Have you ever noticed that your entire music collection which you cherished for the past decade got encrypted by ransomware, immediately you click on a link in a spam mail or when you try activating macros in a malicious document? Have you also been told to pay a sum of $500 or more to get the decryption code? If yes, you are also among the 200,000 victims across 150 countries. Businesses, organizations and individuals are still trying to handle this rising terrifying virus, this has left millions of people worried if they are at risk of this ransomware. However, many still have questions such as what is ransomware? What effects does it have? How can one get this ransomware? And many more. Questions such as these will be answered here and solutions to curb this will also be offered.

If you have multiple PC's, downloading the Windows 10 Anniversary update as an ISO would save internet bandwidth costs and time. Here are direct ISO download link of the update Windows 10 build.

Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Update is out now as scheduled and is being rolled out to users via Windows Update in phases, if you don't want to wait for the auto-update here is how to get the after manually - right now.

I had earlier shared a trick on how to get rid of repeated and intrusive annoying Windows 10 upgrade prompts from Microsoft on Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines, but Micrsosoft seems to be getting more aggressive trying to push Windows 10 to Windows 7 and 8.1 users and it is getting harder for users to prevent the upgrade from getting installed automatically.

Responding to the significant user displeasure regarding the tactics used to push down the major OS upgrade down the throats of Windows users, Microsoft added features to its Windows Update facility which allowed it to be configured and not forcibly upgrade qualifying Windows 7 and 8.1 operating systems to Windows 10. However, Microsoft did not make this configuration simple. It requires the use of the group policy editor (which is not present in some qualifying systems) and/or the system registry. In other words, they created some deep internal configuration options but chose not to provide a simple user-interface to give their users the choice. Freeware utility Never10 allows users use the very same configuration in a simple to use manner. A single click is all it takes to "opt-out" from the Windows 10 upgrade prompts the Microsoft recommended way. The elegance of this “Never 10” utility, is that it does not install ANY software of its own.

Microsoft has scheduled an event in New York City on October 6, 2015 for unveiling it's new range of devices which includes the new Surface Pro 4 tablet, Band 2 wearable and new Lumia flagships phones running Windows 10. A set of leaked slides have made way onto the internet unveiling specs and features of the new devices, the leaked slides are supposed to be used by Microsoft to train staff in Mexico preparing for the launch event.

Apart from the specs of new Windows 10 phones, the leaked slides also shows an interesting new feature, the "Continuum Display Dock". The dock will enable support for the 'Phone Continuum' feature which allows the user to connect a keyboard and mouse to the handset, and then connect the handset to a display - turning the phone into a full-fledged Windows 10 PC, complete with familiar desktop user-interface. The idea is nothing new and was earlier introduced in Ubuntu Edge which failed to get beyond the concept phase, it now seems Microsoft is getting ahead in the "PC-Mobile Convergence" battle between the two popular operating-systems.

With Windows 10 Microsoft has changed a lot of things and one of them is to not offer direct links to ISO downloads of the OS, when visiting the official Windows10ISO download page all you are offered is the option to download the "Media Creation Tool" which helps a user to create installation media but requires an active internet connection and restarts the whole process if interrupted in between. But here's a trick on how to grab the real direct ISO download links which you can download and save using a download manager of your choice.

Windows 10 features biometric login for safer and faster access to your device, the face-recognition login is something which can be very handy as majority users prefer password-less autologin feature but face-recognition also offers security without the hassle.

To test the face-recognition login security on Windows 10, The Australian newspaper conducted an informal test where it tried to fool Windows using sets of identical twins, and the results are as shown in the video shared below.

Microsoft desperately wants to defragment the Windows Eco-system and is pushing hard to get users upgraded to Windows 10. To get the "free upgrade" message across Microsoft pushed an popup notification down Windows users desktop's, since past few days this got really annoying for me with this blank popup which auto-opens and needs to be closed manually on every boot as shown below. Here is how to remove/hide the notification if you are not yet decided to take the plunge into Windows 10 like me.

In an effort to unite the Windows Eco-system across a variety of hardware Microsoft has made many changes to make "Windows 10" work on the majority of devices out there, even ones with age-old hardware specification. To see exactly how well the new operating-system goes on with old hardware, Softpedia performed a quick test of installing and using Windows 10 on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB hard disk. The results were quite surprising, the total installation took just 15 minutes from a USB drive and Windows 10 installed all the device drivers automatically. After installation Windows 10 performed flawlessly without any lags as shown in the video below.