Windows 10: The best tricks, tips, and tweaks

Brad Chacos

Digging deep into Windows 10

Windows 10, Microsoft’s back-to-basics re-embracing of the PC, is already brimming with handy new features, and with all the new goodies comes with a legion of new tweaks and tricks—some of which unlock powerful functionality hidden to everyday users.
Others, though, simply let you mold some of Windows 10’s new features into the shape you see fit. Here are some of the most useful Windows 10 tweaks, tricks, and tips we’ve found. Be warned: Some of these may break as the operating system evolves, given Microsoft’s new “Windows as a service” mentality, though we plan to update this article over time. Got any tricks of your own? Share them in the comments!

Make Cortana's ears perk up

Cortana’s finally made the leap to the PC in Windows 10, assuming control of the operating system’s search functions and dishing out just as much sass as the Windows Phone version. But by default, she doesn’t listen for your commands.

If you’d like to be able to just bark commands at your PC, open Cortana by clicking the search field in the taskbar and select the Notebook icon in the left-side options pane. Select Settings from the list, then simply enable the “Let Cortana respond when you say ‘Hey Cortana’” option. You’ll need an active microphone for this to work, of course.

While you’re poking around Cortana’s options, you can dive into the Notebook menu to fine-tune exactly what personal data Microsoft’s digital assistant can access. Remember, however, that like Google Now, Cortana’s effectiveness is directly related to how much she knows about you.

Powerful natural language search

Cortana can handle all sorts of commands you issue using natural language, such as playing music, creating reminders, or showing you the weather, but the most powerful use of her natural language abilities revolves around basic search capabilities. You can give Cortana basic commands like “Find pictures from June” or “Find documents with Windows 10” and she’ll apply the appropriate filters, then scour your local files and OneDrive storage for results.

Customize your Start menu

Don’t forget to make the Start menu your own. If you appreciate the blend of the traditional interface with the Live Tiles, note that you can right-click on any tile and select Resize to alter the tile’s dimensions—just like on the Windows 8 Start screen.

Alternatively, if you loathe Live Tiles and the Metro interface with the ferocity of a thousand suns, you can also right-click on every one of the defaults in the Start menu and select Uninstall to wipe them from your system. (Or simply Unpin from Start if you’d rather hide than eradicate them.) Repopulate them with desktop software of your choosing—you can right-click any app or program and select Pin to Start—and before you know it, it’ll be kind-of-sort-of like the Windows 7 Start menu all over again.

Make Mail your own

Windows 10’s overhauled Mail and Calendar apps rock compared to Windows 8’s lackluster offerings. They’re lightning fast, more full-featured, and infinitely more mouse-friendly than before.

Even better, the new Mail adds customization options that let you put a personal touch on the app. Not only can you change the image in the preview pane with the picture of your choice, but you can also configure how Mail behaves when you perform on of its new swipe gestures on a message.
To start tinkering, click the cog icon in the lower-left corner of the app, then select Options. Wah-lah! You’ll find all the gesture options in the Quick Actions portion.

Turn off File Explorer's Quick Access view

When you open File Explorer in Windows 10, it defaults to a new Quick Access view that shows your most frequently accessed folders and recently viewed files. I love it, personally, but if you’d rather File Explorer defaulted to the “This PC” view found in Windows 8, here’s how.
Open File Explorer, then select View > Options from the Ribbon. A Folder Options window will open. Click the “Open File Explorer” drop-down menu at top, then select the “This PC” option. Click OK and you’re done!

Move open windows between virtual desktops

Virtual desktops let you segregate your open apps into discrete areas—literally multiple, virtualized versions of your PC’s desktops. Switching between open virtual desktops is easy enough using Task View (the button that looks like two panels, one over the other, in the taskbard) or Windows key + Tab, while Alt + Tab jumps you between open apps across all desktops. There’s also a way to actually shift an open app from one virtual desktop to another if you’d like to shuffle things around.

