Windows 10 will probably be installed on 100 million computers within the next few weeks. Microsoft expects adoption to hit 1 billion within 3 years as existing computers are updated and new computers with Windows 10 are bought. Maybe your computer is in the first 100 million. I have heard from several people who read the website or listen to the podcast that they've upgraded their systems and, for the most part, the upgrades seem to have gone well. If you're in that group or if you're wondering what you'll find when you upgrade, some tips, tricks, and tweaks might be useful.
Put application updates at the top of your list. Several software publishers have made changes designed to make their applications fit better with Windows 10. Take Firefox as an example.
Mozilla notes that its updates "give Firefox a streamlined feel" and also points to bolder design elements and less chrome so users will have more space for viewing the Web.
If you upgrade to Windows 10 or buy a computer that already has it installed, your default browser will be Microsoft Edge. It's easy enough to restore Firefox as your default browser and I'll cover that later in an item that describes how to select default applications.
Mozilla has updated the process that controls add-ons. The add-ons add features to Firefox, but they also have been responsible for performance and security problems. Mozilla will now certify add-ons based on guidelines they have provided to add-on developers. Firefox will start displaying warnings next to unsigned add-ons in Firefox. In the next version of Firefox, unsigned add-ons will be disabled by default and you will not be able to restore them until the developer completes the Mozilla certification process. This behavior is already present in the beta version of Firefox.
The Start Menu is now a hybrid of the old (Windows 7) and the new (Windows 8). Although I keep my most-used applications on the Task Bar and use Search to start other applications, the new design may convince me to give the Start Menu another look.
If you don't want to see any of the Live Tiles, just right-click them and choose the un-pin option. You can pin your own frequently used applications as tiles and the Most Used section is still present.
You may have a Search Bar next to the Start Menu. Although this can be useful, I think it takes up too much space. Search is launched automatically when you press the Windows Key ("WinKey", the one with the Windows logo on it) and start typing, so you really don't need a dedicated Search Bar.
By the way, if you have an old keyboard that doesn't have a WinKey, Ctrl-Esc performs the same function.
To hide the Search Bar, right-click anywhere on the Task Bar, click Search, and then select Hide. While you're in the neighborhood, you may also want to eliminate the Task View icon on the Task Bar because there's a keyboard shortcut: WinKey-Tab.
I'm in favor of not squandering valuable control surface real estate on icons that I don't need.
Both Apple and Linux systems have had virtual desktops for a while now and now the function has come to Windows.
You might put work-related applications such as Word, Excel, and the MySQL Workbench on one virtual desktop and then place Solitaire and Facebook on a second virtual desktop. I have created as many as 6 desktops. There's probably a limit, but I'll probably never exceed it.
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Remember the DOS window? These days it's called a Command window, but it still looks and acts like DOS. Some tasks can be accomplished faster using the command line interface and some utilities have no graphical user interface.
New customizations are possible, including making the background transparent, resizing the window, setting the typeface size, and (at last!) turning on the ability to copy and paste using standard keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V). You can also enable text selection using the arrow keys (much like in a word processor application).
Right click on the Command window's border and choose Properties. Transparency is controlled on the Colors pane and text selection changes are on the Options pane.
Call it Developer Mode, if you prefer, or Power Mode. No matter what you call it, this mode is hidden by default. Activating it doesn't add any new features, but it places access to a bunch of utilities that developers and power users need from time to time.
Create a new folder and give it the name of your choice (GodMode, Fred, DeveloperMode, whatever) followed by a period and this globally unique identifier: {ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Example: Developer Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
Sometimes you may have a website open for reference while you're writing. You need to scroll the website, so you hover the mouse over the browser and spin the scroll wheel on the mouse. The Web page stays where it is and your document scrolls. Ugh!
The scroll function works only in the active window. That's the default behavior in Windows 10, too, but you can change it. Open Settings, choose Devices, then select Mouse and Touchpad and turn on"Scroll inactive windows when I hover over them."
This is one of those features that you never knew you needed until you have the opportunity to try it and then you wonder why somebody didn't invent it earlier.
Microsoft kept your old Windows 7 or 8.1 files just in case you want to go back. They're in a Windows.old directory. Once you've decided that you won't be going back, you can get rid of the old files. This decision took about 10 seconds on the tablet because it has a very small disk drive.
The files are still on the desktop and I plan to keep them for another week or two even though I've already confirmed that everything is working as expected.
To get rid of the old files and also clean up other unnecessary files, open Search (press WinKey) and type "free up disk". You'll see "Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files" at or near the top of the list. Click the shortcut to open the Control Panel applet.
If you have more than one disk drive, select the primary hard drive and then click "Clean up system files" in the next window. Another dialog box will open with an option labeled "Previous Windows installations". Place a check in the appropriate box and then proceed.
