Tip o’ the Week 300 – Xbox Streaming to PC

Posted on October 30, 2015 (Updated June 30, 2023) by ewand

So,ToW reaches its 300^th weekly missive. In the first weeks and months following the inaugural ToW, Avatar was in the cinema, the Burj Khalifa opened in Dubai, the Deepwater Horizon was busily belching oil into the Gulf and that unpronounceable volcano was disrupting air traffic all over Europe. How Time flies.

If you have an Xbox One and at least one Windows 10 PC, here’s a tip that seasoned gamers will doubtless be aware of, but many more casual users may not. Did you know you can stream whatever is happening on the Xbox, to your Windows 10 PC?

With an Xbox controller plugged in to your PC and the Xbox app open, you can play the game that’s running on the console, with only the video and audio streamed across your home network to the Windows 10 machine. If you have the Xbox in the living room but don’t use it for watching TV, this opens up the scenario that the latest Halo/CoD/Forza campaign could be running on the box and being sent to a laptop in one room, while the big screen in the lounge is tuned to brain-park guff like Eastenders/Corrie/Strictly etc.

Start the Xbox app on your Windows 10 PC and look for the Console icon (left), and you’ll be able to see consoles on your network. After you’ve registered the one you wish to control, youcan remotely switch it on in future too, assuming it’s reachable on the network and configured so.

After firing the console up and/or connecting to it, you’ll be able to do a number of things, like use your PC as a media remote or mimic the Xbox controller with your mouse/touch, but given the scenario we’re interested in, let’s try testing the network for size.

If you run the Test streaming option, the bandwidth between the console and your active machine will be measured, and you’ll get a quick assessment of what quality level you can support – “Very high” is probably only suitable if you’re on a wired connection, and at one stage was only available through tweaking – though it’s now visible to all. The Very high setting sends 1080p video at a decent frame rate, so apart from the odd network judder that might crop up, it’s essentially indistinguishable from using the console directly. Just click Streamto get going.

Another use is that if you have the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner, you could stream live TV to a PC anywhere within range – so it’s possible to be watching one channel on the computer while the TV is currently in use, or you could watch TV in another room without needing the lounge screen to be on.

Once the streaming has started, if you move your mouse or finger to the top of the Xbox app window to display the in-app menu, you can change the quality of the experience, by clicking on the icon on the top right. The multi-line icon to the left of that will show you real-time streaming data in the bottom left of the screen, so you can monitor the performance of the network and make sure you’ve got the right level of quality.

If you’ve never streamed your Xbox to your PC, then give it a try this weekend and you may find a neat way of being allowed to use your console more often…

Tip o’ the Week 301 – Juggling Time Zones

Posted on October 23, 2015 by ewand

clip_image002 This weekend sees most of Europe moving from summer time (or Daylight Saving Time), and promises to cause confusion in some systems until everything settles down, and other parts of the world, who also use DST, have switched to winter time (in fact, most of the world doesn’t, though western Europe and most of North America does). Most of the US leaves summer time/DST on 1^st November – to see more details of time zones and the dates when DST will come into effect, see here.

Most connected systems these days can figure out when the times are right to switch, but in practice, bugs can creep in and will often only get discovered when the time zone change actually takes place. One year, every Blackberry user was turning up to meetings an hour early, as the DST switch happened a week earlier than the devices expected. Since it took longer than a week to address the software issue, the problem had gone away by the time the bug was fixed.

If you’re dealing with people in other time zones, there are more tools than ever to keep you abreast of the changes – some of this has been covered before on previous ToWs (280, 244, 120, 26…) but here’s a refresher.

clip_image004 Outlook – whenever an appointment is created, its date and time are recorded as an offset from UTC, and the time zone it’s due to take place in is also noted. If you’re creating meetings or appointments which are in a different time zone, like travel times, then it may be worth clip_image006 telling Outlook by clicking the Time Zone icon in the ribbon, and then selecting the appropriate TZ – especially useful if you’re crossing between time zones and don’t want to run the risk of horological befuddlement.

clip_image008 If you’re booking a load of appointments in another time zone – eg. you’re working in another country for a few days and creating appointments with people in that locale – then it’s even worth switching the TZ of your PC whilst you do the diary-work, to save a lot of clicking around in setting the appropriate time zone specific to each meeting.

The best way to do this would be to show your second time zone in the Outlook calendar – in the main Outlook window, go to File | Options | Calendar and select the second one to show; when you’re ready to switch between your local TZ and the remote one, just click the Swap Time Zones button to switch the PC (and Outlook) between the different zones.