First, head to the virtual desktop housing the app you’d like to move to another virtual desktop, then open the Task View interface. Just click-and-hold on the app you’d like to move, then drag it to the desired virtual desktop at the bottom of the screen. You can also drag it to the “+New Desktop” option in the lower-right corner to create a new virtual desktop for the app.

Schedule your restarts

This is wonderful. If you’ve got pending updates that require you to reboot your PC, Windows 10 will allow you to schedule a specific time for it to do so. Finally!

Open the Settings option in the Start menu, then head to Updates and Recovery > Windows Update. If you have an update pending, you’ll see the screen at left, which lets you schedule your reboot after you select the “Select a restart time” radio button. Even better, you can dive into the Advanced options and link and ask Windows to notify you to schedule a reboot whenever updates are ready to rock.

Get Windows Updates from other sources

But the Windows Update upgrades don’t end there. Windows 10 introduces a new option that lets you download updates using peer-to-peer technology, rather than Microsoft directly. It could help you get that hot security patch faster when everybody’s hammering Microsoft’s dedicated servers, or save you bandwidth in a computer-crowded house—just download the new patch once from Microsoft, then share it among the PCs under your care.

To tinker with the setting, head to Settings > Update & Recovery > Windows Update > Advanced Options > Choose how you download updates. By default, “Get updates from more than one place” is enabled and configured to grab updates from PCs on both your local network and the Internet at large.

Secret, powerful new Command Prompt tools

Windows 10 packs a slew of nifty new command line features, including—hallelujah!—the ability to copy and paste inside the command prompt with Crtl + C and Crtl + V.

To activate the goodies, open the command prompt. Right-click its title bar, then select Properties. You can find and enable the new features under the “Edit Options” section of the Options tab.

Record a video of an app

Windows 10’s new Game DVR function is supposed to be used for recording video evidence of your most glorious gaming moments, but it’ll actually let you create videos of any open app or desktop software (though not OS-level areas like File Explorer or the desktop).

To summon it, simply press Windows key + G. A prompt will ask you if you want to open the Game bar. Lie your butt off and click the “Yes, this is a game box” and various options will appear in a floating bar. Simply click the circular Record button to capture a video. You can find your saved videos in the Game DVR section of the Xbox app, or inside your user folder under Video > Captures.

Fresh keyboard shortcuts!

Windows 10 packs a handful of fresh keyboard shortcuts, all tied to newfound abilities inside the revamped operating system. There are many more than we can list here, so head over to PCWorld’s guide to Windows 10’s keyboard shortcuts to learn all about them.

GodMode

The legendary GodMode, a hidden staple for Windows power users, makes its return in Windows 10. As before, activating it unveils a power user menu that brings together all of your system’s far-flung settings and configuration options into a single location. Just create a new folder and rename it to following:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Don’t forget the period after “GodMode”, and you can rename the “GodMode” portion whatever you’d like if you want another name for the folder.

Solitaire returns!

After being banished to the Windows Store in Windows 8, Solitaire is back in Windows 10, baby. But it can be tricky to find.

Solitaire’s not in the Start menu, and its old Start > Programs> Accessories > Games stomping grounds aren’t found in Windows 10. Looking for Solitaire in the All Apps section of the Start menu is also a fruitless endeavor—but that’s because the game’s officially called “Microsoft Solitaire Collection Preview.” You can find that in All Apps, or just search for Solitaire. It’ll pop right up.

Enjoy!

SOS!

Did you break something in Windows 10 or one of your Microsoft apps? Don’t sweat it—help is just a few clicks away.
Just look for the new Contact Support app inside the All Apps menu. It can point you towards the appropriate community forums to find help for the issue, or even connect you with a Microsoft support representative via online chat or phone if you stumble into a particularly bad problem.

Offline Maps

Speaking of apps, the revamped universal Maps app, like any maps tool worth using (and unlike the Windows 8 Maps app), packs an offline maps feature. Click the Settings (gear) icon in Maps, then select Download or update maps under the “Offline maps” header.

