Andre's Blog

56. Help and Tips

If you’re a newcomer to Windows 8, and having trouble getting a feature to work, then scanning the official Help files might prove useful. Open the Charms bar, click Search, and type Help: ‘Help+Tips’ is a Windows 8.1 app with some useful, but basic information, while ‘Help and Support’ has more in-depth advice.

If you’re an expert PC user, though – or the problems are more severe – then consulting the usual Control Panel applets may point you in the right direction. Action Centre may reveal problems Windows has noticed already; Device Manager and Event Viewer often highlight relevant low-level issues, and the Troubleshooting applet has a wide range of fixes on offer.

57. Fix it if Windows 8 apps won’t launch

If you click a Windows 8 app, and nothing else happens, display issues are often the cause. In particular, Windows 8 apps don’t currently support screen resolutions lower than 1024 x 768 (or 1366 x 768 when snapping), so increase your resolution if possible (launch the desktop, right-click, select Screen Resolution).

Or if that’s no help, try updating your video drivers.

58. Solve Store problems

Installing or updating Windows 8 apps normally takes only a moment, but if your PC just can’t do either any more then there are several potential causes.

A corrupted Store cache is one of the more likely candidates, for instance, but fortunately Microsoft has provided a tool to help. Press Win+R, type wsreset and press Enter, and the Store cache will be cleaned for you.

If Windows Update is broken or disabled then you’ll also have app problems. Launch the Control Panel Troubleshooting applet (press Win+W, type trouble, and click “Troubleshooting”) and click “Fix problems with Windows update” to detect and resolve any issues.

And if these don’t help then it’s time to try the official Store troubleshooter.

59. Fix performance problems

If your Windows 8 system seems sluggish, the revamped Task Manager may be able to offer some clues. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to take a look.

Click ‘More Details’. The simplified Processes tab then reveals what’s currently using your CPU time, RAM, hard drive and network bandwidth. (The more in-depth data available in previous Task Manager versions is now accessible via the Details tab.)

The Performance tab gives you a graphical view of resource use over the last few seconds, while the App History dialog looks back over days or more to reveal which app is the most resource-hungry.

And is your boot time slow? Click the new Startup tab to see programs your system is launching when Windows boots. The ‘Startup impact’ now shows how much of an effect each of these has on your boot time; if you spot high impact programs you’re sure you don’t need, then right-clicking them and selecting ‘Disable’ will ensure they’re not loaded next time.

Powerful though all this is, if you can think of a reason to use the old Task Manager then it’s still accessible. Hold down the Windows key, press R, type TaskMGR and press Enter to launch it. (Typing TM will launch the new version.)

60. Diagnose with Device Manager events

If you’ve got a driver or hardware-related problem with Windows 8, launch Device Manager, browse to the relevant device, right-click it, select Properties and click the new Events tab. If Windows has installed drivers, related services or carried out other important actions on this device then you’ll now see them here, which is very useful when troubleshooting.

61. Speed up chkdsk

If you suspect your Windows 8 system may have a corrupted hard drive, then you might be tempted to use the old chkdsk /f command. This does still work, but it’s horribly slow, and won’t do anything at all until you reboot. What’s more, it may no longer be necessary now.

Windows 8 now regularly runs chkdsk in the background, looking for problems, and recording them. And then, when run at boot time, it doesn’t have to scan every single sector of your hard drive. It just fixes the known problems, usually in a few seconds.

The first lesson here is that you probably won’t have to use chkdsk any more.

But if you want to try it anyway, don’t use chkdsk /f first. Enter chkdsk /spotfix instead, agree to run a check when you next reboot, then restart your PC and any fixes will be applied, much more quickly.

While this works most of the time, there are no guarantees. If you’re out of other options then you can still try chkdsk /f later.

62. Recover your system

Windows 8 has performed well for us, but if you find it won’t boot at some point then you now have to press Shift+F8 during the launch process to access its recovery tools.

Access the Troubleshoot menu, then Advanced Options, and you’ll be able to try the Automatic Repair tool, which may fix your problems. No luck? The same menu enables you to use the last System Restore point, tweak key Windows Startup settings, and even open a command prompt if you’d like to troubleshoot your system manually.

If that all seems like too much hassle then the Troubleshoot menu’s option to ‘Refresh your PC’ may be preferable, because it essentially reinstalls Windows 8 but keeps your files, and will fix many issues.

But if it doesn’t then there’s always the more drastic ‘Reset your PC’ option, which removes all your files and installs a fresh new copy of Windows 8.

You don’t have to access these features from the boot menu, of course. If Windows 8 starts but seems very unstable, then open the new Recovery applet in Control Panel for easy access to the Refresh, Reset and other disaster recovery features.

39. Set Start screen background

If you’d like to change your lock, user tile or start screen images then go to the Start screen press Win + I, click ‘Change PC settings’ and choose the Personalize option. Browse the various tabs and you’ll be able to choose alternative images or backgrounds in a click or two.

In theory you’ll also be able to define apps that will display their status on the lock screen, although the app must specifically support this before it’ll be accessible from your Personalize settings.

