Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Having a recent System Image Backup on hand is a great way to get your PC back up and running quickly if you have to replace your hard drive or a virus trashes your Windows installation.
But if you recently upgraded to Windows 8.1 or bought a new PC with it pre-installed, you won’t find it in the same place it was in when using a previous Windows version.
Here’s how to create a System Image Backup in Windows 8.1: [Read more…]
By default, any time you perform any kind of search from the Windows 8.1 Start Screen you will also be presented with a list of search results from the Internet – courtesy of the Bing search engine. Some people love it, others hate it.
If you’re like me and prefer having your local searches confined just to the drives on your local computer, you can easily turn Bing Search Integration off. Here’s how: [Read more…]
If you purchased a new PC with Windows 8 pre-installed or upgraded an existing computer to Windows 8 from a previous version, chances are you are unhappy with Microsoft’s new operating system. Well, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and the end of the tunnel is rapidly approaching.
I wrote a post a while back explaining how Windows 8.1 would eventually be released as a free upgrade to make Windows 8 work more like Windows 7. Thankfully, we now know when “eventually” will be. [Read more…]
I found it odd when Microsoft decided to make the touch screen-friendly tiles of the new Start Screen the primary selling point of Windows 8.
To this day I still haven’t figured out why the folks in Redmond thought of laptop and Desktops PC users would ever prefer “touching” their computer screens over using their mice and keyboards.
Well, it turns out that I’m not the only person who feels that way. [Read more…]
Microsoft released Windows 8 with some changes that quickly proved to be extremely unpopular with seasoned Windows users, and as a result the sales of both Windows 8 itself and new PCs that come with it pre-installed never even made it out of second gear.
But to the company’s credit, they listened to their customers and reversed a couple of the most bone-headed decisions in the Windows 8.1 update.
The first and most appreciated change was putting the Start button back in its rightful place. The second (and to me at least, even more important) change was giving users the ability to bypass the reviled Start Screen and boot directly to the Desktop. The instructions that follow explain how to set Windows 8.1 to do just that: [Read more…]