Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
As you probably know, Windows 10 has both a Control Panel and a Settings app that make it easy to alter a plethora of Windows settings and features.
Unfortunately, these powerful tools also make it very easy for inexperienced users to make system changes that end up causing issues with either the Windows installation itself or the programs and apps that run under it.
If you’re like me you want your computer to respond to your clicks and perform its tasks as quickly as possible.
By default, Windows 10 has several features enabled that are designed to make the user interface look pretty.
For example, have you noticed how menus slide into view instead of just popping immediately onto the screen? Or perhaps you’ve noticed the cute little shadow that is displayed under your mouse pointer?
There are actually well over a dozen of these features that spiff up the user interface in Windows 10, and most of them are enabled by default. Unfortunately, all of those “pretty” features slow your system down by varying degrees.
Question from Ervin S.: Last night my son was using my computer (Acer All-in-One Desktop with Windows 10) to play a game on his school’s website.
At some point something must have went wrong because when I turned the computer on this morning I noticed that the taskbar had somehow been moved to the left side of the screen.
I tried to move the task bar back to the bottom of the screen but it won’t move. It’s like it’s stuck on the left-hand side. Can you tell me how to get it back on the bottom where it belongs?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
‘Sticky Notes’ have been a feature of every Windows version since Windows Vista, and they’re indeed still present in Windows 10.
If you’ve never used them, you might be wondering what in the world I’m talking about!
Well, you’re no doubt familiar with the ubiquitous 3M brand ‘Post-It Notes’ that you can use to leave yourself or others a reminder about something important.
You can think of ‘Sticky Notes’ as a digital version of ‘Post-It Notes” that you can “stick” onto your Windows Desktop. [Read more…]
In Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows it was easy to access a PC’s BIOS settings.
All you had to do was press a special key right after you pressed the power button and you’d be taken directly to the “BIOS Settings” screen.
Once on that screen you could make several changes to system behavior (choosing which drive to boot from, for example).
Likewise, you could display the “Boot Options” menu simply by pressing the F8 key immediately after pressing the power button.
But things are different with newer machines that were designed to run Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. [Read more…]