Gregarius » BetaNews.Com » octobre 28, 2013

BetaNews.Com (9 non lus)

Looking to clean and optimize your Mac? Try IObit’s new MacBooster tool

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 7:56pm CET par Nick Peers

Does the world need another system cleaning tool, even if it’s on the Mac? IObit thinks so, and the result is MacBooster 1.0.1, the company’s first foray into the Apple market. This paid-for tool, available as a 14-day download, attempts to provide a one-stop shop for cleaning and optimizing your Mac.

Its subtitle is "For the Maximum Speed", and to that end bundles a selection tools to help clear out junk, improve security and free up system resources.

Once launched, you’ll find the program sports a user interface that -- at first glance -- makes it suitable for all levels of user. That’s not quite the case though, as there’s a distinct lack of hand-holding involved, no backups taken and unwary users might be tempted to trust the program and click the big Fix button without taking due precautions.

The main part of the program is its Clean and Boost interface -- click Scan to have four areas of your Mac (Internet security, system cleanup, system optimization and disk clean) checked for various issues and potentially redundant files.

We say potentially, because it’s important you don’t click that big Fix button and instead take the time to check exactly what the program promises it can clean for you. Pick the wrong option and you might lose a feature or files you actually use.

MacBooster also offers a Performance Boost tool that allows you to shut down "unnecessary" processes -- again, there’s no explanation of what a process is or whether it’s safe to shut down, so another tool for more advanced users only.

The program also bundles a toolbox of five standalone tools: Clean Memory attempts to restore physical memory for a speed boost (the value of this type of tool is questionable), while Duplicates Finder does what it says on the tin, as does Large Files Cleaner.

An uninstaller tool offers to clean up more thoroughly behind applications, widgets, plugins and preferences -- click an entry, and MacBooster will show you what it’s found in addition to the program itself, allowing you to remove associated files and settings too.

Finally, Startup Optimization lets you manage all start-up items, not just those under Login Items under the Users & Groups preferences pane.

As a tool for advanced use, MacBooster works well -- although its $60 price tag may put some off. But despite the user-friendly interface, this isn’t an app we’d recommend to beginners looking for a quick and easy way to reclaim disk space and other system resources -- the lack of a backup, plus absence of hand-holding measures makes MacBooster one for intermediate and advanced users only.

IObit MacBooster 1.0.1 is available now as a free 14-day trial download for Macs running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) or later, including the latest Mavericks release. The full version can be purchased for $59.95 (a cut-down Lite version is also available at $39.95).
Microsoft celebrates 10 years of OneNote -- one notable decade

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 7:03pm CET par Brian Fagioli

It may be hard to believe, but OneNote was released in November 2003. To many mature users of Microsoft's Office suite, it still feels like a "new" addition. Sadly, many people do not use the note-taking, collaboration solution, likely from a lack of education on the software. I am only a few years removed from college and never observed a single student leveraging OneNote in the classroom; they all used Word. This is unfortunate as it is a great cross-platform solution -- Windows, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone are now all supported.

To celebrate the 10 year anniversary, Microsoft is launching the One Notable Decade campaign. This should hopefully raise awareness of the powerful software. Today, Microsoft shares some examples of how OneNote helps people be successful in their lives.

"This month OneNote celebrates 10 years of helping users capture notes at home, school, work and anywhere in between. In that time, OneNote has grown and added features for managing everything from recipe collections, to class notes, to projects and events -- across phones and tablets, as well as the PC", says David Rasmussen, Partner Group Program Manager of OneNote.

Microsoft uses three video examples of OneNote being used in real-life scenarios. The first example is Chad and Carey Hayes -- the writers of the movie The Conjuring. This example is timely for me as I recently saw the movie and loved it (very scary). The writers explain that they use OneNote to collaborate when they are not together. The video highlights them taking notes and sharing pictures. They also use handwriting with a stylus to jot-down notes. This video ends with the tagline, "Collaboration Noted".

The second example is Milwaukee pro baseball announcer, Joe Block. Microsoft explains that he "uses OneNote to keep track of 750 players over 162 games every season". This video highlights the announcer using a stylus and Surface tablet to keep-track of stats by highlighting and circling them. Mr Block says "I don't know how I ever did anything without it". This video ends with the tagline, "Organization Noted".

