WINDOWS 8 TIPS & TRICKS

What is Windows without tweaking it to your liking?

 

Starting with ‘Start’

Let’s begin with the large, Windows-dappled, elephant in the room: the ‘Start’ menu is gone. If it’s something you were attached to (emotionally or otherwise) it would be rather nice to have it back.

We have our very own APC Fix8 tool which helps automate the installation of either Classic Shell orStardock’s Start8 beta. Note that Start8 is now out of beta and a paid product, but well worth the paltry asking price of US$5 if you don’t like Classic Shell. Another option is ViStart, although you have to dodge some adware toolbars when you install it.

You can download our special Fix8 tool from apcmag.com/fix8.htm.

Unlock the lock screen

A lock screen is nice and pretty for a tablet and all, and perhaps for a little privacy in the office, but for your desktop at home it’s a barrier requiring more keyboard or mouse interaction just to use your PC. Save some sanity, time and RSI in your hand by disabling it.

• Tap Windows key+R to bring up the ‘Run’ dialogue box.
• Type in gpedit.msc and press Enter.
• Navigate to ‘Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization’.
• Double-click on the ‘Do not display the lock screen’ setting.
• Toggle it to ‘Enabled’ and click ‘OK’.

Of course, you’ll still be presented with the login screen, which you may want to keep if more than one person uses your computer. However, if this is redundant for you, it can also be bypassed.

Enforce classic defaults

Microsoft really wants you to like the Modern UI, such that opening files like videos, images or web links take you to the Modern UI app that manages the format, even if you’re opening from within the Classic desktop. Fix this unwanted behaviour like so:

• Hit the Windows key or hover your mouse to bring up the Charms bar and select ‘Search’.
• Type in default programs and press the Enter key.
• Click on ‘Set your default programs’.
• To use the classic Windows image viewer, click on ‘Windows Photo Viewer’ and then ‘Set this program as default’.
• To use Windows Media Player, click on (no surprise) ‘Windows Media Player’ and then ‘Set this program as default’.

For each you’ll see the number of total file associations linked to the program change after setting it as default. You can also do this with programs you install; for example, if you’ve got Firefox or Chrome installed, it should show up in the list and you can simply click these and set them as the default.

As standard, any web links will be opened in the Modern UI’s IE, not the classic desktop IE. To change this:

• Press Windows key+R to bring up the ‘Run’ dialogue box.
• Type in inetcpl.cpl and press Enter.
• Click on the ‘Programs’ tab.
• Under ‘Choose how you open links’, select ‘Always in Internet Explorer on the desktop’.
• Click ‘OK’.

You’ll notice there’s also an option to force IE-based tiles to open on the desktop.

Startup programs

Some things never change and installing all your favourite programs will still likely see a bevy of unnecessary startup programs and services slowing down your boot. Other things do change, however, with Windows 8 actually making it easier to find out which culprits are slowing your system down and preventing them from doing so.

• Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and select the ‘Task Manager’.
• Under the ‘Startup’ tab, right-click on any program and select ‘Disable’.

Neat. There’s also a helpful ‘Search online’ option in the same right-click menu, though it simply passes it through a search engine. For startup services, do the following:

• Press Windows key+R to bring up the ‘Run’ dialogue box.
• Type in msconfig and press ‘Enter’.
• Click on the ‘Services’ tab.
• Finally, click the ‘Hide all Microsoft services’ checkbox.

For more detailed information on services, launch services.msc through the ‘Run’ dialogue instead. In either case, a level of common sense prevails here — don’t disable any service if you’re not sure about the impact, as it’s possible to render your machine unbootable or cause hard-to-diagnose behaviour if essential services are stopped. This is why the System Configuration tool launched via msconfig is safer, as you can hide all operating system services and see only those added by third-party programs.

File History

We’re including it as a tip because if you’re not using it, you should be. Especially as it’s so flexible in its use and setting it up takes just a few seconds. File History works like Apple’s Time Machine and allows you to flick back through previous versions and selectively preview and restore a particular backup from any point in time.

First, decide where you want to keep backups. File History can support a partition on a local hard drive, external USB drives and even network targets. With this in mind, do the following:

• Hit the Windows key or hover your mouse to bring up the Charms bar and select ‘Search’.
• Type in ‘File History’ and click the ‘Settings’ category underneath the search field.
• Once the ‘File History’ dialogue is launched, click ‘Select Drive’ on the left.
• Choose a target drive, which can include partitions on drives, or select to set up a network location.
• Click ‘Turn on’ to start the first backup.

If you click ‘Advanced Settings’, you’ll be able to specify how frequently File History backs up your files, as well as when to purge old backups to free up space.

