Have you recently upgraded to Windows 10 ? or are you planning to If yes then this video will help you get the most out of it In this video you will see the new features of windows 10 Some nifty tips and tricks to boost your windows 10 experience and ease your transition from windows 7 to windows 10.
The Windows 10 boot screen has the new windows logo with the revamped boot animation.
Microsoft has redesigned the look and feel of windows based on the principles of minimalist, clean and simple user interface But there is more than a UI change in windows 10 Now Windows can also be cloud synced using the Microsoft account This is like IOS or Android operating system and allows you to sync your settings in the cloud Let us now log in to our system Unlike the Windows 8 which showed the start screen after login In Windows 10 we login straight into the desktop environment just like Windows 7 Also, the start button has been restored Let us click it this new start menu is a kind of a mashup between the Windows 7 start menu and Windows 8 start screen But I feel it is even better than both of them because of the sheer amount of customization that Windows has allowed its users to make Not only we can resize the start menu like this we can change the size and switch from live ties to a static one by right clicking on them like this It also allows us to completely remove a tile again we will right click on the tile and select unpin from start If you do not want any of the tiles on your start menu you can remove all the tile one by one By removing all the tiles it will look similar to the Windows 7 start menu But that’s not all folks for those who like the windows 8 style start screen they can turn it on from the settings It looks like Microsoft has finally learned its lesson It is best to leave the user the flexibility to choose from There is also some new functionality in the start menu Let us, click on the apps button over here this is similar to the all programs button in Windows 7 Like Windows 7 it lists down all the programs that are installed in the system and we can scroll through them Here is a quick tip to simplify your program search Click on the letter over here and this menu will pops up when you click on another letter let’s say C it scrolls back straight to that letter Using this feature you can filter through your applications alphabetically One more tip to improve your productivity Right-click on the start button and this menu pops up Using this menu you can access those features that were earlier present on the original Windows 7 start menu Like Run, Search, Control Panel but besides that it adds several commonly used system tools Like the device manager disk management computer management which you can access with just a single click This feature is also available in Windows 8.
1 The best attraction of Windows 10 in my opinion is Cortana, Cortana unlike many other personal assistants like Siri, Google Now has a character of its own From chatting with you to telling you a joke to singing for you It will do everything with a human-like personality And what I mean by that can be seen clearly by these couple of commands To give a voice command to cortana click on this mic button over here Hey Siri Shirley,you’re not siri-ous Okay Google Google is okay, but this is Cortana.
There are several other commands to which Cortana replies wittily But don’t mistake it to be just as a source of entertainment It can set your calendar add reminders, set alarms, send an email, play your favorite music, get your directions for your next visit tell facts, track your flights, provide statistics and many other functions You can customize these to your interest using the notebook section.
By clicking over here so like this you can customize cortana to your own interest Not only that using cortana you can run a voice-activated search so for that click on the microphone button find a PowerPoint file that I created 2 days ago As you can see it is trying to search my computer for a powerpoint file that was created 2 days ago since I don’t have any such files it is not showing me anything but you get the idea Now let’s look at the file explore The file explorer has not changed much except a ribbon menu has been added to the top section This is quite like the Office ribbon menu using it you can copy, paste create a new folder, check the properties, and other features.
These features were available in Windows 7 by right-clicking and on the top menu Just like Windows 7 Windows 10 also provides side-by-side window placement functionality, so if you have got more than two windows open you can drag a window to one corner of your screen and it will automatically resize it so that it gets fixed on the half part of the screen Not only the Windows sticks to the side but also it provides a suggestion to fix other Windows So as you can see now in my case it is showing me whether I want to fix this users folder so when I click on it it automatically adds this in the second half of the screen.
Also now you can fix four Windows to a single screen For that you drag a window to the corner of the screen like this and now it automatically resize to one fourth of the screen To further improve your multitasking experience Windows now packs in the virtual desktops Now you can open many windows on different virtual desktops and switch between them This provides a great way to reduce the clutter To create a new virtual desktop click on this icon on the taskbar it is called task view On clicking it it will show the currently available desktops at the bottom section you can see there are two desktops available desktop 1 and desktop 2 to add new desktop click on this plus sign over here new desktop and boom a new desktop will be added to your system you can continuously keep adding multiple desktops And To switch to a particular desktop just bring your mouse over that desktop and click on it and here you go you get a new desktop without all the windows that were present on the previous one The task manager has also undergone a significant upgrade To open the task manager right click on the taskbar and select task manager This is the new task manager as you can see this is the process tab and it now categorizes the process in three different types that is apps background process and windows process and in the app history you can track the resources used by an app since a particular date as you can see in my case it is showing these are the resources used by an app since 6, 8, 2016 Also, you can check what all programs are configured to run on startup By clicking on the startup tab but if you don’t like the new look of the task manager You can see the Windows 7 style task manager by clicking on the details tab The single biggest change to Windows is the addition of apps Now just like the Playstore in Android and App Store in IOS Windows has added the Windows Store to manage your apps You can open the Windows store by clicking on this icon on the taskbar The number of apps that are currently available in the Windows store is less compared to Android or IOS However, you can find some popular apps Like facebook candy crush Netflix and its improving day by day Finally, Microsoft has ditched Internet Explorer to start from scratch with the edge browser.
You can open it by clicking on this icon on the taskbar The features of the edge browser are not up to the mark with the likes of Chrome or Firefox.