Lastly, we see an in-love couple, named Ambir and George, plan their wedding. For some reason, the bride and groom are 300-miles apart (it is not explained why). The bride says that she is not stressed because she has OneNote. She took advantage of a wedding-planning template from Office.com. Ultimately, the wedding is successful and we see the happy couple walking down the aisle hand-in-hand. This video ends with the tagline, "Inspiration Noted".

Writing The Conjuring: The Hayes Brothers

Calling the plays: Joe Block

Planning a wedding: Ambir and George

Do you use OneNote? Tell me how you use it in the comments.
Identified uses social media to create largest ever recruitment database

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 5:09pm CET par Ian Barker

Finding the right staff is crucial to the operation of any business. But often the people that are right for a role aren't necessarily looking for a new job. San Francisco-based analytics specialist Identified thinks it has an answer to this with a new product that combines social media and big data techniques to create a massive searchable candidate database.

Identified Recruit claims to have a billion potential candidates available making it the largest source of professional profiles. You may think that this is like LinkedIn, but the difference is that Identified Recruit uses multiple data sources so it isn't limited by its own user base.

"The open web contains the most comprehensive, current professional information available, but until now companies have been forced to go to individual networks like LinkedIn to find talent," says Brendan Wallace, co-founder and co-CEO of Identified. "With access to all of the web's data, companies can find great talent on a scale never before possible".

The product gathers information from a range of public social media sources whist protecting personal data by anonymizing the details. This allows it to deliver results for groups -- such as healthcare professionals -- that are under represented on sites like LinkedIn. The company quotes as an example that Identified has over 3,500 profiles for Surgical Technicians, where only 87 can be found on LinkedIn.

Earlier this month, Identified announced that it had hired Facebook's manager of data science, Mohammad Sabah to direct and develop the expansion of its core technology -- though it didn't say if it had found him through its own system.

Recruiters can find out more and request a free demo at www.identified.com the rest of you make sure your social network profiles are up to date.

Photo Credit: vichie81/Shutterstock
AI firm Vicarious cracks CAPTCHA codes

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 4:09pm CET par Mark Wilson

CAPTCHA are a thorn in the side of web users. Those almost indecipherable string of letters and numbers that are meant to help websites determine that you are a human rather than a spambot often cause more frustration for users than anything else, and they have now been cracked.

Vicarious, a California-based AI team, reveals that it has been able to develop algorithms that can successfully solve CAPTCHAs from the likes of Google, Yahoo and PayPal.

The cracking of CAPTCHAs by machine is nothing all that new, but Vicarious is reporting an extremely high success rate -- the algorithm is successful in up to 90 percent of cases. The company goes as far as saying that "this advancement renders text-based CAPTCHAs no longer effective as a Turing test". The Turing test -- introduced by Alan Turing, one of the old-masters of computing -- was developed to test whether a computer could pass itself off as a human being.

The algorithms were not developed specifically with a view to cracking CAPTCHAs (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), but it is one of the capabilities of the Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) technology pioneered by Vicarious. The techniques used differ from other methods that have been used to bypass CAPTCHAs in the past.

Vicarious co-founder D. Scott Phoenix says: "Recent AI systems like IBM’s Watson and deep neural networks rely on brute force: connecting massive computing power to massive datasets. This is the first time this distinctively human act of perception has been achieved, and it uses relatively minuscule amounts of data and computing power. The Vicarious algorithms achieve a level of effectiveness and efficiency much closer to actual human brains".

This could have huge security implications although Vicarious is planning for its technology to be used in "robotics, medical image analysis, image and video search, and many other fields". Could this be the end of the CAPTCHA? What methods should we use next to prove that we're human and not an advanced computer?

Photo Credit: Maen Zayyad/Shutterstock
Windows 8.1's Calculator app sums up what's wrong with Microsoft's new OS

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 2:08pm CET par Wayne Williams

Windows 8.1 is great. But at the same time it -- and its predecessor -- is based on a slightly flawed concept. It's built on the idea of a one-size-fits-all operating system, but in order to get it to work across tablets, desktop PCs, laptops and hybrids, Microsoft has had to make various compromises. A bit like trying to make one suit fit four people with different body shapes.

