Windows 10: Microsoft has another fix for Chrome’s battery usage on Windows 10

Microsoft hopes to boost the performance of Chromium-based browsers with smooth-scrolling responsiveness and lower battery usage. Microsoft recently proposed a new feature that would turn off unnecessary media caching and reduce Chrome’s heavy battery consumption on Windows 10.

A group of engineers within the Microsoft Edge team is now working on another solution that they hope will eventually resolve Chrome’s battery usage issue. Microsoft wants the Chrome team to enable hardware-offloaded audio processing w/ large audio buffers on Windows 10.

The goal is to offer ‘improved power efficiency & longer battery life’. The existing Chrome’s solution uses audio service with smaller audio buffers and it does not offload the audio processing to hardware. The current method is CPU intensive and it decreases the duration in which the device can stay in a low power state.

Microsoft says that this feature will use the HTML Media Elements on Windows devices with supported hardware to stop Chromium from killing your device’s battery. It will also limit adverse effects on media playback scenarios and the audio processing experience could be better than what the existing solutions are currently offering with the non-offloaded audio pipeline.

According to the local testing, the proposal if implemented could result in average savings of ~150mW improvement.

William Carr from Microsoft engineer team has already started working on this feature and the last commit was made on August 8. The audio offloading support should land via an experimental flag on supported Windows 10 devices.

The post Microsoft has another fix for Chrome’s battery usage on Windows 10 appeared first on Windows Latest

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Microsoft Selects Dolby Audio for Windows 10

it would've been great if microsoft added HEVC decoders, LAV filters along with other codecs with Windows 10, and developing WMP to be better than VLC, KMPlayer and such sorts of media players.

Nevertheless, this is good step for microsoft, by far.

 

Microsoft Botches Up UEFI Support for Windows 7 on ASUS Motherboards



Microsoft suggests updating to Windows 10 to patch Windows 7

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• Chris Merriman
• 
  @ChrisTheDJ
• 05 May 2016

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MICROSOFT HAS confirmed a potentially lappy-borking problem that it won't be fixing, because Windows 7.

Woody Leonhard, the respected Windows columnist, points to a problem involving Asus motherboards, which also appear rebadged in a variety of other manufacturers' machines, and the activation of UEFI Secure Boot for Windows 7 in a patch KB3133977.

Short version: install update, welcome to Borksville, population you.

Both Asus and Microsoft acknowledged the problem. Microsoft entitled the article "BitLocker can't encrypt drives because of service crashes in svchost.exe process in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2", but we prefer to just call it "Trevor for brevity."

The firm's advice was that it's an optional update, leave well alone, you'll be fine, or alternatively turn secure boot off.

Then Microsoft did a silly, silly thing.

It moved the update from 'optional' to 'recommended' and anyone who reads this site regularly will know what happens when Microsoft does this. That's right boys and girls - it makes it automatically install, unless you've specifically told your machine not to.

So now, if you have one of the affected motherboard and you keep your security updates automatic like wot Microsoft recommends, then your machine will stop working properly.

We should add it's not permanently bricked, but it will take some mucking about in the BIOS to fix and that's a pain even for an experienced computer user.

Microsoft has, by offering a workaround, suggested heavily that it won't be fixing the problem, though we have asked the question, so expect a response in about a fortnight.

But the real kicker is this piece of advice: "Note The Secure Boot feature is supported in Windows 10. To learn more about the security advantages of this feature and about the upgrade path from Windows 7 to Windows 10, go to the following Windows website"

Holy toledo, this company really knows how to rub people up the wrong way.

After all - if the advice is to manually avoid the update or move to a version of the operating system where there's virtually no control over updates, then Microsoft is dealing in massive contradictions.

A more cynical site would suggest that it's yet another example of Microsoft running Windows 7 into the ground and adding built in obsolescence to encourage quicker updates. But we're not that sort of site.

Its the patching to force secure boot that is the problem win 7 does not support secure boot
hence it borks systems and well microsofts answer is Cactus >your Asshole > insert

from the inquirer

 

Windows 10 Tweaks

As you may already know, Windows 10 (as well as Windows 8) allow you to log in with a valid Microsoft account, instead of creating a local account that only works on your machine. However, you may prefer to keep a local account for privacy reasons. If you do, though, some Windows 10 features—like Cortana—may not work. Despite the default behavior, the Windows 10 Store is not one of them. You can still log in to your Microsoft account for just the Store without switching to a full Microsoft account. The process, however, is not terribly obvious. To do so, follow these steps:

• Launch the Store from your Start menu.
• Click the user icon next to the search box.
• Click “Sign-in” from the menu that appears.
• Choose “Microsoft account” and log in like normal.
• When the “Make it yours” box appears do not enter your password. Instead, click “Sign in to just this app instead.”

from Lifehacker