Windows 8.1 extends Personalize with several useful options. In particular, it enables you to set your desktop wallpaper as the Start screen background, a great way to reduce the jarring effect when you’re bounced from one to the other.

40. Boot to the desktop

The Windows 8 Start screen hasn’t been Microsoft’s most successful innovation, and many Windows 8 users avoid it just as much as they can. But if that sounds like you, Windows 8.1 provides two new tweaks which just might help.

To begin, right-click the taskbar, select Properties > Navigation, check ‘Show the Apps view automatically when I go to Start’, and click OK. Clicking the Start button then displays all your installed applications, rather than app tiles, perhaps making it easier to find whatever program you need.

If that doesn’t work for you, though, it’s now possible to boot straight into the desktop and bypass the Start screen altogether. Right-click the taskbar, select Properties > Navigation, check ‘When I sign in or close all applications on a screen, go to the desktop instead of Start’, click OK, and you’ll be seeing far less of those colourful tiles in future.

41. Schedule maintenance

Windows 8 can run common maintenance tasks – software updates, security scanning, system diagnostics and more at a scheduled convenient time, which is good.

Unfortunately it doesn’t actually ask you what time is convenient, instead just setting it to 3am and allowing the system to wake your computer (if hardware and circumstances permit) to do its work. Which isn’t so good.

To change this, launch Control Panel, click System and Security > Action Centre > Maintenance. You can now click ‘Start maintenance’ to launch any outstanding tasks right now, while selecting ‘Change maintenance settings’ enables you to choose a more convenient time, and optionally disable the feature’s ability to wake up your computer if that’s not required.

42. Restore the Windows “Updates are available” alert

If you’ve set up Windows 8 to check for Windows updates but enable you to choose whether to download and install them, then of course it’s very important that the system tells you when updates are available. And it does this – but only in the logon screen. The “Updates are available” system tray icon has disappeared, so if you don’t log off or restart your PC regularly then no matter how important Microsoft’s latest security patches might be, you won’t hear about them.

As with many other Windows 8 issues, though, it’s not taken long for other developers to fill the gap, and there are now several free tools that can help. Install a copy of the Windows Update Notification Tool or the Windows Update Notifier and the “Updates are available” alert will be restored to your system tray.

43. Close apps easily

Closing a Windows 8 app can sometimes be awkward. You have to drag or swipe down from the very top of the screen right to the very bottom – which might be quite some distance – and if you don’t quite swipe all the way, the window just reappears and you have to start again.

The solution? Get Windows to close the app without you having to travel quite so far. It works like this.

Launch REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\Switcher, and create new DWORD values called MouseCloseThreshold and TouchCloseThreshold.

These define how far mouse and touch users will have to drag the app before they can drop and close it. Start by setting each value to the maximum 1000, reboot, and you’ll find you can now drop the window maybe only half way down the screen and still have it close correctly, which is much quicker and easier.

You may also be more likely to close apps accidentally, of course. If this happens, reduce the value of the relevant Registry key a little (the minimum value is 1, setting it to 0 prevents that method of closing at all), reboot and try again. Or delete the keys if you have problems with this and would like to restore the default settings.

44. Set a picture password

Windows 8 enables you to create a picture password, where you choose an image, then draw on it in a combination of taps, lines and circles – only someone who can reproduce this pattern will be able to log on. Select Win + I > More PC Settings > Users > Create a Picture Password to give this a try.

45. Hibernate or Sleep

You won’t necessarily see either Hibernate or Sleep in the Windows 8 shutdown dialogs, but if that’s a problem then you may be able to restore them.

Launch the Control Panel Power Options applet (powercfg.cpl) and click ‘Choose what the power buttons do’ in the left-hand pane.

If you see a ‘Change settings that are currently unavailable’ link, then click it, and if Windows 8 detects that your PC supports Sleep and Hibernate options then they’ll be displayed here. Check the boxes next to whatever you’d like to use, click Save Changes, and the new options should now appear in your shutdown dialogs.

46. Simplify search

By default Windows 8 includes every bundled app in its Search results. If you’ll never want to use some of these – the Store app, say – then select Win + I > Change PC Settings > > Search, choose which apps you don’t want included, and your search list will be more manageable in future.

47. Save bandwidth

Set up lots of live tiles on the Start screen and you could find they’re using a lot of network bandwidth, which could perhaps become a problem if you’re running a slow or metered connection. But Windows 8 does offer one option that might help.

Click your network connection on the taskbar (or the Start Screen Charms bar), right-click your network connection in the list and select “Set as metered connection” (you’ll only see this with wireless adaptors). Windows will then limit what individual live tiles can do, while also downloading only priority Windows updates, and applying a few other restrictions. Right-click the connection again and select “Set as unmetered” to change it back.

48. Touch keyboard

By default the Touch keyboard will try to help you out by, for instance, playing sounds as you type, capitalising the first letter of each sentence, adding a period if you double-tap the spacebar, and more. If any of this gets in your way, though, you can turn the relevant feature off: just go to Win + I > Change PC Settings > General and customise the keyboard to suit your needs.

