Paragon HFS Plus For Windows 8/8.1

If you have installed Windows 8 making use of Boot Camp on a Mac computer, or you plug in an external drive that has been set up on Mac, chances are that you only have limited access to any drive or partition that has been formatted in the HFS+ format that is used by Apple Mac computers. This is because Apple only provides read-only drivers to access Mac formatted drives on Boot Camp Windows installs on Macs, while Windows itself comes without any support. Free read-only utilities exist, but if you wish to get full access to a HFS+ drive, you will have to pay for it.

Paragon HFS+ for Windows 8 or 8.1 Free Edition is one of those applications that does what it says on the package. After installing, your Windows 8.1 or 8 powered computer, or Mac running Windows 8 or 8.1 through Boot Camp, will be able to freely access any HFS or HFS+ formatted hard drive just like it was FAT, NTFS, or exFAT. This means full read and write access. You will have to register the program with Paragon free of cost during the setup process to get a product key and serial number. Paragon also strongly recommends the users to disable the Fast Start up option in Windows 8 OS. This can be done through the Power Options in Control Panel of all the Windows 8 versions.

This should be done before installing the driver to prevent possible corruption to the file system, even though some of the users have installed it with the Fast Startup feature enabled without facing any issues. This simply works out of the box too. Some of the previously inaccessible drives showed up like any other and the user will now be able to easily transfer the data to and from a Mac computer using an external HFS+ formatted drive as intermediary. A paid version is also available that supports all the Windows 8 versions and other versions of Windows like XP and above. This allows commercial usage and also extends support to the newer HFSX format if it is needed.

If you would like to know more on Paragon HFS+ for Windows 8 or 8.1, you can contact the Windows tech support team. They will be able to tell you more on this and the latest features of the program.

Windows 8 Consumers Outnumber Mac Users

According to StatCounter, the Windows 8 operating system by Microsoft has now outnumbered Apple’s OS X in total market share. The numbers for September show 7.46 percent market share for Windows 8 OS, which is an increase of 0.44 percent over the old month. This was more than enough to surpass the market share of Mac, which dropped by 0.2 percent to reach 6.98 percent.

Meanwhile, the old versions of Windows are somewhat steady. Windows 7 had a 0.03 drop to reach 51.98 percent, Windows XP gained by 0.01 points to reach 20.59 percent and Vista gained 0.09 points to reach 5.3 percent market share. If this news sounds similar, it is because last month, the rival measurement firm NetMarketShare found that the Windows 8 market share had cruised past OS X in the month of August. This trend continued in the month of September, with Windows 8 rising to 8.02 percent when compared to 7.54 percent for the Mac OS X.

NetMarketShare and StatCounter use different methodologies but both of the firms get their data by measuring the traffic on sampling of large websites. Both these place the Windows 8 usage ahead of all the versions of OS X combined.

Upgrade Blues

Nearly half of the Mac users have the latest version of the Mac OS called as Mountain Lion, according to the firm NetMarketShare. This means that the strategy of Apple to charge only 20 dollars for operating system upgrade is paying off. The large majority of the PC users are still using older versions of Windows. Microsoft had originally charged 49 dollars for the Windows 8 Pro upgrades before increasing the price to $120 for Windows 8 and $200 for the Windows 8 Pro. Lower Windows 8 versions will be charged less when compared to Windows 8 Pro.

The rising share of the Windows 8 OS is encouraging for Microsoft, but the greater health of computer industry is in jeopardy. The PC sales across the world are dropping and back-to-school sales in US dropped by 2.4 percent according to The NPD Group. This is because many of the users have turned to tablets instead of the $500 basic laptop PCs. The way for the PC makers may not be in the raw market share, but it lays in the high end Windows computers that are priced over 700 dollars.

The back-to-school sales of these computers rose by 24 percent this year. If you wish to know more on the sales of different Windows 8 versions, you can visit the official Microsoft website.