This is a good location to visit occasionally because you can instruct the operating system to remove unnecessary files that build up over time.
Whether you use Cortana or the keyboard, you'll find the Windows 10 search function to be powerful.
If you have a microphone that Cortana can use, I encourage using the feature. "Hey Cortana, find Word documents I created this month" will return (not surprisingly) a list of Word documents that you created this month. But you can also tell Cortana to play music, check the arrival time of a flight, or find a location on a map.
The Windows 10 upgrade may have changed some of your default applications. Image files will probably be associated with the Photos app, your default browser will be Edge, and Mail will be set as the default e-mail application.
Although you can make changes for individual file types by right-clicking a file name, selecting Open With, and then clicking Choose another app, it's faster to make all the changes at once.
From Settings or Search, type "Default Programs" (or navigate from the Control Panel to Programs and then Default Programs.) Click "Set your default programs" and you will be presented with a list of installed applications. I selected VLC Media Player for the demonstration and it is already set as the default application for 85 of the 117 file types it can handle. At this point there are two choices: Make the application the default for all file types it can handle or select file types individually. If you choose the second option, you'll see a list of all the file types VLC can handle, the current default application, and a check box that you can use to assign that file type to VLC.
If you have a lot of applications installed, this is probably a good task for a rainy afternoon.
Windows 10 does an excellent job when it comes to attracting the user's attention when something noteworthy happens. Maybe too good.
The Windows 10 Action Center (WinKey-A) displays any notifications you may have missed and you can manage these notifications from the Settings panel.
Start with Settings and navigate to System and then Notifications and Actions. From there you can determine which icons will be displayed in the Notification Area at the right side of the Task Bar. You can also turn some system icons off if you don't want them. I've turned off the Action Center icon, for example, because I use the keyboard shortcut.
Next, you can decide whether Windows tips, application notifications, lock screen notification, alarms, and reminders are off or on. If you use the computer for presentations, there's an option to hide all notifications while you're presenting.
Apps that display notifications can be turned off or on and when they're enabled, you can specify whether they show notifications or notification banners, both, or neither. And you can enable or disable sounds. I've decided to wait a few more days to decide which I want to eliminate. Malwarebytes, for example, displays a banner stating that it's protecting me every time I open a browser.
Windows 10 brings finer control to the system's appearance, including the ability to change colors used on the Task Bar, Start Menu, and (if you didn't hide it) Search Bar.
Start with Settings and navigate through Personalization to Colors. I like the option to "Automatically pick a color from my background", which means that the accent color changes whenever your background image changes. You can also apply the accent color to the Task Bar. If you want to explicitly select a color, turn off the automatic function and you'll be presented with a large group of colors.
Windows 10 includes the ability to create a screen video. This isn't Camtasia or even SnagIt, but it might be enough if you just want to show someone how to do something.
Use the Windows 10 Game DVR function. Microsoft intended for people to use this to record highlights of on-line games, but it's not limited to games. It can record a video of any open app or desktop software. Note the distinction there: What you're recording must be an app, not the Desktop or system-level functions such as the File Explorer. So if you want to illustrate how to perform a task within a single application, the Game DVR is just what you need; if you want to show how to open the Start Menu and change a Live Tile, it's not.
Start the DVR with WinKey-G. You'll be asked if you want to open the Game Bar. Say Yes even if you never play games (even Solitaire). Click the Record button to capture a video, which will be saved in the Game DVR section of the Xbox app or in Video\Captures under your user folder.
These features aren't related, but fit together nicely: You can obtain some system updates locally and, once updates have been applied, schedule a restart time.
Peer-to-peer technology comes to Windows updates. Instead of obtaining updates from Microsoft, you can obtain them from another computer on your local network or from other computers that you trust.
You'll have to drill down deeply in the Control Panel to find the settings: Start in the Update & Recovery section, choose Windows Update, then Advanced Options, and finally "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, but you can change the settings.
When updates require restarting the system, Windows 10 will let you schedule the time that the reboot will occur. Return to Windows Update and, if a pending update requires a restart, you'll see an option to select a restart time. If you continue to the Advanced options, you can tell Windows to notify you whenever an update that requires a reboot is ready.
So there you have about a doezn useful Windows 10 tips, tricks, and tweaks, and a couple of real losers. It's up to you to figure out which is which, though. Expect to see more as I become increasingly familiar with how the system works and if you have any tweaks you'd like to share or questions about how to do something, let me know and I'll add it to a future set of tips, tricks, and tweaks.
Have you heard of "Stagefight Bug"? No, not the butterflies in your stomach when you have to stand in front of an audience and talk. In this case, it's a remotely exploitable software bug that affects just about every Android device on the planet. If you have an Android device with version 2.1 or lower of the operating system, you're safe. That's about two percent of the market.
