operating

Windows XP refuses to give up its top spot without a fight.

The decade-old OS has slowly been losing more users to Windows 7, but January marked a small resurgence in its grip on the market, according to stats out today from NetApplications.

For the month, Windows XP grabbed 47.19 percent of all OS users, inching up from 46.5 percent in December. At the same time, Windows 7 saw its market share dip to 36.4 percent from almost 37 percent the previous month.

Obviously, a fraction of a percentage point is nothing for XP to crow about, … Read more

Arcade Hoops Basketball mimics the arcade quickshot basketball machines you might find at a pizza place or a fair, but with this app it's all about swiping your shots to the basket. Once you start the game, your job is to swipe upwards toward the basket and sink as many shots as you can in 45 seconds. The power of your shot is affected by how much you swipe so it takes a little bit of practice before you'll be hitting shots consistently.

Arcade Hoops Basketball comes with three game modes. The classic 45 second contest mentioned above, … Read more

One of the more widespread malware efforts over the past few years was the DNSChanger scam, which installed a Trojan horse that would change the DNS server settings on affected computers to divert traffic to rogue servers.

The DNS system is essentially the Internet's phone book that allows your computer to resolve a URL to the IP address of the server that hosts its contents. By changing a computer so that it uses a rogue DNS server, the DNSChanger malware was thus able to redirect valid URLs (such as those for banking institutions) to malicious Web sites in order … Read more

PARIS--Free, a French company that already shook up the Internet service provider business here, just shook up the mobile phone service business, too.

Last week, Chief Executive Xavier Niel took to Twitter to announce a service plan that gets subscribers unlimited calls, unlimited text and picture messages, and data transfer of up to 3GB per month, after which download rates are throttled.

One big departure is the price: 20 euros per month, or $25.45. An even bigger departure: there's no long-term contract. And free international calls (though only to some countries, and not with cheap international roaming) … Read more

Apparently, Nokia isn't content with just two mobile operating systems.

The Finnish handset giant scooped up Smarterphone, a small Norwegian company that has an operating system designed for more basic cell phones, known in the industry as feature phones. The acquisition was disclosed by Smarterphone's Nordic investor parent, Ferd Capital.

A Nokia representative confirmed the acquisition but declined to comment further on what it means for the company.

This operating system would sit alongside Microsoft's Windows Phone platform, which is meant for high-end smartphones, and Nokia's own Symbian platform, which is now intended for lower-end devices … Read more

Samsung is still the biggest maker of mobile phones, but Apple is gaining ground, according to data released today by market researcher ComScore.

Samsung accounted for 25.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers for the three months ending November 11, a slight increase of 0.3 percent over the previous three months. While Apple came in fourth with 11.2 percent, its 1.4 percent increase was the greatest market share increase for the previous three months.

Samsung and Apple were the only mobile phone makers in the top 5 to boost their share of the market during that … Read more

People frustrated by the upgrade and setup process in prior versions of Windows may find a more user-friendly experience in Windows 8.

Ensuring that Windows installs properly across a variety of hardware and software configurations has always been a major challenge, and one that Microsoft has never solved to the satisfaction of all users.

Microsoft has already taken some big steps forward in this respect with Windows 7. Its next version of Windows promises further improvements, as described in the latest edition of the Building Windows 8 blog by Christa St. Pierre from Microsoft's setup and deployment team:

Google removed the "+" operator from searches a few weeks ago, but the replacement hasn't been received with open arms.

According to Google, the plus operator was being used incorrectly and was used in a very small amount of searches. In its place, double quotation marks were implemented and seen as operators that would be used more efficiently. However, a lot of users were not excited by this alternative.

To please the masses, Google is rolling out another way to make sure you're searching for something worded in the exact way that you typed it in: meet … Read more

Designing Windows 8 for virtually any device from smartphone to PC, Microsoft says it's had a key goal in mind for all hardware platforms--energy efficiency.

With laptops and mobile devices slurping up battery power and desktops and servers chewing up electricity, Microsoft has wanted to ensure that any device running Windows 8 can tap into better power management.

"Very small changes done well in Windows can result in very large positive environmental impact because of our scale," Pat Stemen, a program manager on Microsoft's Kernel team, said in the latest Building Windows 8 blog. "In … Read more