Windows tips

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You’re a cartoon shark in this physics-based puzzler—like The Dark Knight Rises, it’s also from Gameloft via Xbox—just drag and release his tail to launch him at the rubber duckies and get as many as you can.

As the levels advance (96 in all!) he makes parabolic jumps through rubber rings, pops inflatable blocks, and more. Four different environments—from ancient Rome to exotic Japan—help keep things interesting. And if you grab enough coins along the way, you’ll be able to upgrade your predator with new skins. Buy it now. The game, which costs $0.99, was just published a few moments ago, so it might take a bit before it shows up on your phone or in search results.

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It has been incredibly exciting to see such strong engagement and support from web browser enthusiasts and others over the past year with The Browser You Loved to Hate campaign. With over 25 million total video views worldwide to date, we know we struck a chord with you. Whether you were simply entertained or began to question your assumptions about Internet Explorer, we are happy to entertain and help people learn that something’s changed with IE.

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Since we kicked off the Windows Phone Challenge over a year ago at CES (it was called “Smoked by Windows Phone” back then), the one question I’ve been consistently asked is:

“When do we get to see this stuff on TV?”

The answer is…THIS WEEK! A new spot that pits the Nokia Lumia 920’s PureView camera head-to-head against the Samsung Galaxy SIII will run on ESPN and CBS throughout the men’s and women’s NCAA tournament. Not a basketball fan? No worries – you can watch it online. Check it out:

The spot is 30 seconds long, but if you want to see the full video of how things unfolded with Brittany – and all of our other Windows Phone Challenge videos – head over to the Challenge Playlist on our YouTube channel.

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UPDATE 3/20: The Windows Phone Next App Star voting site is back up. To ensure fairness, votes cast yesterday will not be counted. However, yesterday’s voters are still eligible for the March 19 free phone drawing.

UPDATE 3/19: We’ve taken the voting site offline temporarily while we investigate a few issues that emerged as traffic grew heavy following last night’s launch. We hope to have the site restored soon. Thank you for your patience.

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UPDATE 3/20: Let the voting resume! Looks like the technical problems are behind us. If you cast a vote yesterday, it still counts toward the March 19 daily drawing for a free phone. But out of fairness we’re not using them to help decide our Next App Star—so make sure to head back over to Facebook and vote again.

UPDATE 3/19:  We’ve had to take our Facebook voting page offline temporarily to chase down a few bugs, which surfaced as people began hitting the page in large numbers following last night’s launch (the power of free phones). The team is working on it and hopes to have it back up soon. Thanks for your patience. I’ll update you when I know more.

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More than 100 great Windows Phone apps have already appeared in our ads. Today, we’re pleased to launch Windows Phone Next App Star on Facebook, which lets you help decide the next app to win a coveted spot in one of our TV commercials.

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The brackets have been determined and the seeds are set. Now all you need to pick are some good basketball apps for the 2013 NCAA tournament, which officially kicks off tomorrow.

Head over to the Store’s new March Madness Collection for some slam-dunk suggestions. You’ll find apps for monitoring live scores and tracking your picks from the first tip off to the Final Four—even a few games to keep you busy during breaks in the play.

So who’s your pick to go all the way this year—and what hoops apps do you recommend?

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Starting tomorrow, Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will begin rolling out automatically on Windows Update.  Updating customers to Windows 7 SP1 is part of our ongoing effort to ensure continued support and improved security updates for customers who have not yet installed SP1. Windows 7 SP1 was previously available on Windows Update but required user action to install.  Starting tomorrow, the installation will be fully automatic with no user action required for those who already have Automatic Update enabled.  SP1 will be released gradually over the coming weeks to all customers on the RTM version of Windows 7.  The service pack will take slightly longer to install compared to other updates.  To ensure Service Pack 1 is installed without issue, customers should check for sufficient free disk space and that AC power is present on a laptop.  If additional space needs to be created, we recommend using the Disk Cleanup tool to delete some files so that the service pack will install.  If the service pack installation is interrupted, it will reattempt to install automatically after the next restart.

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For this month’s Windows Phone Photo Challenge, we asked you to create some panoramas using Photosynth, which just released on Windows Phone 8. Your entries came in from all over the world and contained an awesome mix of straight-up image files as well as interactive panoramas that were uploaded to Photosynth.net. The below are our favorites (click through for full-size images or to play around with the panorama).

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I’m surrounded by people who love the People Hub, the phone’s built-in address book and quick-stop social networking center. But I’ll be honest: When I first tried it, I thought it wasn’t for me. Sound familiar? Then keep reading, because recently I gave People another chance—and am really glad I did.

One of the perks of this job is that I’m always just a short walk away from the engineers who design and build Windows Phone. So one day I went directly to the source—a People Hub program manager named Greg, who spent an hour patiently clearing up some misconceptions and helping me discover capabilities I wasn’t aware of.

Today I thought I’d take you on a mini tour of this occasionally misunderstood phone feature and pass along some of Greg’s wisdom, so you can rediscover People too. (Don’t worry, it won’t take an hour.)

All

Let’s start with the All section, your consolidated contact list. If you’ve added Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email accounts to your phone, you’ll see all the people tied to those accounts listed here.

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For those of you who know me well, you know that I can barely find my way into or out of a video game. It’s not for lack of trying but more due to terribly poor hand-eye coordination. So, it was with a bit of trepidation that I agreed to do a Tech Tuesday Live Twitter Chat with Razer. After all, what’s a girl who knows nothing about games going to do talking with a bunch of people who are known for making cool things for gamers by gamers?

Well, it turns out that even a girl who isn’t video game savvy can be incredibly impressed by what goes on at Razer. Even more impressive is the PC that they plan to talk about during tomorrow’s chat. The Razer Edge is the world’s only tablet built specifically for gamers. It’s fast with an Intel processor and an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card. This means that games play fast. Not to mention, the Edge comes in a variety of modes: Tablet, Keyboard, Home Console and Mobile Console.