Windows 10 – As featured in ToW 280 (though it was then in preview), there’s a nice new Alarms & Clock universal Windows 10 app, that shows a map of the world with your choice of locations, and the moving daylight line so you can see what’s happening around the globe. A nice alternative to that exec boardroom display nonsense, that you might expect to see gracing the wall of a Sugar (rabbit…) or a Trump (China…?).

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Now all you need to do is deal with effects of travelling through the time zones yourself…

app o’ the week

VLC for Windows Store – free

If you’re wondering how to play back DVD discs on Windows 10 (since the native playback inherent with Windows Media Center has gone the way of the dodo, much like that niche but much-loved feature), or you have some videos in unsupported formats, such as the one used by Media Center to record off the telly, then you might want to try VLC.

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There are a few “experimental” features, meaning the app can be a touch flaky, and it much prefers playback of local media to networked stuff (depending on the format). But, it’s the most widely-used open source cross-platform playback app, it’s been refreshed with a Windows 10 UI and is free. So what’s the catch?

Tip o’ the Week #297 – Personalisation in Windows 10

Posted on October 9, 2015 by ewand

There are some pretty obvious updates and improvements when you move from Windows 8.x to 10 – the most celebrated being the Start menu changes, and the ability to run ~~metro~~ ~~modern~~ Store apps in a window. Running apps in overlapping windows, which can be moved, resized, minimized etc – who’d have imagined that?

Anyway, there are some neat personalisation tweaks that might not be so immediately visible, but can add a bit of a pleasing touch to your Windows experience…

The best way to get to the Settings menu is probably to just press the Start button and choose Settings from there, though you can also get it from the Action Center, shown by swiping from the right of the screen (in Windows 8 charms-stylee), by clicking the Action Center/Notifications icon on your task bar, or pressing WindowsKey+A.

Or you can press WindowsKey+i to open Settings directly.

Once you’re in Settings, you’ll see a nice big Personalisation menu (well it’ll say that if you’re using English (UK) as your default language – nice bit of localisation there, Windows team …), which is typical of the additional thought & polish given to the Settings menu when compared to Windows 8.x, whose PC Settings screen often felt like a thin shim over the old Control Panel (though that is still there – just look under Themes and you’ll quickly be taken back in time to Windows XP).

The Personalisation section includes the predictable background, lockscreen, colour etc options. As well as pretty but samey and potentially slightly boring corporate-provided background images, you could select a series of your own photo albums to show background or lock screen from your OneDrive camera roll, or other locations. Install the Bing Desktop app and you’ll be able to see the beautiful daily images from Bing as your wallpaper.

You can get the machine to set colours based on what kind of background is being shown, which is a surprisingly neat touch.

And under lock screen settings, you can change the apps which display content on the screen, much like the options on Windows Phone where you can pin information from apps to the lock screen.

As above, you’ll see the Settings option on the left side of the start menu, assuming you haven’t turned it off. You can show other shortcuts in the same location by going to Settings | Start | Choose which folders… (though having File Explorer in the list gives you a sub-menu showing pinned items anyway).

If you want to turn back time, you could even allow the Start menu to go back to being full screen… look under Settings | Start

Tip o’ the Week #296 – Win10 Xbox App: snap snap, grin grin

Posted on October 2, 2015 by ewand

There are a variety of apps out there for grabbing your PC screen in video format, using for making tutorials, saving gaming footage or other activities. There are many free screen capture apps (like Microsoft’s Expression encoder, which is still available though no longer being developed) that seem to be either pretty complex (if feature rich), or else they add all kinds of undesirable gunk to your PC at time of installation (does anyone really want the Ask Toolbar?), they force a length limit or watermark on your resulting video, etc. There are other, commercial, products (eg Camtasia) which are really good, though again can be feature-rich and complex.

What if you want to do a simple screen recording to help make a point, and you don’t want to spend ages learning how to use a Swiss Army Knife of a tool, or installing garbage/spyware on your PC, and can’t justify spending a bunch of cash for a software package you’ll use once or twice?

Well, if you’ve got Windows 10, you may be pleased to know there’s an app that comes with the OS that can be used to do exactly this – the Xbox App. You can use it to take screen snaps (though with desktop OneNote installed, you can quickly grab an area of the screen to the clipboard by pressing SHIFT+WindowsKey +S), or you can save video footage of a target application window.

