Microsoft announced this week that Windows 10 has hit a significant milestone. The flagship operating system is now in use on 1 billion - with a "B" - active devices each month.

Protect yourself now

900 million devices and counting

Microsoft is warning Windows 10 users to update their operating system immediately because of two "critical" vulnerabilities.

It's like a Surface Go for kids. It's powered by a 1.44 GHz, quad core Intel Atom x5-Z8350 processor, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage, which is upgradeable through a microSD slot.

Intel introduced new 8th Gen Intel Core vPro processors, the Intel Core processor family and Intel Xeon E-2100M processors designed for mobile workstations. Engineered to help make digital transformation real, organizations of all sizes can upgrade their fleets with these latest processors to optimize productivity with Windows 10 and help protect company assets, while also managing costs.

We're getting a slightly clearer picture of the performance hits on PCs from the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability patches.

AMD's new Ryzen chips based on the company's Zen CPU architecture are winning some accolades for providing good performance at competitive pricing. The high-end Ryzen 7 series were the first to ship, and the midrange Ryzen 5 series chips have also hit the market.

Despite a turbulent past, Windows PCs with ARM are making a grand return later this year, but only with Qualcomm chips. Another big ARM chipmaker, MediaTek, is sitting out the opportunity to put its ARM-based chips in Windows PCs because the company sees it as a limited opportunity.

At its Windows Hardware Engineering (WinHEC) conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said Thursday morning that it's partnered with Qualcomm to enable new, low-cost PCs. These are intended to replace Windows tablets built around Intel's Atom, a chip the company's essentially discontinued.

The outlook for PC shipments continues to call for eventual stabilization as competition from other devices eases, upgrades to new models and Windows 10 boost demand, and economic conditions around the world stabilize or improve. However, the decline in PC volume since early 2012 is still expected to linger through 2016 with later years struggling to boost volumes as economic issues and competing products continue to present headwinds, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

In Beijing, Microsoft and the Chinese government sign a deal that could bring Windows 10 to government-owned computers.

Not so long ago, the release of a new Windows operating system was a sure bet to drive a massive PC refresh cycle, boosting sales by double digit percentages. But that is a thing of the past.