iPhones and Windows10 – getting them to work together, run Windows in Windows

iPhones, from both a hardware and an apps perspective, have gotten so good that many people don't need to use a laptop or a desktop. Social media, email and shopping can all be done right on your phone.

But what if you want to see the pictures from your iPhone on a bigger screen? Or work on a document on your phone and your Windows device? Or back up your data to your Windows device?

Apple hasn't always been the best at "playing with others," but they're getting better at it. The latest version of iCloud for Windows is probably the best yet from Apple. With it, you can access the photos, videos, files and bookmarks on your iPhone. Of course, for it to work, you need to configure your phone to back up that stuff to iCloud in the first place. Most people do.

Download iCloud for Windows here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283 .

After you've downloaded iCloud for Windows, install it and login with your AppleID and password. Now you can choose which bits of your iPhone you want to save to your Windows device. The most common settings are your photos and iCloud Drive files.

You can sync the photos on your Windows device to iCloud using the iCloud for Windows app. It works best if you don't have many photos on your PC or are paying Apple for extra iCloud storage.

If you want to back up your iPhone to your PC you'll need to install iTunes first, and then wherever you connect your iPhone to your Windows device, you can create a backup.

Don't want to install iCloud for Windows or iTunes on your Windows device? No worries. Go to https://www.icloud.com/ and sign in with your AppleID. You can see most of the data from your phone there and open Pages and Numbers documents without having them installed on your Windows device.

Of course, there's another way or several

The Microsoft approach is to install the Outlook, OneDrive and Office apps on your iPhone and sign in to them using your Microsoft account login and password. Now you can access your email, photos and files from your iPhone and your Windows device, assuming you're using the same Microsoft username and password. And why wouldn't you?

The Google approach is to use Gmail, Google Drive and the rest of the Google apps. Everything syncs with the web rather than a specific operating system, so you should be able to get your files from anywhere. Google Photos is especially handy for getting to your photos from other devices.

I haven't mentioned anything about getting your iMessages on your Windows computer yet, because you can't. There is currently no way to get to your iMessages from Windows, and I don't see Apple enabling this anytime in the future.

Run Windows in Windows

Back in the day, Windows 95 was a pretty powerful operating system. No, really. Managing your RAM and HDD space for Windows 95 and other programs or games was a big part of having a computer.

To show how far modern hardware and operating systems have come, an engineer named Felix Rieseberg has created a version of Windows 95 that will run in a browser. Not a full copy of Windows 95, just a version of it. You download the app from GitHub here: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95 . Don't click on the green download button, scroll down to the installers section. Run it, and you can play Freecell, open Paint, and check out the ugly icons and window interfaces. Takes me back to when Michael Jordan was still playing basketball, the Olympics were in Atlanta, and a gallon of gas cost $1.23.

Progress, eh?

It sure looks that way

Whenever I delete an app from an iPhone, the shaking icons make it look like they're panicking over who gets deleted next. Either that or they're volunteering.

Do you have a computer or technology question? Greg Cunningham has been providing Tehachapi with on-site PC and network services since 2007. Email Greg at [email protected].