Since the functionality comes with the Xbox app, it’s safe to assume that it’s really intended to save game footage to your machine, but since it works with any windowed app too, then consider it a bonus regardless of whether you’re into gaming or not. Note that it only records one window, so if you’re looking to grab the whole desktop then you’re better off looking at the top of this tip, for Expression, Camtasia or others.

Capturing a window

Launch the Xbox app by clicking on the icon on your Start menu, or press Start and just type Xbox…

Next, start the app you wish to record, then press WindowsKey+G, which will open the Game Bar.

The Xbox app will ask to confirm that the target app you’re trying to record is a game – it doesn’t matter whether the app is or isn’t a game, so just pretend that your target app is a game and launch the Game Bar.

With the Game Bar open, you can either take a screenshot with the Camera icon, or begin recording video with the red circle Record icon. During recording, a small red indicator appears at the top of the currently selected window to confirm that recording is taking place, and showing the duration of the current recording. Clicking it will stop the recording, and pressing WindowsKey+G again will show the Game Bar again.

Even easier, If you have the Xbox app running and the game bar is open, you can flick around to your target app just start recording the current application by pressing ALT+WindowsKey+R or grab a screenshot by pressing ALT+WindowsKey+PrtScrn.

Once your recording is complete, you can find it along with any screenshots with File Explorer under ThisPC\Videos\Captures. You can also find any of your recording in the Xbox app under Game DVR. That’s all there is to it.

Tip o’ the Week #293 – STOP SHOUTING ON CONF CALLS

Posted on September 11, 2015 by ewand

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Keeping track of the characters on conference calls could be a new type of buzzword bingo – from the people who stay muted the whole time (the only word they say being “bye”, at the end), to the unmuted furious typer/clicker/lunch eater/talker-to-somebody-else.

This brilliant spoof of conference calls in real life features most of them, but not the blast-radius shouter that is probably more of a nuisance to people physically sitting next to him/her than to others on the call. Sure beats real meetings, mind.

Thanks to Brett Johnson, for pointing out that there’s a feature in Windows that might help reduce the volume of the well-meaning noise pollutant, something known as Sidetone. Turns out, this has been in Windows for ages, if you have a headset that supports it.

clip_image004 What Sidetone does is to play your own voice back into the audio stream you’re listening to, so if you have a headset that covers your ears entirely and blocks out background noise, you don’t completely isolate yourself and end up shouting to compensate.

To access the setting, plug in your headset then right-click on the volume icon in your system tray and select Playback devices to open the Sound settings applet, then double-click on your headset and look in the Levels tab.

Try it out and have a play with the levels, with a willing guinea pig: it’s a surprisingly subtle effect, but one that you won’t want to overdo.

Now, all we need to do is to build a Skype addin for meeting organisers to subvert the Sidetone on chosen attendees, to put a bit of a delay into the replay of their spoken voice, which could effectively deal with some of the other characters on the calls… and now we know how Garth from Wayne’s World achieved his effect.

Tip o’ the Week #292 – Stop the ads on Edge

Posted on August 28, 2015 by ewand

clip_image001 Advert blocking in Internet Explorer was covered back in ToW #247, highlighting some ways to stop annoying adverts from taking over your browser. The internet has plenty of examples of misplaced advertisement, not all of them online banner ads.

There’s a burgeoning industry in providing ad-blocker type extensions for browsers, which basically intervene and elect not to show you the ads – or the “suggested content” or other stuff that not only clutters up your favourite web pages, but also slows down their loading.

Most ad-blocking software runs inside the browser to analyse what’s going on and decide if it wants to let content through. Thing is, the Microsoft Edge browser in Windows 10 doesn’t (yet) have extensions, so there’s not much to do about adverts if you’d like to use Edge as your browser.

3^rd party software

Some 3^rd parties have started offering software that purports to stop ads in Edge – eg. Adguard Adblock, but whether not looking at ads is worth the $20 fee for use (beyond a trial period) is debatable. Either wait for more support from ad-blocking specialists, for updates from Microsoft which may help, or look to other solutions.

HOSTS file manipulation

Deep in the roots of the TCP/IP protocol which underpins the internet, lies an anachronism known as a HOSTS file. This was provided originally to tell your machine how to find other machines’ IP addresses given their names; they sometimes took precedence over other methods (like Domain Name System, DNS) or were a useful backstop if a name/address couldn’t be found trhough other means. Ultimately, HOSTS became unnecessary for the most part.

