Technology Ramblings

At its annual WinHEC conference - this year in Shenzhen, China - Microsoft focused on three major areas.. The first was Mixed Reality.   From Hololens to new low cost VR/AR headsets from the likes of Dell, HP, Acer, Asus and others - MS is making a big push into this space.  Expect to see $199 VR headsets become readily available by summer of 2017.   In the PC space - MS is clear leader in the AR/VR space and with an additional focus on 3D related apps from Paint to Print can provide an end-to-end experience.  It is still to early to tell - but VR/AR may truly be the next killer app for the PC that will sustain it well into the future. This dovetails into the gaming front - where the focus is on control, speed and 4K video.  There where no killer announcements at WinHEC - but MS did spend some time with their major partner Intel regarding project EVO which is a multi-year efforts to improve CPU, GPU, Real Sense (i.e Windows Hello), etc. The biggest annou...

On Dec 7, MS released Windows 10 Build 14986 to Fast Ring Insiders.  This was a PC only build. This build contained the largest number of changes and fixes of any Redstone 2 or Creators Update to date. From Cortana to Windows Defender to USB Audio, Ink and Edge Extensions - there were 8 new features announced and some 25+ fixes.   There was also a large focus on Asian language and input methods support. It had been nearly 3 weeks since the last release build 14971 back on Nov 17 and so to see such a large list of new capabilities was not overwhelmingly surprising but still a nice group. One of the reasons for the delay was a focus toward the new UUP update method which is designed to reduce download and update times. Unfortunately for me and many others - according to the Feedback Hub it was not a smooth update.    I am currently using two test machines - a traditional desktop PC and an 8" tablet.   Both experienced issues. With both devices, the...

On Dec 1, MS released Windows 10 Build 14977 to Fast Ring Insiders.  This build was focused for Mobile only. While MS did call out that some devices with only 8GB of RAM may experience errors - the update downloaded and installed fine on my Lumia 735 test device that only has 8GB of RAM. The update is relatively small.   The main feature update was similar to 14971 for PC in that epub documents could be read in Edge.   There were an additional 13 fixes called out that mostly address notifications, alarms, and some 3rd party music apps. I was not experiencing the errors called out - so can't report on those directly.  I have been experiencing some pain with the Bluetooth stack in that it would hang up from time to time and not display it's paired devices. Toggling BT on/off would not correct the problem and typically required a reboot to correct. All in all from a daily usage standpoint, I've really seen little if any difference in performance, capability with...