The only thing to remember about File History is that it only backs up predetermined locations: your desktop itself, contacts, favourites and libraries. If you want files backed up from other locations, you have two options: copy them to one of the libraries (these include ‘Documents’, ‘Music’, ‘Pictures’ and ‘Videos’) or add your own library. Making a new library is easy:

• Open up Explorer (click on the ‘Explorer’ icon in the classic desktop).
• Right-click on ‘Libraries’ in the left pane.
• Select ‘New > Library’ and type in a name.

You can then include any file or folder on your system in the library by right-clicking on it and selecting ‘Include in library’. At the next scheduled backup, File History will add the library to its backup.

Page file on SSD

We haven’t covered some of the more traditional Windows interface or performance tweaks here, like those you might have used with Windows 7, because for the most part they still work just the same and we wanted to focus on specific Windows 8 tips and tweaks.

One classic tip, however, bears mentioning, especially in the current market where not only are SSDs cheap, they’re likely to be found standard on many machines shipping with Windows 8: where to put the page file.

The prevailing wisdom used to be that in order to preserve the longevity of your SSD, the Windows page file should be moved to a traditional spinning-disk hard drive. However, in an MSDN blog post, Microsoft’s Michael Fortin makes it clear the page file is ideal for SSDs.

Most page file operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on page file reads and writes, we find that:

• ‘Pagefile.sys’ reads outnumber ‘pagefile.sys’ writes by about 40 to 1.
• ‘Pagefile.sys’ read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4KB and 88% less than 16 KB.
• ‘Pagefile.sys’ writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128KB and 45% exactly 1MB in size.

In fact, given typical page file reference patterns and the favourable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the page file to place on an SSD.

Incidentally, there are no SSD tweaks necessary for Windows 8. The operating system will detect if it’s booting from an SSD and ensure TRIM is enabled, it will automatically disable Superfetch (though note Prefetch remains enabled and should be left as such) and will also automatically disable the file content indexing feature.

Importantly, disk defragmentation remains a regularly scheduled service, but this isn’t a mistake — the new defrag tool detects if a drive is platter-based or SSD and if the latter, will instead send TRIM hints to the drive during idle periods to ensure the SSD operates at maximum efficiency.

Explorer with drives

There are a number of great added features with Explorer in Windows 8, but one of the features removed is the default Explorer view showing all the drives and attached devices in your system; instead, Libraries are now shown by default.

To return to this previous behaviour from Windows 7, first right-click on the Explorer shortcut in the taskbar, then right-click again over ‘File Explorer’ and select ‘Properties’. Now replace the path in the ‘Target:’ field with:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D} .

Clicking the Explorer icon will then launch Explorer defaulting to the Computer view, listing your drives and other devices. Note the space between explorer.exe and ,::{20D0... above when entering it. Windows won’t accept the shortcut without this space.

Restore Explorer to opening with the Computer view by default.

Adjust border padding

My, what thick borders you have Mr Windows 8! And unlike Windows 7, there appears no way to alter this default chunky style. But as always, there’s a tweak for that, although this one involves a little registry editing.

First, hover your mouse in the lower-left corner until the ‘Start’ screen image appears and right-click on it to bring up the Quick Access menu. Select ‘Run’ and type in

regedit to launch Windows 8’s registry editor.

Browse to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics. Right-click on ’PaddedBorderWidth’, select ‘Modify’ and type in a new negative value. You can enlarge the border or shrink it, with values closer to zero making it smaller. Set it 0 to disable all padding.

Then log out (choose ‘Sign Out’ from the username menu in the Modern UI ‘Start’ screen) and log back in again to trigger the change.

Super-small or super-large borders, it’s up to you!

Calibrate your display

Windows has had an in-built display calibration tool for some time now, but it’s not easily found. Even searching in Windows 8 for ‘display’ or ‘calibrate’ turns up nothing. The handy tool is still there, though it’s almost like you need to know the secret password to get to it. In this case, this is ‘dccw’. Search for this in the Modern UI search to launch the Display Colour Calibration tool and calibrate Windows for your monitor. This includes adjusting brightness, contrast and RGB balance, and ends with being able to tweak ClearType if you so desire to improve the look of font rendering on the screen.

Basic screen calibration can be achieved with Windows’ built-in tool.

Starting in Safe Mode

Starting in Safe Mode used to be as easy as pressing (or rather, button mashing) F8 at startup to interrupt the boot process and choosing to boot into Safe Mode. Windows 8 makes this no more, but Safe Mode is still there. It’s just a little bit more convoluted to get to.

The long method is to get there via the ‘Advanced Startup’ screen (also called the ‘Recovery Screen’). This can be entered by bringing up the Charms bar and heading to ‘Settings > Change PC Settings > General’. From here, click ‘Restart Now’ under ‘Advanced Startup’. Once there, you need to click ‘Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Startup Settings’. And then you need to restart again.

Safe Mode is buried under ‘Startup Settings’.

