The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
10. IBM to slash over 110,000 jobs in 26 per cent workforce reduction says report
January 2015 saw IBM cleave off over a quarter of its workforce, as it was revealed that the company would make its biggest series of redundancies since 1993.
The claim was later refuted by IBM who called it "ridiculous and baseless" - the total being apparently around 10,000.
A figure still hasn't been disclosed, but whichever way you look at it, things haven't been too rosy for the Big Blue this year.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
9. Lenovo: 'Yes, we shipped PCs with malware pre-installed that compromises your security'
February's Superfish didn't help the reputation of a dwindling devices industry, and Computing's own Graeme Burton was on hand to describe the whole sorry situation, as Lenovo explained how its "Visual Discovery browser-add on" had been causing "issues", and was swiftly to be removed from all PCs that the manufacturer shipped.
Translation: the game was up and the company had all-but admitted it had been installing software that grabbed adverts from the internet and shoved it into end users' browsers.
By August, Lenovo was at it again, this time injecting BIOS hacks into supposedly 'clean' PCs to install similarly dodgy software. Sneaky.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
8. The 10 worst-ever government IT projects
There's a not a lot Computing's Sooraj Shah doesn't know about government IT, which means he's also extremely familiar with it when it all goes wrong.
His feature took in anything from Charles Babbage's spectacular waste of money on failed early calculators to the Child Support Agency's recent spend of £300m to not improve an already disastrous system.
It's a rollicking read, so get involved, and find out how your taxes have been abused for so many years.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
7. PayPal back after global fault hit every account Monday night
Computing's former editor and occasional freelancer Chris Middleton returned to remind us all how it's done, getting the jump on this enormous PayPal outage after a company spokesperson admitted the true breadth of the fault, as well as the company's lax approach in informing its customers.
As Chris pointed out, a massive irony was that PayPal had only just been named a 'valuable global brand' by consultancy Interbrand. Ouch.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
The increasingly bleak situation for the PC and laptop market was highlighted in this January 2015 news story, as device manufacturers forecast that both the appearance of Windows 10 and the emergence of Intel's Skylake processors wouldn't do much to change the slow downward spiral.
They were right - it's a trend that doesn't seem to be abating.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
5. Microsoft Surface Pro 4: Everything we know so far
July's quick round-up of the (numerous) leaks from Redmond about what Microsoft might be putting into the latest version of Computing readers' favourite device - the Surface Pro - proved exceedingly popular.
We're also happy to say that our deft combination of rumour-gathering and good sense proved almost spot-on, including the assertion that it would do Microsoft some good to release something a little 'souped-up' alongside the Surface Pro 4. This, of course, turned out to be the Surface Book.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
4. IT salaries: Are you earning what you're worth?
If you're a CIO and you're earning less than £90,000 a year, it might be time to have a chat with your boss.
This is what we found when we pulled together salary details from various sources for this salary study earlier in the year.
Covering many roles from mid-level BI to CISOs and technical architects, the piece remains a useful checklist to make sure you're earning what your skills entitle you to.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
3. What next in the battle for Hadoop supremacy?
Sooraj Shah's excellent investigation into the shifting power plays in the Hadoop industry certainly turned heads. Intel buying an 18 per cent stake in Cloudera as just the start, however: the piece is really about discussing whether Cloudera's (and Intel's) non-warehouse approach to cloud databasing is the right one next to, say, Hortonworks' method of betting precisely on the warehouse.
It's only going to get more interesting in 2016.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
2. 'Fess up, Microsoft: Windows 10 is merely a rebranded Windows 8
Another cause of a Computing traffic spike was this barb about Microsoft's Windows 10 battle plan, courtesy of senior reporter Peter Gothard.
Is Windows 10 really just a rebranding exercise to fix the shambolic reputation of Windows 8? Even this far down the line, it seems a fair argument. Features such as shared APIs across devices and platforms and combined traditional and touch interfaces are still at the forefront - just more elegantly designed.
Is Windows 10 really just a version of Windows 8.2 that Microsoft will begin charging for after a year of grace? We may never know.
The top 10 news stories of 2015
All the hottest topics you've been reading most this year
1. Microsoft Office 365 and Azure experience widespread outage
It was four hours that shook the world, or at least a considerable part of it.
It seemed like an ordinary day as Computing lurched, bleary-eyed, into the office, hazelnut latte in hand (bleurgh, why can't you guys drink proper coffee? -Ed), and tried to log into our email.
Except we couldn't, because it was completely broken (I could, if you'd got in as early as me you'd have got round the login issues -Ed).
What ensued was a slowly dawning truth - an Azure malfunction in Europe had knocked out the login portals to a number of Microsoft services which depended on Azure to run.
It's still unclear how much the event cost enterprises in terms of lost productivity, but Microsoft even let the same thing happen again a few weeks later.
As cloud services continue to become more important to prop up our daily work, expect this kind of thing to keep happening into 2016. "Expect outage, rather than uptime" - not our words, but the forecast of cloud email pros Mimecast.
And on that cheery note: Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year to all of our readers!