You’ll be bounced to the Settings app, where you’ll be able to select which continent, then country whose offline map you’d like to download. (If you’re downloading a U.S. map, you'll also have to select which state you need.) Helpfully, Windows tells you how large the download will be before you start scraping the maps.

Chameleon

The customization doesn’t end there. Windows 10 offers you more granular control over the color of your taskbar, Start menu, and search field.

Open the Start menu and head to Settings > Personalization > Colors to start tweaking things. The “Automatically pick a color from my background” option does what it claims, then applies that color to the Cortana/search field and underneath the icons of open apps. “Show color on taskbar and Start menu” also does just that, while disabling “Make Start menu transparent”—which is enabled by default—removes the subtle see-through effect in favor of a full-blown opaque background for both the Start menu and the taskbar.

Enable Tablet Mode

Windows 10’s Continuum, which dynamically switches from the traditional desktop to a more Metro-like interface when you’re using a touchscreen, is supposed to kick into action when you connect or disconnect a keyboard from your Windows hybrid or tablet. But what if you’re using a standard PC and just plain love full-screen apps and the Live-Tile-strewn Start screen, rather than the Start menu?

Easy! Activate Tablet Mode. Open up Windows 10’s new Action Center—the small icon that looks like a comic-book word bubble in your system tray—and click the Tablet Mode button. Everything will be removed from your desktop, save for spaced-out icons for the Start button, Cortana, and Task View. (Want your open and pinned apps to stay on the taskbar? The option's found in Tablet Mode settings, which we cover later.) Now press the Start button to bask in the full-screen apps and Start screen, since that's obviously your thing.

Tinker with Tablet Mode

But what if you don’t want to fuss with all that manual Tablet Mode labor? While Windows 10 should intelligently switch between the two when you’re using a hybrid, you can also tweak how the operating system handles Continuum.

Simply search for “Tablet Mode” and select the “Tablet Mode Settings” option that appears. Here, you’ll be able to tell Windows whether you want to even use Tablet Mode on this device, and specify how you want to handle Tablet Mode prompts if so. You can also tell Windows to keep your open and pinned apps on the taskbar when in Tablet Mode if you so desire, as well as to boot into tablet mode at startup.

Get rid of the old stuff

When you upgrade to Windows 10 over an existing Windows 7 or 8 installation, it keeps a copy of your old operating system around in a folder dubbed Windows.old just case you need to revert back for any reason. If you know you’re never going back you can delete that folder to reclaim the lost gigabytes—but it’s not as simple as right-clicking on it and selecting Delete.

Search for “Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files”. Click the shortcut, select your primary hard drive (if you have multiple installed), and in the window that appears, click “Clean up system files.” After Windows thinks for a second, check the “Previous Windows installations” box in the list, then click OK and confirm you want to delete the files.

Manage your notifications

System-wide notifications were a highlight feature for Windows Store apps in Windows 8, and Windows 10’s new Action Center lets you actually manage them, making notifications useful rather than one-off shouts into the wind.

You might not want every Windows Store app you install barking at you all the time, however, or maybe you don’t want to see any notifications while you’re in presentation mode. To tinker with you your notification settings, head to Start menu > Settings > Systems > Notifications and actions. Individual Windows Store apps tend to have more granular notification options in the Settings menus inside the apps themselves.

Edge's reading enhancements

Windows 10’s new Edge browser drags Microsoft’s web efforts into the modern era, with a blazing fast engine and nifty forward-thinking tricks like intelligent, automatic Cortana integration for supplementing the info you’re looking at. But to me, the most refreshing aspects of Edge are its reader-first extras, which carry over from Windows 8’s Metro IE app: Reading View and Reading List.

Reading View (the small book icon, next to the bookmark star in the browser bar) strips away ads, sidebar images, and other clutter to present a clean, straightforward reading experience. Edge also supports sharing to the Reading List app, which functions like Pocket or Instapaper, essentially letting you a story for later reading. To save a juicy article, simply click the bookmark star and opt to save the article to your Reading List rather than as a bookmark.