A cheaper version of Office 365 is now available, not that you considered it....

If you don’t need the family plan offered by Microsoft’s Office 365 Home Premium, relax—Microsoft announced an individual subscription on Thursday.

Dubbed Office 365 Personal, the new Office subscription works with just a single computer (either a Mac or a PC) and a tablet. Instead of paying $9.99 per month ($99 per year) for Office 365 Home Premium, Microsoft is charging $6.99 per month, or $69.99 annually, for the Personal version. The new subscription option will arrive later this spring, Microsoft said.

Microsoft will continue to offer Office 365 Home Premium, but will tighten the name to just Office 365 Home when the Personal Edition becomes available, the company said. The name change also reflects the fact that Office Home is, in fact, designed for a home, with licenses for up to 5 PCs or Macs, plus an additional 5 mobile devices such as phones or tablets. Office Personal, naturally, is for those without additional family members. Whether one chooses Office Personal or Office Home Premium, however, Microsoft will still offer them 60 minutes of free international Skype calls per month and 20 GB of OneDrive storage.

Microsoft giving you a $50 credit to upgrade now

Microsoft has anted up in its attempt to convince last-minute laggards to abandon Windows XP by handing a $50 carrot to people who buy a new Windows 8.1 device.

On its online Microsoft Store, the Redmond, Wash. company is giving a $50 gift card to customers who buy one of 16 Windows 8.1 notebooks, desktops, tablets or 2-in-1 hybrids. The card is good for future purchases at the e-store.

Microsoft kicked off the deal on March 4; it ends April 30.

The move was the latest in a series to convince customers to ditch the 13-year-old XP, which was sold on new PCs as recently as October 2010. Microsoft will issue the final public patches for XP security vulnerabilities on April 8.

The 16 devices that come with the $50 incentive include four notebooks, four all-in-one desktops, four tablets and four hybrids, all which run Windows 8.1. Prices range from a low of $229 (for a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet) to $1,299 (for an HP Envy Recline 27-in. all-in-one). Prices of the four notebooks run from $279 (Asus VivoBook) to $699 (Dell Inspiron). All are touch-enabled.

Customers who buy one of the 16 devices will also receive 90 days of free telephone and live-chat support, and can download Laplink Express, the free file- and settings-transfer tool Microsoft announced last week that is available to anyone, not just those who purchased a new system.

Although Microsoft has beaten the dump-XP drum for almost three years, in the last few months it has gotten more specific, telling customers that they should upgrade their existing PCs to Windows 8.1 or buy a new computer running that operating system. Both those solutions have been met with incredulity and derision by users stuck on XP, who have suggested Microsoft try other strategies to reduce the old OS's footprint, including reviving Windows 7 at retail -- most XP PC owners are suspicious of Windows 8.1's sweeping changes -- and offering deep discounts on new devices.

But the company's use of the $50 gift card shows that, even at this late date, Microsoft is not interested in a radical solution to XP's refusal to die. According to metrics firm Net Applications, XP currently powers 29.5% of all the world's personal computers, and 32.2% of those running Windows.

Amazon Prime has a price hike...$20

Free two-day shipping and access to streaming video from Amazon is going to cost you a bit more from now on.

The online retail giant on Thursday morning sent email to Prime members, informing them of a $20 price hike. This means the service will now set you back $99 a year, instead of $79. For existing members, the change will go into effect when your membership renews.

Google Drive just got cheaper....almost a steal at this point.

Google Thursday announced that prices of its fixed monthly data storage plans for its Drive service have been cut by as much as 80%.

The price for 100GB of capacity dropped from $4.99 to $1.99; the price for 1TB of capacity plummeted from $49.99 to $9.99; and the service is now offering 10TB of storage for $99.99.

Google Drive's new pricing chart (Source: Google)

Google Drive will continue to offer an initial 15GB of storage capacity at no charge.

Scott Johnston, a director of Google product management, said in a post on Google's blog site that the prices were cut due to "a number of recent infrastructure improvements."

"We're able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere," Johnston wrote.

Data stored on Google's Drive can also be accessed from Gmail and Google+ Photos.

Google Drive users already signed up for previous plans will automatically be moved to a similar new plan at no additional cost, according to Johnston.

Last year, Google tripled the amount of free space from 5GB to 15GB.

Among Google Drive's competitors is Microsoft's OneDrive and Apple's iCloud, but the companies most threatened by Google's move into online storage two years ago are smaller specialized service providers, such as DropBox, Box, SugarSync and YouSendIt.

Google's new prices now undercut those of competitors. For example, Dropbox offers 2GB for free and charges $9.99 a month for 100GB.

OneDrive offers 7GB of free storage, and charges $25 per year for 50GB of storage and $50 for 100GB.

If you insist on using XP, at least stop using Internet Explorer

People who plan to run Windows XP after Microsoft pulls the patch plug should dump Internet Explorer (IE) and replace it with a different browser, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said Monday.

US-CERT is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and regularly issues security warnings and threat alerts.

"Users who choose to continue using Windows XP after the end of support may mitigate some risks by using a Web browser other than Internet Explorer," US-CERT said in a Monday bulletin. "The Windows XP versions of some alternative browsers will continue to receive support temporarily. Users should consult the support pages of their chosen alternative browser for more details."

US-CERT's advice was not new: Security companies and experts have said the same before.

Because Microsoft ties support for Internet Explorer (IE) to the underlying operating system's end date, people running Windows XP will also not receive patches for IE7 or IE8, although others, including customers running the same browsers on Windows Vista and Windows 7, will continue to receive fixes.

IE6, which debuted several months before XP in 2001, will be retired from all support next month.

With IE patches ending, security professionals have urged people sticking with XP to run a browser that will receive bug fixes, like Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera.

So how does malware get on your system?.......from you

As the malware landscape evolves, it's helpful to understand how malware gets onto your machine. Knowing the bad guys' strategies gives you the edge while on-line and puts you in a stronger position to defend your data and PC against compromising threats.

The most common way malware gets onto your system is via the biggest security risk on any computer system - between the chair and the keyboard. According to Microsoft's recently published Security Intelligence Report, almost 45% of infections stem from the malware writer using various social engineering tactics to persuade the user to take some kind of action that results in the user running a malicious file, thereby infecting their own machine.

This means that the malware writer doesn't have to spend time thinking of complex and ingenious ways to infiltrate your machine – they just have to present you with a credible reason to install and run their program.

A common technique is to prey upon user's fear. People can be easily persuaded if you frighten them. The media frequently reports on cyber-crime and as we mentioned before, we're all aware of the need for an anti-malware program. Bad guys have taken full advantage of this and unleashed hundreds of legitimate looking security applications, that scan your machine then present you with a lot of scary, non-existent infections then try to trick you into buying the software to remove the infection. The best way to avoid this is to use a reputable anti-malware application like Ad-Aware.

Another common tactic is to lure the user into installing an application that will allow them to watch a video, but predictably that application turns out to be malware. Big surprise, no? To a lot of people, it is.