Windows 8.1 (like Windows 8) fits best on tablets, but tweaks had to be made to ensure it runs on smaller screen sizes. Windows 8.1 works well on standard PCs, but you can almost feel Microsoft's disapproval when you're controlling the OS with a mouse and keyboard -- "But that's not how it's meant to be used!" As a desktop user there are various elements of the new OS which annoy me, but none more so than the Calculator app.

I know what you're thinking. The Calculator app, really? Let me explain. I hate it. It is, to me, the epitome of everything that's wrong with the one-size-fits-all approach of Windows 8.1. On a small Windows tablet, like the Acer Iconia W4, the calculator app works fine. It does a good job. You can use it to do all the things you'd want to do with a calculator. Add up numbers. Subtract them. Multiple them. Wonderful.

On my desktop PC with its two 24-inch screens, the Calculator app is the most useless thing ever. I launch it and it takes a while to open, and then it's there -- bloody huge -- filling my screen with buttons the size of business cards. It offers a selection of calculator types -- Standard, Scientific and Converter, and each mode looks like it's been designed to be viewed from Mars.

To calculate a sum I have to stop what I'm doing, open up this monstrosity, tap in my calculation, then close the app down. It's an exercise in time wasting.

Yes, Windows 8.1 comes with a standard calculator for the desktop -- and this is the program I actually use -- but my point is, the Calculator app serves no purpose on a PC. It doesn’t belong there. It doesn't look like it belongs there. So why is it included?

Because Microsoft is trying to make Windows 8.1 fit everywhere.

Windows 8.1 does this thing if you have a large screen. It detects it, and adds more rows to the Modern UI, so you can fit more tiles into the available space.

So why doesn't the Calculator app detect my large screen and use the space more intelligently? Why, instead of opening full screen, doesn't it just appear in a strip down the side? Why does every app in the OS have to run full screen unless manually resized? Because Windows 8.1 treats every app as if it’s being opened and used on a tablet with a -- at most -- 10-inch screen.

My point here is Windows 8.1 is a good operating system, but it could be a great one if Microsoft had written it to adapt intelligently to the different devices it's on. Instead of offering the same features to all, how about if Windows detects its environment and removes the features you don't or can't use?

I don't have any statistics on hand to back this up, but I'd imagine most people who have a non-touchscreen PC spend most of their time in the desktop, while anyone who owns a tablet running Windows 8/8.1 will use apps a lot more. So instead of requiring the user to customize the OS to how they want it, why can't the OS configure itself to the likely needs of the user?

At the very least, Microsoft could include a wizard that runs the first time you use Windows and lets you choose the features you want, and the features you don't. Instead of just letting us pick a color scheme, how about letting us choose how Windows works from the start, like choosing a desktop-friendly or tablet-friendly setup? Every time the OS detects a change to the hardware it can offer to run the wizard again.

I believe in Microsoft’s vision of having the same operating system running on a phone, tablet, and PC. It's a great idea. You learn how to use one device and you can use all devices. Your data and preferences are available to you everywhere, regardless of whether you're on a PC at home, or using a Surface in a coffee shop on the other side of the planet. It's a bold, brave idea, and to a degree it works.

But one-size-fits-all really means one-size-fits-all-badly, and for Windows 8.2, or Windows 9, I'd like to see the approach handled a lot more intelligently.

And yes, it's not just the Calculator app I hate. The super-sized Alarms and Sound Recorder apps are just as bloody ridiculous (maybe even more so).

Photo Credit: Dusit/Shutterstock
Samsung shows off its curves in new Galaxy Round ad

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 1:12pm CET par Mark Wilson

Flat screens are so yesterday; curves are where it is at these days. Not content with constantly increasing the size of phone displays, handset manufacturers are now looking for a new twist. Both LG and Samsung have decided that curves are the way ahead. LG has officially announced the G Flex following on from the Galaxy Round that was revealed by Samsung just a few weeks ago, but it is the Samsung handset that is highlighted in a new ad.

As the Galaxy Round is destined for the Korean market, it should come as no surprise that the commercial is in Korean. This matters little as the looks of the phone speak for themselves. The advertisement demonstrates various curved objects that sit neatly in the hand to highlight that a great design decision has been made. Oddly, most of the objects shown -- an egg, a hand, a lemon, a glass -- are convex in curvature, so it's not really a direct comparison with how the handset will sit in the palm.