The quick method is to bring up the Quick Access menu (right-click in the lower-left corner on the desktop), select ‘Run’ and type msconfig . From here, click the ‘Boot’ tab and tick ‘Safe Boot’. When you reboot, you’ll reboot to Safe Mode. However, note that you then need run msconfig again and deselect ‘Safe Boot’, otherwise you’ll keeping booting to Safe Mode.

Setting to reboot in Safe Mode.

Add Steam games to the Modern UI

If you’re a gamer, you’re familiar with Steam. While installing Steam on Windows 8 will add an icon for it to the Modern UI’s ‘Start’ screen, you still can’t launch games from there. This is easily fixed with a little file shortcut wizardry (or hack, depending how you look at it).

First, create shortcuts for any games you want to add to the Modern UI ‘Start’ screen from Steam itself. This is usually done by going to your Library in Steam, right-clicking on a game and selecting ‘Create Desktop Shortcut’. Move the shortcuts to C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\. If the AppData directory isn’t visible for you, simply click on the ‘View’ tab at the top in Explorer, followed by ticking the ‘Hidden items’ box. Finally, head into the Modern UI, bring up the Charms bar and click on ‘Search’. Type in the name of the game shortcut you want to pin and it will show up as a search result. Now you can simply right-click on it and select ‘Pin to Start’.

Add your Steam games to the Modern UI ‘Start’ screen.

WinAero tools

We’re not usually fans of tweak tools, but these three programs are neatly packaged and focused to help you change the behaviour of Windows 8. All of them are from the WinAero site, the download pages for which are unfortunately littered with junk advertising — you’ll have to navigate past multiple false ‘DOWNLOAD!’ buttons to get the one that actually gives you the file.

Skip Metro Suite

This is an excellent tool to complete your exodus from the Modern UI desktop, should you so choose. It features a ‘Skip Start Screen’ toggle to let you boot directly to the desktop, something other tools have offered, including the ‘Start’ menu replacements Classic Shell, Start 8 and ViStart. However, unique to this suite are the options to disable Windows 8’s hot corners that bring up the app switcher, ‘Start’ screen button and, of course, the Charms bar. Technically, if you tick all the boxes and install a ‘Start’ menu replacement, you can boot to Windows 8 and never see the Modern UI or any of its ancillary functions at all. This is the closest to a pure Windows 7 desktop you can get.

The ultimate tool in ridding yourself of the vestiges of the Modern UI.

Pin to 8

This simple tool takes a different tack: assuming you do like the Modern UI, it helps to make better use of it by letting you pin pretty much anything to the ‘Start’ screen. Alternatively, it does the same for the taskbar in the desktop, too. This includes being able to pin folders, libraries (‘Music’, ‘Movies’ or ‘Documents’), individual files (such as a Word document) and finally, ‘Special items’. For the latter there’s a wide selection to choose from including the ‘Control Panel’, ‘Network’, ‘Power Options’, ‘Recycle Bin’ and even the ‘Run’ dialogue.

Pin to 8 makes it easy to add files, folders and special objects to the Modern UI or the taskbar.

Start Screen Animations Tweaker

This tool is for people who really love the Modern UI. So much, in fact, that they wouldn’t mind spending a little extra time marvelling at its slick ‘Start’ screen animations, where tiles, the user picture and username slide into view depending on the values you set. To give it a quick spin, try the ‘Recommended settings’ button followed by ‘Apply’, and then return to the ‘Start’ screen. If you really like the full-length intro animation — seen when you first log in — to occur every time the ‘Start’ screen appears, there’s even an easy toggle option for that in the tool as well.

If you really like the Modern UI, you can tweak the ‘Start’ screen animations.

Disable dynamic ticks

While Linux has had dynamic ticks for some eight years now, Windows 8 is the first version of Windows to incorporate it. And it’s not working out so well.

On the whole, dynamic ticks are a good thing, altering the timer interrupt on a system to only occur as processor events need to be triggered. The upshot of this is the processor gets to spend more time idling, which in turn saves power. On a desktop this isn’t so noticeable, but on mobile devices such as laptops and tablets, this can add up to a significant saving in battery life.

Unfortunately, with Microsoft’s implementation in the Windows 8 kernel it’s been causing problems, with numerous reports online of random freezing of the OS. There’s still been no official word from Microsoft on the cause, but it’s thought to be related to drivers crashing the system — since many drivers are designed to perform a job at regular intervals (for example, updating your screen with your GPU), adjusting to dynamic interrupts appears to be causing problems with some hardware.

If you’ve been experiencing random freezes, particularly if leaving the machine idle for a while, the solution may be to disable dynamic ticks. To do so, first launch an elevated command prompt (‘Command Prompt (Admin)’ from the Quick Access menu) and run: bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes . Then reboot.

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