Analogue landlines are scheduled to be switched off nationwide in 2025, with the biggest telecom providers pushing ahead to switch customers in the coming months.

Britain’s biggest telecoms brands have agreed to temporarily suspend plans to switch customers from traditional landlines to a broadband-powered phone network following a number of “serious incidents” involving the failure of personal alarms.

Analogue landlines are scheduled to be switched off nationwide in 2025, with the biggest telecom providers pushing ahead to switch customers in the coming months. However, the process hasn’t been without issues.

Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan summoned the UK’s leading telecoms firms including Sky, BT, Virgin Media 02, and TalkTalk following incidents when telecare devices – personal alarms used by an estimated 1.8 million elderly and vulnerable people and designed to be activated in a health emergency or after a fall – failed because of digital landlines.

All UK phone and broadband providers are forging ahead with plans to upgrade millions of people from traditional copper phone lines to digital landlines ahead of the nationwide switch-off in 2025. BT, which is the single biggest provider in the UK, has branded its broadband-powered landline as Digital Voice.

When switching to the system, BT promises clearer calls and better protection from fraud and spam calls.

If you already have a full-fibre broadband plan with BT, nothing will change as the company has offered Digital Voice to fibre customers as standard for many years. BT stopped selling copper-based products to all new customers back in September.

If you’re unsure whether you’re already using the newer system, the easiest way to check whether you’re already using the new system is to look for “Digital Voice” branding on the handset or check whether it’s plugged into the back of your Wi-Fi router or a landline socket.

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In the early hours of December 6, 2022, a shipment of Evercade EXP Limited Edition handhelds, bound for customers in the US, UK and other non-EU countries was robbed in a potentially targeted criminal attack. A statement from Blaze Entertainment, the manufacturer of the Evercade EXP handheld tells us in a press release. The announcement was made following police investigation.

No one was hurt in the robbery of the upcoming handheld device, though over £500K of stock was lost as a result of the crime. Andrew Byatt, CEO of Blaze Entertainment stated the following:

“This is an unprecedented situation in the history of Blaze and Funstock and we deeply sympathize with all our fans and customers who are the victims of this theft.“

He continues to state that all units that were initially bound for consumers will be replaced, as the company has already begun to manufacture more units as soon as possible.

“We firmly believe that the customers of Blaze and Funstock are victims here and we apologise for the impact this event will cause. We hope all our customers can join us in condemning the actions of these criminals and ensuring this event will not be allowed to stop our enjoyment of the classic gaming experience that Evercade provides.”

The limited-edition Evercade EXP was initially due to launch on December 15, and offers a host of retro games to play on the handheld through a unique cartridge-based system.

Blaze also urges people who see suspicious stock on sale at third-party websites to step forward, as they could potentially be purchasing stolen goods. If you see that, they state to email interested@evercade.co.uk.

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Queen Elizabeth II in her robes on the occasion of her coronation in June 1953. Photograph: Cecil Beaton.

We are all deeply saddened to learn of the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Royal Family at this very difficult time.

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If you plan to continue using Windows 10 for the time being. The company also announced today that it’s started rolling out the November 2021 update for the operating system. Moving forward, Microsoft plans to move Windows 10 to a yearly feature update.

As before, Microsoft doesn’t recommend installing Windows 11 on a device that doesn’t meet the system requirements — though you can still do so. One thing to keep in mind is you might not get updates on a PC with an unsupported processor. When Microsoft first released Windows 11 on October 4th, the company said it expected it would offer the updates process.

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This last year has proved to be a another challenge as the Covid-19 pandemic has affected everybody on a global scale.

We will continue to provide our services and we look forward to supporting our residential and business customers.

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Some users affected by the glitch were also prevented from using the Windows Search option near the start menu. Now Microsoft has vowed to solve the issue and said a fix is on the way.

On its support page, the tech firm wrote: ‘Microsoft is getting reports that a small number of users may not receive results when using Windows Desktop Search and may see high CPU usage from SearchUI.exe.

‘This issue only occurs on devices that have disabled searching the web using Windows Desktop Search. ‘We are working on a resolution and estimate a solution will be available in mid-September.’

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It seems that Microsoft may have run into another major bug that and delay the roll out further still of the Spring update.

If you’ve been following the story of the Spring Creators Update,  you’ll recall that it was expected to launch last week, but then a serious issue was discovered which needed to be fixed.

Then, earlier this week, Microsoft’s Dona Sarkar (who is head of Windows testing) clarified that Windows 10 had indeed suffered from some reliability issues that caused outright crashes (BSODs), but that a fresh preview build (17134) which was pushed out solved these.

However, the bad news now is that build 17134 is beset by a new bugbear of its own. As Wccftech.com reports, those testing this fresh preview version of Windows 10 are having trouble with the Settings app.

Apparently, when you go into Default Apps and click to ‘Set defaults by app’, the Settings app crashes, simply disappearing and leaving you back at the desktop. This has been reported over a number of different systems, the suggestion being that it could be a somewhat widespread and not trivial issue.

Exactly what this fresh bug might mean isn’t clear yet, then, but if this does turn out to be a significant issue with a wider level of impact, then we could be looking at a further delay for the already late Spring Creators Update.

We were hoping it might arrive next week, but perhaps there’s even a danger now that the big update could fail to be released before May rolls around.

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Ever since Intel announced its first Core i9 processor for desktops last year, it’s only been a matter of time until the company brought that branding to laptops, too. Today, Intel is announcing its first Core i9 chip for laptops, with what it claims is “the best gaming and creation laptop processor Intel has ever built.”

The top-of-the-line model being announced today is the Intel Core i9-8950HK, which can reach speeds of up to 4.8 GHz with turbo boost, and is the first mobile Intel processor to offer six cores and 12 threads. Intel claims that translates to up to a 29 percent overall speed boost over the previous seventh-generation Intel chips, with 41 percent improvement for gaming and up to 59 percent faster 4K video editing.

Along with the Core i9 processors, Intel is also announcing i5 and i7 processors for laptops, which will also be based on the company’s 14nm++ architecture (known as Coffee Lake) instead of the first wave of the eighth-generation Kaby Lake R chips, which were enhanced versions of the same 14nm+ architecture of the seventh-generation chops.

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