The Galaxy Round is curved differently to the G Flex. Both handsets have concave displays, but while the LG G Flex is curved along the short edges, Samsung has opted to curve the Galaxy Round along the length instead.

When Samsung's handset was unveiled a few weeks ago I asked whether curved screens are a gimmick or are genuinely useful. Now we have two handsets that are curved along different axis, the next question is... which is better, horizontal or vertical curving?
LG takes a stab at Samsung with its new 'real' curved smartphone

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 12:43pm CET par Mihaita Bamburic

When Samsung announced the Galaxy Round, the company's first smartphone with a curved display, many folks (myself included) struggled to see the real-life benefit that such a form factor would allegedly bring. The natural direction for the curve is considered to be on the long side, and not on the short one as the Galaxy Round has it. The rather gimmicky Roll Effect feature, that shows users some information when tilting the device, did not add more credibility to the touted benefits of the Galaxy Round either.

Rival Android maker LG has also announced its first smartphone with a curved display, that is called G Flex. The company markets it as the "world's first 'real' curved smartphone", in a (clever) attempt to take advantage of the negative feedback that the Galaxy Round has received so far.

"The LG G Flex is the best representation yet of how a smartphone should be curved", says LG president and CEO Dr. Jong-seok Park. "The LG G Flex with its distinctive design, innovative hardware and consumer-centric UX represents the most significant development in the smartphone space since smartphone became part of our regular vocabulary". LG is clearly not shying away from subtly mocking the competition.

Unlike the display of the Galaxy Round, the panel on the G Flex is curved on the long side (or vertically) which should theoretically help users reach the top side easier. LG is comparing its smartphone with old telephones which, due to their shape, were closer to the caller's mouth than the typical handsets of today. Clearly, this is not a very sexy reference and not one that young people may relate to.

LG says that because of the design of the G Flex, the sound level is 3 dB higher compared to "typical flat smartphones", the device is grippier and fits "more comfortably in one's back pocket". Obviously, the question here is: Why would anyone want to store the G Flex in their back pocket? I sure don't. (Don't people sit on their back pockets?)

The G Flex features the same button arrangement from the G2 -- the power and volume keys are on the back, underneath the camera. I was skeptical at first, but after trying this on the G2 I found it to be quite pleasant to use in the hand. I have not had the device in any of my pants' pockets, so I cannot comment on accidental wakes and such. Now let's look at the specs.

The star of the show is the 6-inch P-OLED display, touted as being brighter and more precise. It is made of plastic and, according to LG, delivers an "IMAX-like" viewing experience in landscape mode. By modern standards, the 720 by 1280 resolution is low for such a screen size, but is aided by the "Real RGB" matrix which has blue, green and red subpixels in one pixel. The screen is definitely not geared towards spec-sheet fans.

The G Flex is powered by a 2.26 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, an Adreno 330 GPU running at 450 MHz, 2 GB of RAM and a 3,500 mAh non-removable battery. According to LG, the smartphone should have "enough power for more than a full day of use".

Other specs include: 32 GB of internal storage, 13 MP back-facing camera, 2.1 MP front-facing camera, 4G LTE-A cellular connectivity, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 3.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and NFC (near Field Communication).

The smartphone ships with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, coupled with a number of LG-made add-ons like QTheater (easy access to multimedia content from the lockscreen), Dual Window (enables running two apps side-by-side), Swing Lockscreen (changes the lockscreen image depending on the position of the handset), Face Detection Indicator (LED on Rear Key lights up green to indicate status), Camera Timer (flashes LED on Rear Key to indicate countdown) and Urgent Call Alert (flashes LED on Rear Key in red after ignoring or missing repeated calls).

The G Flex comes in at 160.5 x 81.6 x 7.9 mm and 177 grams. There is only one available color trim -- Titan Silver. Like the Galaxy Round, the G Flex is set to launch in South Korea first, in November. Other markets will follow. There is no mention of pricing.
Check unsigned files at VirusTotal with Sysinternals’ Sigcheck

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 12:24pm CET par Mike Williams

Microsoft Sysinternals has released Sigcheck 2.0, the latest edition of its digital signature verification tool.

Okay, it’s true, a command line utility which scans for signed executables doesn’t exactly sound interesting. At all. But wait: this version’s new VirusTotal support means it could be a very useful addition to your malware-hunting toolkit.