The Stagefright Bug allows an attacker to take over an Andoird device through remote code execution and privilege escalation. This is done by means of a rogue MMS message to the device. In most cases, no action is required by the user for the device to be infected.
Stagefright is one of Android's core components that is used to play multimedia files. Joshua Drake from the Zimperium security firm discovered the bug and announced it near the end of July after reporting it to Google in April. Since then, Andoid device providers have been scrambling to fix the problem. So far, T-Mobile hasn't quite made it.
Why has Google been unable to figure out how to fix it since April? Maybe they were too busy with Alphabet.
In July, Moscow-based security researcher Evgeny Legerov, announced additional zero-day vulnerabilities in the Stagefright library. You can download and run an app that checks your device's status. Some of the flaws have been patched on my smart phone, but it's still vulnerable to others. To install the test app, visit the Google Play Store, search for "stagefright detector", and select the offering from Zimperium. After you install and run it, you'll get a status report.
There's not much you can do about it if your device is still vulnerable, though, so until the manufacturer or cellular service provider patches your device, about all you can do is to avoid using Google Hangouts. You may also want to disable automatic fetching of messages by your device's default SMS app.
When downloading a utility program or an open source application, perhaps you've noticed a checksum and wondered what that's good for. It's good for ensuring that the file you download is the one you really wanted. It's good for making sure that nobody has tampered with the file.
Once a checksum has been calculated, any change in the file will be immediately apparent because it will create a different checksum after being modified. Microsoft provides a checksum verifier, but doesn't provide any support for it. It's a simple command line utility that computes MD5 or SHA1 cryptographic hashes for files. The File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV) will run on any version of Windows starting with version 2000.
The utility is 11 years old and the file you can download (see the link later in this story) Windows-KB841290-x86-ENU.exe can be saved to any directory. The odd-looking name refers to the Microsoft Knowledgebase article that describes it (841290). When you run the file, you'll be asked to specify where it should be extracted to. One good choice would be to add a path to this directory to the command shell's path.
Instructions are in the read-me file and will also be displayed if you type fciv /?. By default, the command needs only a single argument: The name of the file you want the MD5 checksum for. Other options are possible, though, including the SHA1 checksum.
So let's say that you're on the Apache Open Office site, planning to download Open Office. Version 4.1.1 is current at the time I'm writing this account, and displaying the MD5 checksum by clicking the illustrated link opens a browser tab that displays the checksum.
After downloading the Open Office file to the computer, verifying the checksum requires only that I navigate to the directory where I downloaded the file (G:\Downloads\Open Office - Apache). Because I have added the directory where I extracted the File Checksum Integrity Verifier (C:\MSUtils) to the system path, all I need do is type the command name followed by the name of the file that I want to verify. The reported checksum (above my green line) agrees with the provided checksum, so the file is OK.
You can think of a checksum as a fingerprint (or maybe a DNA test) for a file. As long as the checksums match, the file hasn't been altered. Checksum utilities exist for checking entire folders or even disk drives and these are useful if you want to periodically confirm that stored files haven't become corrupted as the disk drive inevitably degrades.
But if all you're looking for is a simple one-off checksum for the occasional file you've downloaded, just obtain and install the Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier from Microsoft's website.
That's the headline Larry Page used to announce Alphabet, the new company that will oversee Google. After 11 years of not being "a conventional company", Google now becomes a large part of "not a conventional company".
Instead of a dot-com URL, the new Alphabet's URL is abc.xyz. Page will be CEO of the new company and co-founder Sergey Brin will be president. Over the years, Page wrote, Google did many unlikely things. Things that seemed crazy at the time. "Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android." He says they're still trying to do things other people think are crazy, but that resonate with them.
The problem was that Google had just become too large and diverse. Google will now concentrate on being a search engine and a provider of on-line advertising. Google's life sciences projects will be separate. These include projects such a one that's based on longevity and another with glucose-sensing contact lenses. The two co-founders "will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well," Page writes.
In October of last year, Sundar Pichai took over product and engineering for Google and now becomes the new CEO of the "slightly slimmed down" Google.
Alphabet will include Google's X lab, which is responsible for working on a drone-based delivery system (Wing) and the company's investment divisions (Ventures and Capital).
Shareholders will receive one share of Alphabet stock for each share of Google that they own. If you like long and boring (but highly detailed accounts), you'll find the Securities and Exchange Commission's for 8-K here.
This probably makes sense because Google really was just too big. The central part of the operation is still advertising based and management hasn't changed much. Alphabet will probably continue to invest in seemingly goofy projects that may never be profitable, but the division seems logical from a management perspective.
Being more focused on profitability will make Google more popular on Wall Street, which is all about profitability and cares nothing at all for seemingly goofy projects that may never be profitable. So maybe, after 11 years of not being "a conventional company", that is exactly what Google has become.
