WinAmp Media Payer shutting down after 15 years

Posted by David Bernstein

If you have been a Windows user for a long time you most likely have used or at least heard of WinAmp Media Player. It was a very popular free program that would play audio and video files and was used by a lot of people. It was also used to stream audio from internet radio sites and the like. WinAmp supported a variety of file types making it popular for end users.

Once Windows Media Player and iTunes became the standards for audio and video playback WinAmp started fading away except for the faithful old school users. WinAmp was created in 1997 and soon bought out by AOL in 1999.

The latest version of WinAmp was released this Wednesday and the last time you will be able to download the software from their site will be on December 20^th. All of their associated web services will be shut down on the 20th as well. Even though former employees claim that WinAmp was pulling in 6 million a year the company has not commented on why they are shutting down.

 

Personal computer sales still on the decline

Posted by David Bernstein

If you think about it, when was the last time someone talked about some new software they got for their personal computer compared to the new app they downloaded to their smartphone or tablet? This is because PCs are old news while smartphones and tablets are still the new hot ticket.

With that being said it’s no wonder that personal computer sales have been declining for some time and are still on their way down. We don’t think they will be going away any time soon but their popularity seems to be. Apparently for the 6^th quarter in a row, PC sales have been dropping which of course causes concern for PC manufactures and PC operating system vendors such as Microsoft.

Research group IDC said the market fell nearly 8% and expects the PC market to bottom out next year and then start to recover in 2015 when people will have to replace their current computers assuming they don’t just switch to tablets. The drops were from other countries outside of the US according to their research.

IDC said Acer and Asus suffered declines of about 34% but report that Lenovo, HP and Dell have actually grown up to 3% thanks to the US market for PCs.