Kevin's Blog

 In the last blog post I looked at how-to get your hands on the new Start menu layout in Windows 11 by utilising the Dev build from the Windows Insider Programme and then using the Vivetool to enable the feature. Now lets take a look at the new view and what it has to offer.  The new view option allows you to view your entire app list on the same screen as your pinned apps. The new menu now includes the category view, which if selected groups your apps automatically, these are: Productivity - Edge, Office etc Utilities & Tools - apps like phone link, and utilities like snipping tool, calculator Games - anything Xbox Creativity - camera and any creative apps like Clipchamp, photos and paint  Information & Reading - RSS readers, weather, news  Other - anything else it cant categorize! To get the new view go to the highlighted view menu and choose Category.  These groups are categorised by AI, so at present you cannot change the names of the groups. How...

 You know it was back in the days of Windows 3.11 and Office 95 that I first started training staff at our local council.  My how things have come along since then.  We used to photocopy screen shots on to acetate and use the traditional Overhead Project to project against the end wall in the training room!    Over the years I have delivered more and more sessions and always thought about how much people retain once they have left the room.  I know teachers as soon as they get back to the classroom probably have forgot my name and the majority of the content!    To rectify this  we have developed a low cost training solution aimed a schools and business who are focused on the Microsoft toolset. E-training is nothing new ! I have not reinvented the wheel in anyway however I think we can now effectively back up in person training for hard pressed staff members and also allow then to curate there own training at a super affordable price !  ...

 There is some interesting stuff happening in the Windows Insider channel at the moment.  We have recently the Dev channel branch to Build 26200, and this brings the first look into Windows 25H2 or perhaps we would call Windows 12? The Windows Start menu in  Windows 11 , appeared first in the extremely short lived Windows 10X as a simplified Start Menu allowing you to get you into your stuff quicker (not my words!). This features the area you could pin apps that you use regularly and a recommended section of the documents and things you were working on (your stuff), this moved away from the hybrid Start Menu with Live tiles which was a mix of Windows 7 and Windows 8 combined into Windows 10. Microsoft has started looking at the Start Menu layout in the latest Dev build of Windows 11, and remember these channel builds are not guaranteed to make the final cut of Windows 11. So I though it would be a good moment to take a look at what is coming down the line! To get the new ...

There is a very important date coming down the line in 2025, and that is the End of Support for Windows 10 on October 14th. After that date, Windows 10 will not receive critical updates and security updates, making your Windows 10 device a security loophole  in your organisation if you don't take action now. Windows 10 has launched on 29th July 2015, back in the heady days where we carried around a Windows Phone! It was an important OS that took us from the heady days of Windows 8 and 8.1 and developed into a mature OS that became the backbone of Windows 11. Again, Microsoft initially did not get everything right with Windows 10, including a bi-annual release, but there were some great features and a nice clean UX, which reflected the fact that we were not all using touch and tablets at the time (which is where Windows 8 had its focus). But as of today, Windows 10 will be a non-supported OS in October, and I wanted to talk about the "cost of doing nothing" and, of course,...

Microsoft announced yesterday a significant addition to the Copilot+PC range with the new Surface Pro 11th edition and Surface Laptop 7th edition supporting the Intel Core Ultra 2 chipset. This brings Intel into the Copilot+PC specification alongside Qualcomm. A significant improvement? Yes, the previous chipset used in the Surface Pro 10 and Laptop 6 was Intel's Meteor Lake chipset, while having a Nueral Processing Unit built in it would only achieve 11 TOPS, meaning it fell short of being a Copilot+PC standard. Therefore, this meant these devices did not get the full functionality of Windows 24H2 when released. Improvements in Core Ultra 2 (Lunar Lake) are a NPU up to 48 TOPS, improved power efficiency, and the highly talked-about Intel Arc graphics, and with 12 cores instead of 8 and a clock speed of 5.2 GHz, really lands Core Ultra 2 in the Copilot + PC standard. The new Surface Pro 11th Edition now contains a choice for the user, either Intel or Snapdragon, and each will have ...

Spoiler alert: this is an enthusiast post!  Always keen to see how you can get the best from old tech?, I dug out my gen 1 Surface Go device.  This was an 8 GB model with the faster Intel Gold processor. It came orginally with Windows 10S; I upgraded that to 10 Pro, as most people did, and then finally to Windows 11. First Stop Ubuntu Now it did run Windows 11 but as expected not amazingly fast, good enough for some web browsing and using Office Online. So I looked for some alternatives: Linux, of course, had to be a great choice to start with; I chose Ubuntu, as this is a mainstream distro. Once installed I updated the Surface Kernel through Github and even got my Surface pen to work!  I could install Microsoft Edge, sync to my M365 account and all was good.    By using Microsoft Edge, I could create a Progressive Web App (PWA) of any web page and have it behave like an application. Second stop: Windows 10X Next I tried going back to Github and found the projec...