my TechNet subscription (which I still truly miss) to allow me to install MS Operating Systems and Applications on my various test and home machines.   I wanted to keep my families systems current and wanted to get them to Office 2016 - which I had been running various evaluation builds up until it's release this October.  But I knew the evaluation periods were running out and I needed to address this.. To me I think this bundle is one of the best values that MS has.  I've stated many times that versus going out and buying 5 copies of MS Office at some $400 / copy - the Office365 Home approach of paying $89 or $99 / year for all 5 PCs, plus all iOS and Android devices and 1TB of OneDrive space per user just cant be beat.  I also like the flexibility of the annual subscription.  If for some reason I want to change I can just stop

On Dec 16, MS began the public testing of the next Windows 10 Branch codenamed Redstone with the release of build 11082 to Fast Ring testers. As I suspected back on November 7 with the final release of the Threshold branch 10586 - that there would be a few weeks break.  So it ended up being 5 weeks but here we are... As has been the case through the later releases of TH2 - the Redstone 11082 build showed up quickly in Windows update and installed with out issue on my desktop, laptop and tablet devices.    From all appearances MS has gotten the build deployment and update process down cold.  And considering what a user used to have to go through to update a Windows version - this new process is completely painless.    The machine I am writing this post on has been under continuous upgrade for over a year - so maybe 20+ builds and I've never had a serious problem.  The only change that I ever needed to make was to update the video card to support WDDM 2.0 and DirectX 12.  I a