The Case of the Disappearing Spartan…

Today it’s from the up and coming Windows 10 to why my boys get frustrated with a touchscreen tablet… via a little thank you!

Windows 10 and the case of the disappearing “Spartan”
I used to love Sherlock Holmes stories when I was younger – always trying to work it out before the sleuth (and rarely managing it…)

And this sounds like one – the disappearing Spartan.

It’s all to do with the up and coming Windows 10, coming out later this year. It doesn’t have Internet Explorer – Microsoft are scrapping that and replacing it with a completely new web browser, which was going to be called “Spartan”.

That’s changed, though. Well, the name’s changed. They’re still replacing internet Explorer, it’s just the new one will now be called “Edge”.

I suspect it’s so they can still use the blue “e” they’ve been using as the logo for Internet Explorer.

Anyway, it’s supposed to be much faster and less likely to crash than Internet Explorer… we’ll have to see.

On the subject of Windows 10, as reported before, for the first year after it’s out, you’ll be able to get a free upgrade if you have Windows 8, 8.1 or 7. That’s still true, but Microsoft have now announced that if you have Windows 7, you’ll need to already have “Service Pack 1” (or SP1) installed before you can get the upgrade.

If you don’t have Service Pack 1, it’s also a free upgrade, though, so it’s not really a problem. And most PCs will already have it anyway by now.

Anyway, once Windows 10 is out, I’ll go through how to do the upgrade anyway.

We’ll update the free ebook “What you Should Know about Windows 10” shortly, to reflect them changing the name Spartan to Edge. Apart from that, nothing’s changed, though. (You can still get the ebook here, if you haven’t already.) Lots of nice comments about it from people who’ve read it so far – thank you!

A big thank you – and an update
Thanks to everyone who left a comment about the possibility of being able to pay online for a book you’d already ordered. It sounds like it could be quite popular, so it’s something I’ll put on the list to get sorted. I’m not sure just yet whether we’ll go for paying online with a card, doing a bank transfer through your bank system, or both. Watch this space.

A few people also asked about other things to do with paying, so here are a couple of answers!

Assuming we do go ahead with it being possible to pay online for books you’ve already ordered, we won’t take any other ways to pay away, so you’ll still be able to ring up and talk to Louize or Laura to pay by card (it was nice to see how many people said how nice it was talking to them when they rang up to pay – we pride ourselves on being real human beings on the phone!) And if you prefer, you can still post a cheque to us (or even a postal order if you prefer – though it’s probably best not to post actual cash as it’s too obvious what’s in the envelope if it gets spotted by anyone unscrupulous on its way here).

You can actually pay at the same time as ordering if you order over the phone (just say you’d like to pay and Louize or Laura or one of the others will take a card payment). Or if you order online on our main website, then you have to pay when you order. The website uses paypal to take payments, but you don’t have to use a paypal account, you can use a credit or debit card and paypal simply handle the card transaction for us.

Something that frustrates Alastair and Edward no end
Both my boys (4 and 3 years old) love playing on the touchscreen tablets. I quite like them to play on it, too, as long as they don’t spend too long on them. It’s good for them to know how to use the technology and they learn quite about numbers, reading and so on from some of the games.

But one thing frustrates them no end – sometimes the Nexus 7 we have turns itself off – apparently at random.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on – it happened to me, too.

We have a case that has magnets in it that’s supposed to tell when you close it and turn the device off. It’s clever, but occasionally when you have the case open the whole way, so the cover bit is behind the device, it thinks it’s in front of it and you’ve shut it – so it turns it off.

If it happens to you, you can leave the flap that covers the device hanging instead of folding it neatly out of the way, then it won’t happen. Or simply take it out of the case.

That way it doesn’t turn it off just as you’re about beat you best ever score on Angry Birds!

It’s funny, really. Part of the point of tablets like this is that they’re supposed to be easy to use. Intuitive, the techies say. And a lot of the time, they are.

It doesn’t mean nothing ever goes wrong though!