To get a general feel for how the program works, open a command window, enter something like:

sigcheck c:\windows\system32

and you’ll see the details of every executable file, its digital signature, signing date, publisher, description, product and more.

Life gets more interesting when you start using VirusTotal. Sigcheck requires that you accept the site’s terms and conditions first, but with that done, enter a command like:

sigcheck -e -u -vn -vt c:\windows\system32

Now the program will scan your \Windows\System32 folder for unsigned files, then upload whatever it finds to VirusTotal, before listing anything that at least one of the engines thinks is malware.

It’s not uncommon for lesser known programs to have one or two hits, of course, but you probably shouldn’t have unsigned files in that folder anyway, so investigate anything that turns up. (Or if nothing is listed at all, try pointing Sigcheck at your Downloads folder and you should see a few more alerts.)

This is just the start; Sigcheck 2.0 supports plenty of other command line switches. You can have the program show more version information, recurse subdirectories, query VirusTotal with file hashes, export its data in csv format, and more. Enter sigcheck with no switches for the full list.
How to easily migrate to SkyDrive from Google Drive, including your Google Docs

Publié: octobre 28, 2013, 8:46am CET par Derrick Wlodarz
Google Docs and Google Drive were all I knew when it came to personal cloud document storage until this summer. I never got on the Dropbox bandwagon, and was so entrenched in the Google ecosystem that SkyDrive didn't interest me at first when it came out. While I have nothing personally against Google Drive, as it has served my company and myself quite well, I had to take a deep dive into SkyDrive territory to prepare for an Office 2013 class I taught this past summer. I was pleasantly surprised with the service, so much so that I began using it side by side next to Google Drive for my personal needs.

Fast forward to when Windows 8.1 went RTM, and I subsequently moved my primary Thinkpad X230 Tablet over to the new OS. One of the least publicized aspects of 8.1 has to be hands-down the tight integration between the OS and SkyDrive, meaning you didn't need a standalone app anymore to save/open files on the service. Some have called it Microsoft going too far, but I completely disagree. The service is 100 percent optional (you can still save locally as you would expect) and if you are using a local account instead of a MS account for your computer login on 8.1, the service is a moot point at best.

Unlike Google Drive, which allows you to upload Office documents for viewing but not edit them, I can access my entire SkyDrive file collection on any web browser now and work on any file with ease. I'm not relegated to using Google Docs like I had to with Drive, which forces you to import Office files if you want to edit them -- a nasty thorn when it comes to cohabiting files between ecosystems. This is one of the biggest things I like over that of Google Drive. No more worrying about what file format I am using depending on my situation.

I absolutely love it now. The fact that I don't have to run an extra program taking up system tray space, processing power, and memory are all fringe benefits. I've also used Drive enough personally and at customer locations to know that it has a certain nasty propensity to crash at random times, without notice. Just do a quick Google search on "Google Drive crashing" and you can sift through some of the 5 million+ results referencing to Drive's awkward stability fits. This is a problem that is getting better, but is still experienced by Windows and Mac users.

I don't recall a single crash when I used the standalone SkyDrive program, and of course, with the service being baked right into Windows 8.1, the chance for any crashing is next to zero. Not trying to brag blindly in Microsoft's favor, I'm just stating it how I see it from experience with both products. But Google does have the upper hand (right now, at least) in one area: and that's in free storage space.

The Free Space Wars: How Google Drive and SkyDrive Compare

It's a tit for tat war in the hearts and minds of cloud storage users, and it's likely far from over. While Google has the undoubted lead in the personal space right now by offering all Gmail (and Google Account) users a free 15GB, Microsoft only provides personal SkyDrive users a petty 7GB. While it's less than half of what Google is offering, it's actually plenty for most people's needs -- including my own. I moved my entire collection of personal documents (including my whole archive of college and grad school work) from a messy scattering across my business NAS and Google Drive, and consolidated them without problem on SkyDrive. And I still have about 4.6GB of space left.

You may be curious what I haven't moved over just yet. And this is where you need to make some decisions about what will be taken to the cloud and what won't. None of my old music (which I don't even organize or worry about anymore, since I have lived on Pandora for over four years now) or my large photo collection made the trip into SkyDrive. I am still keeping these on my business NAS, which is soon being moved onto an instance of FreeNAS running off the free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (which I'll be penning a story for separately in due time).

