Table of contents for October 2017 in Tech Advisor

Remember when Microsoft touted Windows Mobile during earnings calls? Now, Microsoft’s Windows Phone business is ‘immaterial’, while Office, Azure, and other cloud and services products continue to propel the company to profitability. In a small note during its second-quarter earnings report, Microsoft said its phone business had declined $361 million in revenue from a year ago, leading to the claim that the phone business was ‘immaterial’, or not enough to report to investors. It wasn’t enough that the firm’s More Personal Computing segment reported a revenue decline of 2 percent to $8.8 billion: chief financial officer Amy Hood also noted that phones caused a four-percent decline – in other words, Microsoft blamed phones for the company’s loss. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s mantra of “mobile first, cloud first” has been officially discarded. Chief…

1. Dark mode isn’t coming, so stop asking Google teased us with dark mode on both the Android N and O developer previews, but it’s not making it into the full release anytime soon. The reason? “Reliable and consistent theming is hard.” Numerous questions about themes and dark mode stacked up on the Reddit board, and Android engineer Alan Viverette addressed it thusly: “There are technical and logistical issues with theming. The technical side is largely solved in O with Runtime Resource Overlay support (a Sony framework that allows the system to modify the look and feel of an app while it is running); however, we still don’t have stable APIs for describing what can be themed or adequate ways to verify that existing applications properly support theming.” Instead Viverette…

My desire to power up a laptop with an external graphics card began in 2015, when I set out on a quest to get back into PC gaming – a beloved pastime I’d neglected since childhood. But the only PC I had at the time was a 2011 Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptop with Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics. That just won’t cut it for proper PC gaming. Sure, the laptop would work well enough for older titles such as Diablo III, especially on the laptop’s tiny 1366x728-resolution display, but forget about more graphics-intensive modern games on an external 1080p monitor. That’s why I decided to examine external graphics card (eGPU) setups. And indeed, I found entire communities of people creating DIY setups that connected desktop graphics cards to their laptops…

Windows 10 works best with more disk space. While it’s not optimal to run Windows 10 from a 16GB or even 32GB SSD, the OS has some tricks up its sleeve that allow it to run on devices with skimpy storage space, such as tablets. It’s not that painful once you take the proper steps. Live small and prosper Microsoft designed Windows 10 so that its own files could be reduced in size without using disk compression. The overhead of unpacking stuff reduces performance somewhat, but it can mean the difference between being able to work with the device you’ve got, and having to buy a new one. Compressing the Windows 10 files is simple: type CMD into the search windows field, right-click on CMD and run as administrator. Once…

No Windows 10 Creators Update for you, Microsoft says – at least, not if you happen to be the unlucky owner of certain older Atom-based Windows devices, and other aging models in the future. After stories arose of failed attempts to upgrade such hardware to the Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed recently that any hardware device that falls out of the manufacturer’s support cycle may be ineligible for future Windows 10 updates. In the case of the four ‘Clover Trail’ processors (part of the Cloverview platform) that have fallen into Intel’s End of Interactive Support phase, they will be ineligible for the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft confirmed. Instead, they’ll simply be offered the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, plus security updates through January, 2023, the end of the original Windows 8.1…

Microsoft Edge Let’s start with the easy one. Because Edge is built on the Windows Store platform, stopping it from asking for your location is simple. Open the Settings app and go to Privacy > Location. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen until you see the heading ‘Choose apps that can use your precise location’. Now just turn the slider next to Microsoft Edge to Off. Google Chrome In Google Chrome, click the menu icon (three vertical dots) to the right of the address bar. From the drop-down menu select Settings and the settings tab will open. At the bottom of this tab click Show advanced settings. Under ‘Privacy’ click Content settings to open a pop-up window. Scroll down in that window to the ‘Location’ section and click…

You never know when you’ll need a Windows recovery drive in order to restore your system to a pristine state, so the time to make one is now – and it’s very easy to do. A recovery drive is similar to the media you’d receive if you bought a prebuilt system. Back in the day, PCs would ship with a CD or DVD that included an image of the system as it left the factory. If your PC’s OS went sideways, you could easily restore it to the way things were on day one (though you’d lose all of your subsequently created data and applications, obviously). Nowadays manufacturers usually just put an image of the system as it left the factory on a hidden partition of your main drive. A…

When Intel’s next Core i9 CPU appears in a month or so, it may face some stiff competition in a battle people long thought was over: the Megahertz Wars. Although Intel hasn’t formally declared the clock speed of its upcoming 12-core Core i9-7920X, the company appears to have inadvertently disclosed it. A price list posted by the company in July shows the £910 Core i9-7920X with 16.5MB of cache, 12 cores, 24 threads, and a clock speed of 2.9GHz. Intel officials declined to comment to on the apparent slip. Intel’s price list typically lists the base clock or minimum clock speeds a CPU will run at under the heaviest workloads. In this case, the Core i9-7920X appears to guarantee an all-core clock speed that is 500MHz lower than AMD’s published…

There are some very good reasons why you might want to peer behind the scenes of your Windows PC. Maybe you want to tweak your system to maximize performance, or maybe you just want to know what your computer is doing underneath those slick desktop graphics. Either way, here are 12 free programs you can use to fully monitor and manage your Windows experience. 1. Belarc Advisor It’s tough to tweak your hardware and software settings without knowing your exact system composition to begin with. Belarc Advisor (tinyurl.com/y9pryg6b) tells you in detail all about your hardware, software, patch status, security settings, networking inventory, and more. If you’re dealing with a new system for the first time, running a Belarc report can give you vital information in one place that it…

Unlike the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t come with all of its online features baked directly into the console – you’ll need the official smartphone app to make the most of the console online. You can still play games with the console alone of course – including online multiplayer – but if you want to take advantage of more complex features such as voice chat, stat tracking, and more, you’ll need the app. Download the app The official Nintendo app is available for free for both Android and iOS devices, and you can download it directly from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Bear in mind that to use the app, you’ll need a Nintendo account, which is what will tie the app to…

For most people, Windows 10 was either a free upgrade or it came on your new PC or laptop. If you’re ever asked for a product key – during a clean install for example – here’s how to find it. Get product key If you upgraded from Windows 7 or 8, Windows 10 will have activated automatically after connecting to Microsoft’s servers online. You didn’t need to enter a product key as you were entitled to Windows 10 by virtue of having a genuine consumer copy of Windows 7 or 8. There are, however, a few instances where you’ll need your product key. If you’ve upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 and plan to upgrade your PC components, thus wiping your hard drive, you’ll need your Windows 10 product key.…