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The Mossberg Report Columns Tagged ‘Windows’

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A Digital Crime Wave

The Windows computing platform is in a genuine crisis. Windows computers are being attacked, every day, by an international army of digital criminals who seek to spy on users, turn their own computers against them and deface, corrupt or destroy their data.
There have long been computer viruses, but until the past couple of years, they [...]

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Room At the In-Box

For the most serious email users, there’s no substitute for a sophisticated, powerful program such as Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows, or Entourage and Apple Mail on the Macintosh. These programs reside on your computer’s hard disk and store e-mail there. They offer a host of deep features and are very fast. But there’s [...]

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Computer, Search Thyself

The graphical user interface has been a success in the mass market since the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, and it has dominated computing since Microsoft Windows went mainstream around 1990.
Its visual display of files stored in a nested hierarchy of folders has worked pretty well — until recently.
In the past few years, computer hard [...]

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Rent vs. Own

When you think of legal music downloading on the Internet, you naturally think of Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store. The first successful legal music service to offer the catalogs of the major labels, iTunes has roughly an 80 percent share of the legal market, according to Apple. It offers 1.5 million tunes, about 50 percent [...]

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Tempted By the Apple?

Apple’s Macintosh computers claim only a tiny share of the overall PC market, but they are getting more consideration from Windows users thinking of switching than at any time in many years.
The daunting security problems that have plagued Windows have also prompted many of its users to take a serious look at the Mac. This [...]

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Handheld Hollywood

Apple Computer caused a big splash recently by introducing a new iPod that can play videos and by starting to sell videos, as it does songs, at its iTunes Music Store. This new iPod will very quickly become the bestselling handheld video device, mostly because people will buy it mainly for its music capabilities.
But as [...]

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Hasta la Vista

When it came out in 2001, Windows XP was a very nice operating system, far slicker and more reliable than previous versions of Windows. But XP is getting long in the tooth. It has been patched so often to plug egregious security flaws that it is barely recognizable as the sleek, stable product that debuted [...]

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Apple’s New Core

Apple Computer is gradually replacing its entire Macintosh lineup. The cutting-edge company, which turned 30 in April, already makes the best-designed hardware, the best operating system and the most-secure machines in the consumer-PC market. Now it’s performing a brain transplant on the Mac.
Starting in January, six months earlier than promised, Apple began switching the Mac [...]

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Opening The New Vista

The release of a new version of Microsoft Windows is like the launching of a new aircraft carrier. It’s a major, ponderous event whose ripples affect everything around it. So Microsoft’s planned launch of the next version of its Windows operating system, called Windows Vista, currently set for January 2007, will be a big deal.
Vista [...]

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The Best Of Both Worlds

It used to be that if you switched from a PC running the Windows operating system to the small-selling but elegant Macintosh, you had to leave behind your Windows programs. Sure, there was one software product that allowed you to run Windows on a Mac and thus run Windows programs. But it was so slow [...]

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The Q Review

Recently, the Palm Treo has been the product of choice in high-end smart phones. The Treo can not only make phone calls, but also send and receive e-mail, surf the Web, play music, take pictures and handle Microsoft Office documents, with the aid of a small built-in keyboard. The latest Treo 700 models are more [...]

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The New Digital Dictionary

Since the digital revolution began 30 years ago, computers and other devices have been steeped in technobabble, an argot designed to make insiders feel smart, average users feel dumb and salespeople feel superior. Of course, every industry has its jargon. But it’s hard to think of a vocabulary that’s denser yet so widely used as [...]

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Safety Dance

You can’t turn around without reading scary stories about the dangers of the Internet — spyware, adware, viruses, spam. But the biggest trend to worry about is the combining of these nefarious tools for criminal purposes. Spam email used to be annoying; now it may lead you to phony web sites set up by identity [...]

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Thinking Outside the Pod

Apple’s iPod music players are wildly popular, and they’re paired with a very good online music service, the iTunes Store. But not everyone loves the famous gadget. Here’s a guide to doing digital music outside the Apple hegemony.
Music services
The iTunes Store is the digital equivalent of a music shop. You buy individual songs or albums [...]

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Where’s My Jetpack?

When I started writing this column back in 1992, the world of personal technology was positively primitive compared with where we stand today. So armed with the benefit of 15 years of hindsight, and in this final installment of the Mossberg Report, I’d like to take a look back on the distance we’ve traveled in [...]

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