The fact of the matter is, none of the cloud storage warriors offer enough free space yet for anyone to move a majority of their entire digital life onto yet. As from my experience, where I had to keep my media separate, this will likely be the case for you too. Our digital lives are bloating and growing quickly, and free cloud storage is still in its infancy. This is why I decided to just move my essentials that I need most day to day, and which I can leverage SkyDrive's Office Web Apps for as well.

I do want to note that while Google offers 15GB of space now for Google Drive, you do want to be mindful that this increase came along because Google changed their policy into one that considers this 15GB shared among all the core Google services. As Google states, this 15GB bucket spans Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos. So while nice at face value, those with years of large Gmail history may find this headroom bitten into if you have an email inbox that has grown a beer gut of sorts. In my own case, my 15GB has been brought down by nearly 2.5GB from my Gmail usage alone. So technically, I only have about 12.5GB left for pure Drive storage.

I was curious why Google was showing my Drive as using 2.52GB, when my exported Google Drive contents only made up about 49.1MB. The caveat? Google's new storage policies pool your quota across Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos which can eat into your storage space quickly if one of the other services is being used heavily. You can scroll over your usage percentage in the lower left hand corner of Drive at any time to see the details of which service is using what from your quota.

I think it's only a matter of time before Microsoft ups the ante for the free storage for personal SkyDrive users. I say this because of all the love they have been giving their SkyDrive Pro users from the Office 365 side of things lately. Back in August, users of SkyDrive pro had their storage pools more than tripled at no cost from 7GB (the current personal SkyDrive offering limit) up to a fat 25GB.

Just a few days after that, Microsoft one upped themselves in the email arena for Office 365 users as well, by giving all Exchange Online accounts a free 50GB cap now. That's a complete doubling of what they used to offer at 25GB. In comparison, Google's free Gmail is at 15GB shared as I stated above, and higher end Google Apps accounts have double that at 30GB (shared, of course).

Not only that, but Outlook.com, which is Microsoft's competitor to free Gmail (and replaced the cruddy Hotmail service a year ago), has no technical limit to how much email you can store. Microsoft says you have "virtually limitless" headroom for email storage which just increases as your needs grow. I'm sure there are fair use rules around what "limitless" entails, but still, I'm glad to see that Microsoft is tearing down the usual walls around free email storage space.

I happen to like Outlook.com quite a bit too, and wrote a nice article on how you can leverage the service as a custom domain email host at no cost -- a la what Google Apps Free Edition used to provide until Google killed that off.

And to be fair, Microsoft is throwing free bones at consumers with complimentary SkyDrive place in many of its popular offerings on the market. For example, anyone purchasing either a Surface 2 or Surface 2 Pro is entitled to a free 200GB of SkyDrive space for two whole years. Students in college can pick up the dirt cheap Office 365 University edition for only $80 which covers 4 years of usage, includes Office download rights on up to 2 computers, and also throws in a free 20GB of SkyDrive space. Office 365 Home Premium includes the same free storage space offer on SkyDrive, but turns the cost into a yearly $100 fee and ups your download rights count to 5 computers.

So to say that Microsoft is being stingy with SkyDrive personal is a bit of a misguided statement. They're being quite generous is most other regards to their online services these days and picking up extra room is either cheap, or in the above instances, free with other purchases.

Where Does SkyDrive Have Google Drive Beat?