In fact it is not fully developed and so Microsoft has kept internet explorer as a backup option which you can open by clicking on this icon and then clicking on open with internet explore But given its early days it’s a step in the right direction There are a couple of unique features like the on-page annotation which allows you to quickly add a comment, highlight, and markups to any web page and share it instantaneously with anyone Let us check that feature out let’s go to Google news to add annotations to this page click on this icon over here make a web note ok now these five six tools are available this is a pen so we can change the color let make it to orange ok Dallas shooting security forces ok you can also use a highlighter and add your own comments very bad and then you can also clip a particular page like we want to show only this much there you go One more cool functionality that the edge browser has inbuilt is the the read view functionality to activate the read view click on this book icon that you can see on the address bar as you can see it just trimmed down all the other cluttering items on the page and just kept the article that we were reading this feature is also available in other browsers One more new feature added to Windows 10 is the notification and action Center Click on the bottom right corner on this icon to open it On this icon The notifications and action Center not only have the notifications that were originally seen on Windows 7 Like that of the maintenance or any error related or update reminders.
But now you can also have email alerts and any custom alerts generated by a Windows app.
In my system as you can see I have got an email alert I have also got an alert from cortana app that I had installed on my android phone this is a very neat feature it automatically transfers notification from my phone to my windows system there are some tips there is a security and maintenance alert this is again quite like what is present in android and IOS On the bottom there are a couple of toggle buttons This button the tablet mode when switched on makes all the apps full screen and instead of the desktop we see the start screen Let’s toggle it on and here you go now we are in touch optimized environment and this is particularly useful if you have a convertible system were when you remove your keyboard it will automatically converts to this tablet mode I believe this feature is the best way to bring the best of both worlds Allowing your system to perform both as a tablet as well as a personal computer The next toggle button is this rotation lock this allows you to fix your orientation or keep it on auto rotate this is relevant if you are using a tablet the note button allows you to opens the Microsoft’s one note software There is a project toggle button which allows your computer to share your display to a projector or other monitors connected The quite hours toggle button silence the notification center so that you won’t be distracted between the time period of 12 AM to 6 AM The connect button allows you to connect a wireless display and audio devices that are supported by Windows 10 On switching it on it tries to search if there are any device available on the same network If you have a VPN connection you can activate it using the VPN toggle button The location button allows you to switch on and off Windows location tracking feature If your system has got Wi-Fi or Bluetooth then from here you can toggle them also on and off.
The settings button allow you to open up the all-new Windows 10 settings panel.
I will open it up.
This new settings panel tries to bring all the settings at a single place that were before available in separate menusin Windows 7 It is kind of a mini Control Panel.
The old menus are still present in Windows10 but it has been hidden down within the settings panel Let us look at the first setting that is the system settings under this the display and power & sleep settings are the ones which are quite like what we had in Windows 7 The display allows us to change the orientation, brightness, text size and other advanced display settings While the power and sleep changes the idle times for your computer to go to sleep and to turning off the display The notification and action settings allow us to customize the notification panel as well as the taskbar It allows us to select which icons should appear on that taskbar and which notification should be shown on the notification and actions panel Again, here Windows provides a lot of customization of the user experience which is quite helpful.
The apps and features section is kind of the program and features dialogue that was present in Windows 7 Control Panel The only difference is that this allows us only to uninstall apps and not the desktop applications You can also add or remove some optional features by clicking on manage optional features The multitasking settings allow us to customize the behavior of autosnap in and virtual desktop functionality.
Tablet mode allows you configuring how the Windows should behave when you toggle to tablet mode.
The storage setting shows the current disk consumption of your Windows system It also allows you to change the default location for saving your apps, documents, videos, music and pictures One tip if you wish to separate your personal files from windows system drive you can change the storage drive in this settings panel Off-line map section provides a new feature of saving Bing maps on your computer Default app settings allow you to select apps for common functionalities like email, maps, music player, photo browser,video player and web browser.
A handy tip if you wish to change the default browser to let us say to chrome you’ll have to change it from this settings panel The about panel gives us the system information you can view the previous menu that was visible in Windows 7 by clicking on system info over here Now let us go back The device settings provide the option to add common hardware components like a printer, scanner, monitors, Speaker,and microphone.
It is kind of a trimmed down version of device manager which is still available in the Control Panel The network and Internet settings panel provide an easy interface for changing a couple of settings like proxy, VPN, Ethernet settings and adding a new internet connection A neat trick to keep track of your data consumption you can check the data usage section here The personalization settings screen provides configuration options for the background,lock screen, themes and the start menu A quick tip if you don’t like the default windows 10 dark theme color You can change it to any other color by changing the accent color That can be done by clicking on colors and here changing it to any other color let say reddish color now as you can see the entire system changed its color If you want to activate the start screen by default you can toggle this use start full screen to on and then when you will click the start button your start screen will pop up instead of the start menu like this.
The accounts section in the settings panel provides the options to change the Microsoft Account to which you want to sync.
You can add or change the account using this settings section Time and language provide options to change your date time settings as well as the region and language settings.
Plus it allows you to change your microphone and speech configurations settings The ease of access settings provides accessibility settings for Windows10.
You can change the options for narration, magnification, high contrast, keyboard,mouse and closed caption.
Under the privacy settings there is a ton of options Unlike Windows 7 Windows 10 collects a lot of data.
This data is used by third-party apps and Microsoft for performance improvement and feature development.
The amount of data that you want to share can be controlled by using this privacy settings.
You can toggle off sharing of data about your location, camera, microphone, speech, typing, contacts, calendar, account information, email, messaging, feedback, diagnostic, device information, and other general settings.
A tip to boost the windows startup time.
In the background app settings section you can toggle off those app that you are not using In the Update and Security section you can control your Windows Updates, Windows Defender, Backup and Recovery and Windows Activation related settings.
I hope this video helped you in easing your transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10