49. Sync and privacy

One very useful Windows 8 feature is its ability to synchronise your settings with other PCs and devices. So if you’ve set up your new Windows Phone device with your contacts, email details and so on, then use the same Live account on Windows 8 and it’ll import them for you: very convenient.

Of course that may not always be a good idea. If several people use a device then you may not want your website passwords to be synced, for instance. In which case you’ll want to hold down the Windows key and press I, then click Change PC Settings > Sync Your Settings and disable anything you’d rather not share.

32. Tweak SmartScreen

Windows 8 now uses Internet Explorer’s SmartScreen system-wide, checking downloaded files to ensure they’re safe. This is a very good thing – a report by NSS Labs revealed that IE10 blocks more malware than any other browser – but if you have any problems then it can be tweaked.

Launch Control Panel, open the Action Centre applet, and click Change Windows SmartScreen Settings in the left-hand pane. Here you can keep the warning, but avoid the requirement for administrator approval, or turn SmartScreen off altogether. Make your choice and click OK to finish.

33. Set up Windows 8 File History

Windows 8 includes an excellent File History feature, which can regularly and automatically back up your libraries, desktop, contacts and favourites to a second drive (even a USB flash drive – just connect it, and choose ‘Configure this drive for backup using File History’ from the menu).

To set this up, go to Control Panel > System and Security > File History. Click Exclude Folders to help define what you’re saving, Advanced Settings to choose the backup frequency, Change Drive to choose the backup destination, and Turn On to enable the feature with your settings.

And once it’s been running for a while, you can check on the history for any file in Explorer by selecting it, choosing the Home tab and clicking History.

34. Use VHD – enhanced

Windows 7 added support for creating and attaching virtual hard drives in Microsoft’s VHD format. Now Windows 8 extends this with the new VHDX format, which improves performance, extends the maximum file size from 2 to 16TB, and makes the format “more resilient to power failure events” (so they shouldn’t get corrupted as easily). Launch the Computer Management Control Panel applet, choose Disk Management, and click Actions > Create VHD to give the format a try. Or, for an easy and free way to create VHDX files from physical drives, take a look at the excellent Disk2vhd.

35. Keep apps quiet

Windows 8 apps will often raise notifications, alerting you to new emails, messages, calendar events, status updates and more. This is generally a very good idea, but if you don’t want them popping up when you’re not working at the system (overnight, say) then a new Windows 8.1 feature can help.

Open the Charms bar, click Settings > Change PC settings > Search and Apps > Notifications. As before, you can selectively turn off notifications for individual apps, but a new ‘Quiet Hours’ option allows you to turn them off altogether for a period of time. Just turn ‘Quiet Hours’ on, set the ‘From’ and ‘To’ times – 00:00 to 07:00, say – and you’re done. Unless you’re using the PC, notifications will be disabled during that period.

36. Pool storage spaces

If you have multiple hard drives packed with data then you’ll know that managing them can be a hassle. But that’s all about to change with a new Windows 8 feature, Storage Spaces.

The idea is that you can take all your hard drives, whether connected via USB, SATA or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), and add them to a storage pool. And you can then create one or more spaces within this pool, formatting and accessing them as a single drive, so you’ve only one drive letter to worry about.

What’s more, the technology can also maximise your performance by spreading files across multiple drives (the system can then access each chunk simultaneously). There’s an option to mirror your files, too, so even if one disk fails your data remains safe. And if your Storage Space begins to fill up then just plug in another drive, add it to the pool and you can carry on as before.

Yes, we know, this is just a consumer-friendly take on RAID. But there’s nothing wrong with that, and it looks promising. If you’d like to read up on the technical details then the official Windows 8 blog has more, and you can then create and manage your drive pool from the new Control Panel\System and Security ‘Storage Spaces’ applet.

37. Enable virtual machines

Install 64-bit Windows 8 Professional or Enterprise and you also get Microsoft’s Hyper-V, enabling you to create and run virtual machines (as long as you’re not running in a virtual machine already). Launch OptionalFeatures.exe (press Windows Key and R and type it in to run), check Hyper-V and click OK to enable the feature. Then switch back to the Start screen, scroll to the right, find and click on the Hyper-V Manager tile to begin exploring its capabilities.

38. Smart search

When you’re in the mood to track down new Windows 8 features relating to a particular topic, you might be tempted to start by manually browsing Control Panel for interesting applets – but there is a simpler way.

If you’d like to know what’s new in the area of storage, say, just press Win+W to launch the Settings Search dialog, type “drive”, and the system will return a host of related options. That is, not just those with “drive” in the name, but anything storage-related: BitLocker, Device Manager, backup tools, disk cleanup, and interesting new features such as Storage Spaces.

This Search feature isn’t new, of course, but it’s easy to forget how useful this can be, especially when you’re trying to learn about a new operating system. So don’t just carry out specific searches, use the Apps search to look for general keywords such as “privacy” or “performance”, and you just might discover something new.