In light of the fact that Google has Microsoft beat in the amount of free space they provide on Drive, you may be wondering why the heck I even bother with SkyDrive to begin with. For numerous reasons, actually. There may be more, but these are the ones that come to mind most:
- App-less integration in Windows 8.1: As an early adopter of 8.1, the fact that SkyDrive is caked right into the OS is a huge benefit for me. While the standalone apps work, as I mentioned about Drive earlier, it was too prone to crashing or having sync issues for my tastes. May I say that SkyDrive in 8.1 just works? No crashes, no sync problems -- it's like a natural extension of Windows Explorer with no memory or processing overhead. You do have to use your chosen Microsoft account to login to Windows with, but I don't find this to be a nuisance. It's a huge boon for me since I can keep my settings, Windows Store apps, and more synced on the account with ease.
- Office Web Apps are good alternatives to Desktop Office: Microsoft has been playing catch up in the browser app arena for document editing, but I don't think it's doing half bad a job. I wrote earlier this summer how Microsoft is working hard on getting real time co-authoring up to the same levels that Google Docs offers, and to keep overhauling their offerings in order to start reaching the point where desktop Office may become truly optional at some point. While Web Apps are limited to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote thus far, with differing capabilities, they work quite well already. Google Docs are good, especially in the arena of co-authoring and sharing, but when it comes to Office file fidelity and feature sets, they are still pretty barren even this many years into the game.
- Co-authoring between desktop and Web Apps simultaneously: Word and PowerPoint are the best examples of where this capability is heading. For example, you can share out a Word document from your SkyDrive folder and work on it at the same time as someone (or many others) may have it open in the Web App editor remotely. This beats the Google Docs approach in some respects, because all parties have to be in the web browser on the Google side. Microsoft is still making improvements to this technology, and highlighted where they are heading in a nice video earlier this summer. Mobile devices will be joining into the real time co-authoring blitz "soon" they claim, which should further extend this functionality for people on the go.
- SkyDrive uses the unified Office file formats for web and local storage: Yes, I know full well that this should be a given, coming from Microsoft, but it's still something that irks (and confuses) many users that my company supports on Google Drive. Why are some things Google Docs? Why are some things Office files? Why can't they just all be the same? It's a question I've wondered for a while; why Google couldn't have built Google Docs to co-author true Office files without the need to bring in their proprietary Google Docs formats which live only in the browser. I know the marketing reasons of why they do it, but I find it frustrates more people than it helps. SkyDrive gets rid of this confusion and allows you to work with a common set of file formats that are now near universal. Docx, Xlsx, Pptx, etc. You can edit them locally, in Office Web Apps, and share them -- and they are still the same Office files that you started with even if you never used SkyDrive. I like that parity proposition from SkyDrive.
- More paid storage upgrade options, and cheaper price points vs Google: While Google has a bevy of price points that allow you to get up to 16TB of space on Drive, who is really going to use that much this day in age? I just don't find it feasible unless you have $800 to throw away every year in cloud storage fees. I think consumers are much more apt to purchase smaller upgrades in space, and this is where SkyDrive has Drive beat. Whereas Google expects people to pay no less than $60/yr for an upgrade of 100GB for their accounts, SkyDrive allows you to purchase a reasonable 20GB extra (for 27GB total) for only $10/yr USD or 50GB for $25/yr USD. Even at the 100GB and 200GB price points, Microsoft's pricing is still decently cheaper per year. I haven't had the need to purchase more space yet, but when I do, I like that I'm not being forced into high level plans unnecessarily.
While it's not a huge deal breaker for most, it's also interesting to note that Microsoft has the widest array of mobile apps for SkyDrive, including Windows Phone which Google is avoiding to keep up its subliminal boycott of Microsoft devices. Conversely, however, Microsoft has made a SkyDrive app for Android, so you're not being punished for whichever device mixture you choose to use. Apple iOS included. +1 for Microsoft in this regard and keeping consumers above that of competitive spats.

SkyDrive accounts come with free access to use Microsoft's Office Web Apps, which are free web-based versions of its popular desktop apps. Above is a screenshot of a Word document I have open being edited in Word Web App. Notice much of a difference between editions? Feature parity between the two is still considerably vast, but Microsoft has been pushing updates out every quarter or so reducing the barriers. For what I need to get done, Office Web Apps usually work just fine -- aside from OneNote, which cannot handle tablet pen input over the web interface. Yet.

Are you ready to make the switch from Google Drive/Docs over to SkyDrive? If you've looked at your storage footprint, and made a conscious decision that SkyDrive could serve you better, then follow along as I'll walk you through the transition process step by step. It took me about a half hour to make the move, and mind you, my situation was exacerbated by a collection of items that were not only in Google Drive but also on an offline NAS box -- something which a majority of people likely won't be running up against.

Luckily, Google has put the tools into place to make the process quite easy. Here's what's involved:

1) Log into your Google Drive account and ensure you are not using over 7GB of space for your Drive needs.

