Upgraded to Windows 10? Then you’ll want to know how it’s better than Windows 7 and 8. Jonathan Parkyn and Daniel Booth reveal the best things you can do in the new OS that you couldn’t do in its predecessors
It’s now two months since Windows 10 launched, and the general reaction among Computeractive readers has been: ‘Yes, it’s good, but…’. Every user has their own ‘but’, whether it’s updates not working, software mysteriously vanishing or hardware packing up. As promised, we are continuing to fix your problems – no buts!
And yet there is still much that’s fantastic about Windows 10. As with previous versions of the operating system (OS), many of the best tools are hidden. Often these are functions that Microsoft thinks you won’t want to use much, which just goes to show how little the company knows about how most people use their PCs. Memo to Microsoft: the majority of people don’t use Windows in the way you make out in your expensive adverts. They just want a smooth OS that does the simple things well, and doesn’t try to be gimmicky.
So here are our favourite new things in Windows 10. Some of these features have never previously appeared in Windows; others improve those that did. But they all do one key thing: make your computer easier to use.
1 Access the secret Start menu
Isn’t it just typical? You wait ages for Microsoft to bring back the Start menu, then two arrive at once. As well as the main Start menu in Windows 10, there’s a hidden one just waiting to be discovered. Right-click Start and you’ll find a three-tiered list of tasks and options, including shortcuts to some of the operating system’s most essential tools. You can head straight to the old Control Panel from here, for example, as well as Device Manager, Power Options, Event Viewer, Disk Management and more. It’s also the quickest way to uninstall an application – just right-click Start and select Programs and Features’. Command Prompt (Admin), meanwhile, lets you open a cmd window with administrator privileges. A similar menu was available in Windows 8.1, but if you’re coming to Windows 10 from Windows 7, this will be completely new.
2 Pin your most used settings to the Start menu
Between them Windows 7 and 8 let you pin apps, programs, shortcuts and files to your Start menu/screen. Windows 10 goes one better by letting you pin almost any item in the Settings app with a simple right-click. So if you’re regularly running low on drive space, say, and you find yourself frequently checking your storage, you could navigate to Start, Settings, System, then right-click Storage on the left and select ‘Pin to Start’.
3 Scroll any open window
In previous versions of Windows, you could only ever scroll the active window. If you had more than one program running – a word processor and a web browser, say – you first had to click or press Alt+Tab to go to the other program. This made multitasking very frustrating.
Thankfully, Windows 10 addresses this. Click Start, Settings, Devices and select ‘Mouse & touchpad’. Here, make sure the option to ‘Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them’ is switched on. With this enabled, you can have two (or more) programs open on screen and scroll through any of them by moving your cursor over them.
4 See what’s open using Task View
Task View supersedes the old Alt+Tab task switcher (though this still works), giving you a broader, at-a-glance snapshot of open documents and programs. Open Task View by clicking its button in the Taskbar, or by pressing Windows key+Tab. Your Desktop will then be dimmed and you’ll see a preview of the programs and documents you have open.
5 Click through virtual desktops
Don’t abandon the Alt+Tab shortcut just yet, though. It has been given a new lease of life by the arrival of Windows 10’s virtual desktops. By default, Alt+Tab only shows windows open on the current Desktop, not any others you may have running. But you can change this in the Multitasking section of the Settings app. Type Settings in the Taskbar search field to open the app, click System then Multitasking.
6 Find out what’s hogging storage space
We’ve been using Windows 10 for only a few weeks and we’re already looking back in amazement at how awkward it was to carry out certain tasks in Windows 7 and 8. Even something as simple as finding out what was taking up the most space on your hard drive was an incredible chore, unless you installed a third-party program like WinDirStat (free from http://windirstat.info), which is great, if also somewhat complicated.
In Windows 10, though, it’s fantastically easy to find out exactly what’s eating into your hard-drive space. Click Start, Settings, System, Storage, then select the drive you want to analyse. You’ll be presented with a graphical view of how much space is currently being consumed, colour-coded by category.
7 Open any ISO file
Another thing that’s unduly complicated in Windows 7 and 8 is the way they handle ISO files. ISOs are disc-image files – data contained in special files that are formatted for CDs or DVDs. Let’s say you have an ISO that contains a file you need. Sadly, Windows 7 has precious little support for ISO files. To open one and view its contents you either need to physically burn the ISO to a disc or install a separate tool (such as Virtual CloneDrive – free from www.snipca.com/17892).
