Apple throws free Snow Leopard bone at MobileMe punters
Apple is now giving away an OS upgrade to as a ploy to wean punters off its MobileMe service and onto its iCloud storage offering. Cupertino's older OSes do not support iCloud.
Cupertino has informed MobileMe customers still using the 2007 Mac operating system Leopard that they can have the next version of the OS – the 2009 release, Snow Leopard – for free.
Apple hopes that after the punters have installed the software freebie, they will whip out their wallets and upgrade again to the latest Mac OS X (Mountain Lion), where they can use the new Apple cloud, iCloud, leaving MobileMe behind. Read more...
Amazon floats free Windows Server clouds
Amazon is giving Windows shops a taste of Microsoft's Windows server for free in the cloud.
The Amazon Web Service (AWS) Free Usage Tier now includes up to 750 hours of Windows Server 2008 R2 without having to pay the hard-to-catch cloud-fluffer anything.
Amazon is targeting developers – especially .NET heads – starting up anything that might turn into bigger paying customers once the devs' applications take off and grow.
Also available in the Free Usage Tier are another 750 free hours of Linux, along with S3, SimpleDB Elastic Block storage, and Elastic Load Balancer.
The amount of room available for free in Elastic Block Storage has also been boosted to 30GB and I/O requests doubled to two million. Read more...
7 free Windows tune-up tools and tips
You don't need to spend money to keep a Windows computer running in top form. Here's how to fix, clean, and maintain Windows using programs you can download now for free.
The following software and tips generally apply to Windows 7, Vista and XP, and are listed in the order you should use them for the first time on a computer you suspect may be infected with malware or running slower than it should.
1. Update Windows itself with Windows Update.
Though this should be a no-brainer, many Windows users don't install the latest updates for the OS provided by Microsoft (which are usually issued every Tuesday). Either they ignore the update notices that Windows sends them, or their Windows setup doesn't have automatic updating turned on. But ensuring that your installation of Windows has the latest updates and patches is one of the easiest ways to keep it functioning well. Read more...