This is my work station area at Stardock when I'm working in the Object Desktop area of the company which is located on the third floor of the building. As you can see, I have 3 monitors connected to a Surface Pro.  The reason I'm up here is so that I can collaborate in person with the rest of my team.  And the reason for the Surface Pro is that I frequently use it as a tablet for sketching on screenshots and designs. The only downside is that the Surface Pro 7, while quite powe...

I love my Surface Pro.  It doesn't always love me.  This Summer, a firmware update caused the keyboard cover connector to not work anymore which forced me to use the Surface truly as a tablet.  It wasn't...a good experience. While I wasn't a fan of Windows 8, it was a pretty decent touch OS.  Windows 10...not so much.  A big part of the reason Windows 10 isn't good for touch is that it doesn't use the screen edges well. Windows 10, by default, has these touch-based...

One recent feature of Groupy that I appreciate is that I can now specify how long I keep one window on top of another to group them.  Originally, this was instant but I found myself often grouping windows when I didn't mean to.  I think I'll request a half second option just to be difficult. www.stardock.com/products/groupy    

Stardock will be releasing Start10 v1.75 today which, amongst other things, adds dark mode support.  Start10 is designed to bring the Windows 10 start menu the full power it traditionally had. I won't pretend to understand the UX team at Microsoft.  It will come as no surprise to those who have been following Microsoft and Stardock for the past twenty years that we've been pursuing often parallel visions of where the Windows desktop should go. When our visions diverge they tend to d...

I started out with BBSes back in the 80s. Fidonet and Usenet in the 90s. Forums and later Reddit. My first BBS was for the Commodore 64.   Where did you start?

I just got my new PC set up.  First new one in 3 years and it's a monster. I mostly got it for the Core i9 which has 18 cores.  The reason for this is, basically, I compile a lot.  Most of my programming involves AI coding and that means doing lots of recompiling and running.  I highly recommend 18 cores for most people as it's wasted. The other reason I wanted so many cores is for Nitrous/Cider work which is Stardock's new engine.  I want to make sure that As...

I want to tell you the story of a situation I ran into with a Google employee named Tab Atkins Jr. So what do you get if you combine a petty little man like Tab Atkins Jr. and a culture that promotes defaming people who don't share your ideology? The answer:  Manipulated search results to punish those they believe "deserve it". With the increasing evidence that Google  some employees have no problem trying to ruin the careers of those that they disagree with, it is not surprisin...

Got a Kindle Oasis.  I won’t bore you with a full on review because there’s a ton of reviews that basically say it’s wonderful but too expensive. It is a lot more expensive than the other Kindles but the screen is noticeably better thanks to having a more consistent series of lights and it is also noticeably lighter. If you do a lot of reading on the Kindle and you’re not price sensitive, get it.

How many times have you written something amazing in a forum editor only to have the page crash/disappear/self refresh? Just happened to me. I must have had a 3 page article I was writing regarding debugging technology just go poof as the forum page refreshed. GRRR.

I got the Dell 5K monitor. It’s only 27 inches but it’s just gorgeous.  I hooked it up to an NVIDIA 980TI and have been playing Ashes with it. Below is a screenshot I took that I lowered to a more reasonable resolution so you can see the extra detail you get when running at that resolution.               Recommended!

For some months users have complained about the Surface Pro 4 consuming several % per hour of CPU while sleeping.  In December, Microsoft indicated that they were working on the problem. In December, Intel released a driver update to their Skylake drivers. By default, these drivers won’t work on a Surface Pro.  However, users who download the .ZIP version, extract and then update the drivers via device manager can enjoy the benefits today.   The Results A...

Is Microsoft serious about its online media stores?   Movies & TV Let’s say you want to buy an episode of Rick & Morty.  This is what you get if you use the Microsoft store: No previews. No star ratings.  Not even movies get a star rating.  The little “i” brings up a barely formatted tooltip. How did this even ship? This is what the home page looks like:   Music Going over to music the situation is better....

My Microsoft Surface is a constant companion.  It is absolutely central to my workflow. One of the challenges I’ve had with it is battery life.  There’s a lot of things you can do to help with your battery life but one simple thing I’ve done, for now, is to set the max CPU when on battery to 99%.  Setting the max CPU to 99% prevents the CPU from going into Turbo mode.  For me, this accomplishes two things: (1) I get roughly an extra hour of battery ...

I love my Surface Pro 3.  Windows 10 has transformed it from something I occasionally fiddled with to my primary mobile device (replacing my iPad and MacBook Pro combo for trips). But it is, by no means, perfect. The weaknesses of the Surface Pro 3 include: It is almost 1.8 pounds.  That's really too heavy to use as a tablet for an extended period of time. While Windows 10 has greatly improved the issue of it getting hot and the fan blariung, the fact it has a fan means...

Does your laptop or tablet run out of battery while it’s supposed to be asleep? You can find out why thanks to a fairly obscure but relatively new feature in Windows. Step 1: Open a command prompt in adminstrative mode Step 2: Go to a temp directory (like cd\temp) Step 3: Type powercfig /SleepStudy This will create a file in the current directory.  Open that file in your web browser and you will find out why. Common causes: Notifications. Eve...