WOW Weekly – Are LogMeIn at it Again, Surely Not?

Welcome to this week’s edition of WOW weekly, featuring LogMeIn, Apple, the number 7 and a Microsoft trade-in! This particular edition should be renamed to fortnightly as last week I devoted time to having a good clear out (home wise) and spending time with my children during the first week of their school holidays. I also managed to upgrade to El Capitan which was well worth the upgrade! Sadly I’ve given up trying to install Windows 10 on my aging 5-year-old laptop.

LogMeIn Buys into Password Management

LogMeIn recently announced that the company have acquired LastPass the popular password management service. If you didn’t already know LogMeIn lost a lot of users after announcing that they were going to stop free access to their popular Remote Desktop Software back in early 2014.

At the moment it’s uncertain that LogMeIn will do the same with LastPass but there will be a lot of customers that will have already made the switch to alternatives like Dashlane and KeepPass because they have lost faith. I will keep you posted.

Microsoft Windows 10 Trade-in Scheme

Microsoft are offering a trade-in scheme which offers an incentive to upgrade to Windows 10 by getting cash back for your old computer. The incentive offers up to £100 cash back when you buy a qualifying product.

Once you have made your purchase you have 14 days to claim online and then package up your old computer, laptop or chromebook to claim the cash back. The qualifying trade in items have to be under 5 years old, have a working power supply and battery (if they are portable). The screen also has to be minimum of 11.3″. In America they are running a similar offer (If you can call it that) offering $300 for you to trade in a Macbook. How generous!

Check out the UK’s Trade-in scheme.

Tool of the Week

A friend recently asked me if I could find an alternative to a well-known piece of software that comes with a shareware license which periodically nags you to buy it. The alternative to this was 7Zip which is open source. 7Zip allows you to compress/decompress popular formats like 7z, RAR, ZIP, GZIP and many more.

It also integrates into the windows context menu for easy access to quickly (un)compress files in a flash. It’s a must-have piece of software for any Windows users. There are also unofficial ports, Keka for the Mac and PeaZip is also pretty good alternative for Linux and Windows users too.

New Releases in Brief

Apple have been busy spoiling us yet again with updates to its office software for both iOS 9 and El Capitan. Pages word processing, Numbers spreadsheet and Keynote Presentations apps has improved compatibility with Office formats and offers better integration with HandOff allowing you to switch between Mac, iPad and iPhone etc for editing. They also integrate well with El Capitans new Split View. Head over to Apple to see the huge list of fixes and improvements.