Windows 8 and 8.1 were slightly better because they allowed you to right-click an ISO file and select Mount to temporarily turn it into a virtual DVD-ROM drive, which lets you browse the ISO’s contents as if it were a real disc. But Windows 10 demonstrates just how unnecessary any of this was. Want to view, copy or extract any of the files contained in an ISO? Simply double-click it, like you would any other folder.
8 Get Cortana to use Chrome, not Edge
Dismissed as a gimmick by many users, the voice-activated app Cortana is actually one of Windows 10’s most innovative new tools. But annoyingly by default it opens on a page of Bing search results in Microsoft’s new Edge browser. This just won’t do if you prefer Google to Bing, and Chrome to Edge. If that sounds like you, simply change Windows 10’s default browser to Chrome.
Click Start, Settings, System, then ‘Default apps’. Scroll down to ‘Web browser’ and, if Chrome isn’t listed here, click Edge, then select Chrome from the list that pops up. Next, you need to install a Chrome extension that diverts all Bing searches to Google. There are a couple of good ones, including Chrometana (www.snipca.com/17901) and Bing2Google (www.snipca.com/17902). Next, ask Cortana to search the web for something. You should now see a list of Google search results open in Chrome.
9 Copy and paste command prompt
There are dozens of slight but significant improvements in Windows 10 that may not grab the headlines, but do make it much easier to use your PC.
One of these is the ability to copy and paste into the Command Prompt window using keyboard shortcuts. If you’ve ever tried using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste a complicated text string from, say, a web page into the Command Prompt in Windows 7 or 8, you’ll have been met with the annoying ^V character instead of the command line you copied.
That’s not the case in Windows 10. Click Start, type cmd and press Enter, then rightclick the program header bar at the top of the window and select Properties. In the Options tab, make sure there’s a tick next to ‘Enable Ctrl key shortcuts’ and click OK. Now you can copy and paste freely.
10 Instantly access old versions of files
Technically speaking, File History is nothing new – it first saw the light of day in Windows 8. It continuously backs up your personal files and folders, so all you need to do is keep a large external hard drive attached.
To enable it, click Start, Settings, ‘Update & security’, then Backup, switch File History on and let it do its thing. It keeps previous versions of your files, so that you can restore them if you lose them, and even revert to an earlier incarnation if, say, the file has been changed and you want to go back to how it was before.
But what’s unique to Windows 10 is the ability to roll back a file merely by right-clicking it, selecting Properties, then clicking the Previous Versions tab. Simply select the earlier version you want from the list and you can then click Open to view it or Restore to roll it back. Click the down arrow next to Restore then select Restore To to save this earlier version in another location, so that you can compare the two versions.
11 Find out what’s draining your battery
Windows 10’s Battery Saver mode has received more attention, but the new Battery Use tool is arguably more useful. On a laptop or tablet, click Start, Settings, System, ‘Battery saver’. Then click ‘Battery use’ on the right, under Overview. Similar to the battery-usage setting in Android, this tool displays lots of useful information about what’s sapping your battery power. You can then make appropriate adjustments, such as lowering brightness, switching off Wi-Fi and so on. It’s astonishing that Windows hasn’t had a tool like this before now.
12 Go faster by disabling background apps
Also useful for preserving battery life, and for giving overall performance a shot in the arm, is Windows 10’s ability to disable (or enable) apps that run in the background. You can access the settings that control these via the Battery Use options if you’re using a laptop or tablet (see previous tip).
On a desktop PC, you’ll need to click Start, Settings, Privacy, then ‘Background apps’. Either way, you’ll be presented with a long list of apps that have on/off switches next to them. See one you don’t need? Simply switch it off to conserve power and other resources. Some apps, such as Alarms & Clock, Calendar and Settings, are better left switched on.
13 Open storage devices instantly
There’s a new way to make Windows perform a particular task whenever you connect an external hard drive, an SD card, or an iPhone to your PC. You do this by setting up AutoPlay commands. Open Settings, click the Devices group of settings then click the AutoPlay tab. Select what you want to do in the relevant dropdown menu.
14 Find favourite files and folders faster
Windows 7 and 8 have a useful Recent Places section in their respective versions of Windows/File Explorer, which takes you to folders you’ve recently visited. What’s more, you can also add permanent shortcuts to specific locations to a Favorites list in the left-hand pane.
While both of these are great, Windows 10 goes a step further by providing you with a ‘Quick access’ section that combines both concepts. As with Recent Places, by default the ‘Quick access’ area displays links to recently and frequently visited folders. But you can add a permanent link to any folder by right-clicking it and selecting ‘Pin to Quick access’. Better still, ‘Quick access’ is now the default view when you open File Explorer, letting you get to your favourite folders fast. And, in the main area of the Explorer window just below your ‘Frequent folders’, you’ll also find an automatically populated list of ‘Recent files’.
