Windows loves to help you. It will send you targeted advertising because you will like it, it will give you games that you need that you didn’t know you needed, and it will offer up advice on how to make your computing experience more wonderful …
System Tray Clock Windows 95 was the last version of Windows to display the seconds in the System Tray clock. Microsoft’s reasoning when they removed this feature was, since system memory was limited at that time (measured in megabytes), that continually updating the seconds put …
One thing that Microsoft Windows does not manage well is windows. You can move all your windows into positions that work well for you, resize them to your liking and next time Windows opens the windows they’ll not be where you left them. It’s as …
It used to be, in older times when we actually paid for our operating systems, that imposed advertising would not have been tolerated. Nowadays it has become the standard and regardless of whether we have to pay for our systems, the abusive advertising practices in …
Environment Variables have been around since the DOS days. These variables are used by Windows, Apps, and various other programs to know where things are on your system. For example, it would be difficult for a file manager to know where the AppData folder is …
Left to its own devices Windows will happily run all sorts of stuff in the background on your PC. A lot of the time you might not even realize it’s happening. One important thing to consider, however, is that all these background Apps use up …
The Window Task Bar has an area which shows all the running background processes. It is known as the System Tray, or the newly named, Notification Area ( how hoity-toity). According to Bing, “hoit-toity” means haughty or snobbish, and that’s exactly how I respond to …
If you have stopped using Internet Explorer (any version), then good for you! I know there are some die-hards out there who are still hanging on to Windows XP for goodness sake, so anything is possible I guess. According to NetMarketShare, there is still a …
Windows will let you set the time it takes for menus to open when you hover over them with your mouse cursor. Even though this post is directed at Windows 10 users, it will also work in Windows 7 and 8.x. The point to be …
All modern versions of Windows maintain an Icon Cache and a Thumbnail Cache. Their purpose is to store these many thousands of tiny files in one place in order to speed up access times. Sometimes, however, these cache files can become corrupted and your icons …
Windows 10 Hibernation “Hibernation is a state of inactivity and metabolic depression in endotherms.” Wikipedia In Windows, too, hibernation is a state of inactivity. It differs from “sleep” in that it consumes no power. When a computer is “sleeping”, a certain power draw is maintained …
Windows 10 Game Bar In Windows 10 Microsoft introduced a feature called Game Bar. Its purpose is to give you easy access to screen captures and recording options. If Game Mode is enabled, it will recognize when you start up a game, increase game-related priorities, …
Folders Microsoft used to call Folders Directories, but no longer. Now they are Folders, and sub-folders, and forever shall be unless of course, they aren’t. You never know what Microsoft will do regarding its naming conventions. You can do things with Folders in Windows 10 …
Write Caching Windows versions since way back when have offered a feature known as Write Caching. What this does, if enabled, is send disk write-requests to computer memory (RAM) instead of directly to the much slower hard disk drive (HDD). This frees up applications from …