As I showed earlier in the screenshot above in this same article, you can easily scroll your mouse over your storage space usage number in the lower left hand corner of Drive to see a detailed reading of what your Drive account is using in GB. For me, Gmail is the main pig for my storage needs -- with Drive using not even 1GB of room. If you are running close to the 7GB cap of what SkyDrive provides, you may need to make decisions on what stays in Drive, what needs to go on a personal NAS, or what may need a second SkyDrive account for. You can get creative with your file placement these days. It's not like Microsoft is limiting the number of SkyDrive accounts per person. Just remember that you can only tie one Microsoft account to the SkyDrive on your computer (either the standalone app route, or by using Windows 8.1 with integrated SkyDrive).

2) Head over to Google Takeout to make a personal ZIP archive of your Drive data.

Google Takeout is a little known tool that Google provides for free which is like your gateway to take anything off the Google ecosystem when moving to different services. Here, you can not only make a zip download of your entire Drive contents, but you can easily export a copy of your contacts, YouTube items, Google+ profile items, Blogger posts, etc. The only thing that is missing is Gmail, but you can easily transfer messages from Gmail to other services using Thunderbird or Outlook over IMAP.

Within Takeout, you just need to use the "Create an Archive" button on the homepage and then select Drive (and any other services you may want to pull down) and you will get a ZIP file to download to your desktop which is a full hard copy of all files in your Drive account.

Google Takeout offers you the chance to change file formats on exported files. Considering a switch from Office to LibreOffice and want to leverage OpenDocument formats instead? Go ahead and select them. SkyDrive plays just as nicely, from my experience, with OpenDocument files as it does in native Office formats.

NOTE: You will NOT get any files downloaded that are considered "Shared with You" from Drive. These are items that others have shared out from their accounts. The way Drive works, these items are not considered under your ownership and you need to manually pluck these items off if you want to move them. A pain in the rear if you have a lot of them, but it is what it is.

3) Unzip the ZIP file that Takeout gave you, and just use "drag and drop" on your computer to move it into SkyDrive.

Your ZIP file from Takeout should have a clean, Office file format copy of every file that used to be in your Google Drive. All Google Spreadsheets should be Excel files, all Google Doc files in Word format, etc (unless you opted for OpenDocument exports, that is). This makes it super easy and clean to move them over to SkyDrive. I merely did a drag and drop after cleaning up my folder structure and I was set. After merging in contents from my NAS box, which had another half of my personal doc collection, I had a full single spot to access all of my critical personal documents on SkyDrive now. No double searching across two places anymore.

And That's Really About It!

Depending on how much "stuff" you moved into SkyDrive (and if you had to purchase extra space to move all your items in) then your sync time from desktop to the cloud could be anywhere from a 10-15 mins to a few hours. I moved in about 2.3GB of files between my old Drive items and my NAS stuff, and it ended up taking me about 1.5 hrs for it all to fully sync between cloud and my desktop.

At this point, I truly don't care if my Thinkpad X230 gets lost. I see it this way: my laptop is always backed up to SkyDrive for things I properly save into those folders. The contents of my SSD are encrypted with BitLocker at all times now too. This is probably the first time in my computing life that I can call my day to day workhorse machine a truly disposable system without the pain and damage that may have been caused from theft or loss even just a few years ago. If something were to happen, I can load up any machine with Windows 8.1 and have my entire computing situation back up (barring programs, of course) in relatively short order. Even apps aren't a big deal today, as most of my apps are freeware or open source, and those which aren't -- namely Office 2013 and Creative Suite 6 -- are downloadable from the cloud easily and quickly.

Give SkyDrive a look, even if you've dismissed it in the past like I did. If you are running Windows 8.1, there is little reason you shouldn't be leveraging Microsoft's free cloud storage solution. They're truly a match made in heaven at this point, and with Office Web Apps maturing at a very quick pace, it likely won't be too long until we won't even need desktop Office to get our work done. Fingers crossed!

Photo Credit: dencg/Shutterstock

Derrick Wlodarz is an IT Specialist who owns Park Ridge, IL (USA) based technology consulting & service company FireLogic, with over eight+ years of IT experience in the private and public sectors. He holds numerous technical credentials from Microsoft, Google, and CompTIA and specializes in consulting customers on growing hot technologies such as Office 365, Google Apps, cloud-hosted VoIP, among others. Derrick is an active member of CompTIA's Subject Matter Expert Technical Advisory Council that shapes the future of CompTIA exams across the world. You can reach him at derrick at wlodarz dot net.