15 Clear files and folders from ‘Quick access’
So, having automatic lists of all the files and folders you’ve recently opened in ‘Quick access’ is very convenient. But what if you’re worried about privacy? Perhaps you use a shared PC. Or maybe you don’t want your husband or wife to stumble upon that Surprise_Birthday_Party.doc you’ve been working on.
Whatever you need to hide from prying eyes, Windows 10 makes it easy to remove or clear recent files and folders from Explorer’s ‘Quick access’ menu. To get rid of a single file from the ‘Recent files’ list, right-click it then select ‘Remove from Quick access’ – this won’t delete the file itself, just the shortcut in ‘Recent files’. Alternatively, click the View tab in File Explorer and select Options. In the Privacy box at the bottom of the General tab, you can click Clear to remove all current recent files and frequent folders in one fell swoop, or untick the two boxes here to turn off both features permanently.
If you’re a traditionalist and prefer to see the old My Computer-style list of drives (instead of the ‘Quick access’ menu), whenever you open File Explorer click the dropdown menu next to the ‘Open File Explorer to’ option at the top of the General tab and select This PC. Click OK when you’ve finished.
16 Apply filters to your photos
Windows 10’s Photos program will never rival Photoshop, but then it doesn’t cost £100. It doesn’t cost anything, in fact, because it’s built in. It’s also easily the best photo-editing tool Microsoft has ever produced, offering new filters, effects and fixes. To see how a photo will look with a filter applied, open Photos, click the Filters button on the left, then click the preview thumbnails on the right.
17 Open any file from any PC using OneDrive
By using OneDrive in Windows 10, you can now access not only those files you’ve stored online (in the ‘cloud’), but also those that are stored on another PC’s hard drive – wherever it happens to be. You used to be able to do this with the old OneDrive app but, oddly, Microsoft dumped this in Windows 8.1. Thankfully, this brilliant ability has been restored in Windows 10.
To enable this feature, right-click on the OneDrive icon in your notification area (you may have to click the up arrow first to reveal the icon) and select Settings. In the window that opens, tick the box next to ‘Let me use OneDrive to fetch any of my files on this PC’ and click OK. Restart OneDrive by right-clicking the notification area icon again and selecting Exit, then clicking Start, typing onedrive and pressing Enter. Leaving that PC switched on, log into onedrive.live.com on another PC (it doesn’t have to be a Windows 10 one) and look for your computer’s name – it willl be listed under PCs on the left. Click this to browse the files on your other computer remotely.
18 Convert anything to PDF
Creating your own PDF files is very handy, letting you convert files to documents that are easy to share or transfer to mobile devices, for example. Previously, if you wanted to make PDF files you needed either a very expensive professional PDF-creation program or a free third-party tool that let you print to a virtual printer. Some of these free tools, such as CutePDF Writer (www.cutepdf.com), are even fairly good. But others are difficult to use, and come with adware.
We were delighted to see therefore that Windows 10 has its own built-in PDF printer, letting you create or convert to a PDF from within almost any program or app. Want to save a PDF of a route in the Maps app, for instance? Press Ctrl+P to open the print dialogue box, click the dropdown menu under Printer, select ‘Microsoft Print to PDF’, then click Print. This saves the PDF to your Documents folder. This works for web pages, Office documents and any program that lets you print.
19 Boot to hidden recovery tools
When things went pear-shaped in Windows 7 or 8, the tools required to fix the problems were often scattered all over the place. Helpfully, Windows 10 gathers Safe Mode, System Restore and other troubleshooting tools together in a useful alternative boot menu.
Click Start, Settings, ‘Update & Security’, Recovery, then click ‘Restart now’ under the ‘Advanced start-up’ heading. Or, better still, just click Start, Power then hold down the Shift key and click Restart. Both methods will boot you to a recovery boot menu – click Troubleshoot, then ‘Advanced options’. From here you can restore from a system image backup, roll back to an earlier system restore point, run an automated Start-up Repair tool or click Start-up Settings to boot into Safe Mode.
The side effect of this is that, in most cases, you can no longer bash the F8 key during startup to access the Safe Mode menu. But if your PC won’t start, you can get to these recovery tools by booting from either a Windows 10 DVD, or from a Recovery Drive – it’s well worth making one of these and keeping it safe in case of emergency.