![]() What Is Microsoft's Grand Plan for Phones? It has been nearly two years since Microsoft introduced a new Windows phone. Sure, HP is still making Windows phones and marketing them to businesses, but Microsoft has been basically silent on the subject of its flagging mobile platform since 2. There have been zero flagship devices, despite the persistent rumors of a super Surface phone. Logic dictates that Microsoft needs to get in the game here. People are increasingly moving away from their laptops and onto their smartphones, and if Microsoft wants to keep up with Apple and Google, it will need a convincing phone platform. The company apparently has something in the works. According to Windows Central, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed as much on the Marketplace podcast Make Me Smart earlier this week.“I’m sure we’ll make more phones,” Nadella told host Molly Wood, “but they will not look like phones that are there today.”Let’s step back for a moment. Windows 1. 0 on a phone today has two things going for it. First, the interface is gorgeous—sleek and minimalist, without any of the cutesy affectations that i. OS and Android have collected over the years. Second, the phones function as mini PCs thanks to Continuum, so you can phone during the day and then dock it at your monitor and keyboard for a traditional PC experience at night. But the current version of Windows on mobile phones, Windows 1. Mobile, was introduced waaaaaay back in 2. Microsoft’s last flagship, the Lumia 9. Windows for a phone was already late to the scene when Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in 2. By then, Apple was a powerhouse with the i. This usually happens when who ever made your laptop never bothered to update the drivers to work with Windows 10. Scrolling features for the touch pad can (usually. Google for Jobs Could Save You Time on Your Next Job Search. Last week, Twitter’s security team purged nearly 90,000 fake accounts after outside researchers discovered a massive botnet peddling links to fake “dating” and. Sweet, this was really helpful. I've had a Windows 7 PC since Christmas now and was not able to print to my printer connected to my XP machine. Phone, and Google had forged a worthy competitor with great Android devices like the Motorola Droid. But Microsoft’s mobile look was so radically cool, it conceivably had a chance to be a true contender. At the time, even Gizmodo was enraptured. Only instead of radically disrupting the mobile phone market, Microsoft saw itself playing a distant third fiddle to the titans, Apple and Google. Everything really was different. Microsoft was accustomed to making the best- selling OS, and its failure to find its way into the lucrative mobile market left Microsoft scrambling. First there was the massive Windows 8 redesign that spanned mobile and desktop devices. Then Cortana came in 8. Windows phones a digital assistant to rival Siri. In 2. 01. 5, Microsoft introduced Continuum, which let phone users plug their devices into a monitor and keyboard and get a Windows experience similar to the one enjoyed by desktop users. But as cool as Microsoft’s attempts at competing have been, the company has failed to break into the elite mobile OS inner ring. By the time it arrived, users had already bought into the Android and i. OS ecosystems, and developers, who were already building apps for two mobile operating systems, had little desire to add a third, far less lucrative one to their roadmaps. Sure, the many iterations of Windows for phones looked nice enough, and had the backing of Microsoft, but its constant game of catch up with Apple and Google made the phones built for the platforms unappealing. That hasn’t changed, and it’s one of the reasons why, just last month, Android overtook Windows as the most installed OS in the world, according to one estimation. Hopefully, this two- year- long news void in the mobile phone market is the result of Microsoft working like hell to make something new. Microsoft can’t gain a measurable share of the smartphone market (and thus interest from app developers) without first making a product consumers really want to buy, and it can’t do that without wildly wowing us with hardware radically different than what the likes of Apple and Samsung currently provide. As we noted last year, smartphones have become universally so good they’re boring, and they’re also so expensive now, that people are moving away from the two- year purchase cycle. Microsoft not only has to make a great phone, it has to be a disruptive one—and there’s no clear path to such a device apparent in the stable of phones on the market. Such is the complexity of the modern-day computer, we could’ve written an article twice this size on any one of the categories listed below (look at any graphics.Get the latest science news and technology news, read tech reviews and more at ABC News. We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Get help for Windows Phone 8. Includes instructional videos, tips and tricks, FAQs, troubleshooting information, and more. It has been nearly two years since Microsoft introduced a new Windows phone. Sure, HP is still making Windows phones and marketing them to businesses, but Microsoft. ![]() In other words, Microsoft needs to blow our collective minds. So what would a future Windows phone look like? Ahead of Microsoft’s hardware event last week, we might have hoped for a cloud- based phone, but that dream was shuttered when the long- rumored Windows 1. Cloud was officially named Windows 1. S. Instead of being a window into the cloud computing future, Windows 1. S resembles lightweight Windows variations like Windows RT and Windows 8. Bing. It’s not cloud- based, but rooted in the computer and inextricably linked to Windows’ wasteland of an app Store. And that Store isn’t going to just improve overnight. As already noted, Microsoft needs a robust stable of developers in order to bring in mobile users, but developers want a large user base before they dedicate time and money to a platform. So Microsoft is left at a frustratingly cyclical impasse. Which means whatever we see is going to have to be so different, so wild, that neither developers nor consumers will care. Get cracking Microsoft. We’re ready for that Surface Phone. Share a Printer from XP to Windows 7. One common problem I have run into with clients is trying to share a printer connected to a Windows XP machine with Windows 7. There are lots of people out there that have USB connected printers attached to one computer, usually a Windows XP machine. If you get a new laptop running Windows 7, it makes sense to share that printer so that any computer can print to it. Unfortunately, trying to print to an shared printer on XP from Windows 7 is not as simple as it should be! In this article I will walk you through the steps for XP to Windows 7 printer sharing. I am assuming your printer is directly attached to a Windows XP machine and you want to print from a Windows 7 machine. Step 1: First make sure that the printer on the XP machine is shared. You can do this by right- clicking on the printer and choosing Sharing. Click the Share this printer radio button and give your printer a share name. Make sure is less than 8 characters and does not contain any symbols. Step 2: Make sure you can see the printer share from the network browsing area in Windows 7. You can do this by going to Control Panel and clicking on Network and Internet. Then click on View network computers and devices under Network and Sharing Center. At this point, you should see the name of your XP computer in the list of computers. Mine XP machine is called Aseem. Double- click on the computer name and you should see your shared printer in the list. Here you can try to add the printer by right- clicking on it and choosing Connect. If everything goes perfectly, Windows 7 should automatically add the printer to your set of printers. However, if you get a message like “Cannot connect to printer”, follow the next steps. Step 3: Click on Start and then click on Devices and Printers. At the top, click on the Add a printer link. Step 4: Next choose Add a local printer. Yes, that sounds counter- intuitive, but this is what you have to do! Step 5: Next, click Create a new port and choose Local port from the list of options. Step 6: Click Next and in the Port name box, type in the path to the shared printer. It should be something like \\Aseem\HPXP, where Aseem is the name of your XP machine and HPXP is the shared name of the printer. Step 7: Now choose the printer driver from the list or download the latest driver for the printer and choose Have Disk. Note that if you printer is a little older, it’s a good idea to download the Windows 7 driver for the printer and click Have Disk. That’s it! Windows 7 will load the driver and you’ll be able to print to the XP machine from Windows 7! The main things to remember are sharing the XP printer and downloading the latest driver for the printer on the Windows 7 machine. If you have any problems sharing your printer on XP and printing from Windows 7, post a comment here and I will try to help!
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