To see if your PC has a HOSTS file already, try running (WindowsKey+R):

notepad %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

There is a neat trick to immediately block a lot of well-known advert-serving sites. Think of it that the web page you’re reading is also telling your browser to go to sitea.com, siteb.net and sitec.biz to show you lots of ads and other content from those places. If you were to put a hosts file on your PC, which specified that each of these sites refers to the mysterious concept called “localhost”, then it means your PC will quickly redirect to itself when it comes to serving up any of that content, and it will immediately fail and move on.

Several online communities maintain communal hosts files that list the URLs of a lot of common advert sources, and if you drop an appropriate file on your PC every few months (or whenever you notice there are more annoying adverts appearing), it will quietly deal with the menace, and operates at a low level so you don’t need to do anything to your browser(s).

Find a HOSTS file

There are many out there, but a good one is from MVPS.org (which lists ~15,500 known ad-serving URLs):

Click http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip to download to your PC
In Microsoft Edge, click the View downloads button
You should see the hosts.zip file at the top of your list on the right – click on it to open
Double-click on the mvps batch file, then select Extract all then Extract, to unzip the whole lot into a folder
Select with left-click, then right-click on mvps and choose Run as administrator to update your hosts file
You can always go back into your downloads folder and delete the folder created above – its work is done

You will likely need to tweak the registry to enable Hosts resolution:

Press WindowsKey+R then run regedit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters then

Click Edit > New > DWORD Value then type MaxCacheTtl
Click Edit > New > DWORD Value then type MaxNegativeCacheTtl
Double-click on the MaxCacheTtl key on the right pane, and enter the value 1
Double-click on the MaxNegativeCacheTtl key on the right pane, and enter the value 0

Another option would be to open this zip file, then double-click the file within, click Run, then Yes, Yes and OK. Assuming you trust this site, you won’t now be showing up on some list of transgressors, you’ll just have avoided the grubbiness of editing the registry as per the section above.

Now let’s compare one page:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

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clip_image006 Some sites will substitute blank space for the missing ads, but for content like the Other Stuff you might want to click on (such as the Taboola-type clickbait guff that’s normally at the bottom of the page), site may just quietly ditch whole sections without you ever knowing.

You may see the odd weird missing bit on some pages (eg from Ebay, see >>>), but that’s surely a fair price to pay for not cluttering up your machine with annoying adverts, having auto-playing videos blaring at you, etc. Now if they only made adverts like they used to, it wouldn’t be such a chore.

Pea & Ham, from a Chicken? Now that’s clever.

Tip o’ the Week #290 – get your Groove on

Posted on August 14, 2015 by ewand

clip_image002 It’s quite useful to have a catalogue of names that can be put to different uses. Codenames are frequently reused, and there was a time when every new product had to have a snazzy moniker – remember Daytona, Natal or more recently Spartan?

As well as the more public ones, there are all kinds of internal project and product codenames that never make it out into the wild. Nowadays, openly referring to old products exclusively by their pre-release code names is no longer a sign of authority and more an indication of being a wazzock.

Product names, on the other hand, sometimes get reused, though not often by the same company. Microsoft, however, took the original Surface name from the table-computer (now PixelSense) and applied it to tablet computers, and has also now renamed ~~Zune~~ Xbox Music to Groove (not to be confused with this Groove), featuring the Windows 10 app called Groove Music and a subscription service called the Groove Music Pass. If you already had Xbox Music content, you need do nothing – it’s a rebranding exercise and some fresh new app functionality. If you don’t have Win10 or a Music Pass, check out the web player to see what’s available.

Great News! Groove Music Pass users can now play with Sonos, so there’s no need to keep a Spotify (… Deezer, et al) subscription if you’re already a Groove Music Pass user. If you’re tired of waiting for Sonos to release a proper controller app for Windows Phone or Windows 8/10, then check out Andy Pennell’s Phonos. Or take to Sonos’ forums to ask what’s happening, though be prepared for a wall of silence neither confirming nor denying if and when a Windows Phone app is coming.

Readers with long memories might recall where “Groove” came from – it was the product of Groove Networks, brainchild of erstwhile Lotus Notes inventor, Ray Ozzie, whose company was acquired by Microsoft 10 years ago, largely to get the man himself. Along came the baggage of the (frankly horrid) Groove 3.1 then Groove 2007, which begat Sharepoint Workspace and was subsequently deep-sixed as a separate product line. Or so you may have thought.

If you dig around in Task Manager (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to jump there quickly, keyboardinjas), or better still, use the excellent Process Explorer from SysInternals, you’ll see something interesting…

That’s right – the bones of Groove live on in OneDrive for Business, at least for now – the plan being to unify the OneDrive for Business and consumer OneDrive sync engines. Good thing too.

Tip o’ the Week #288 – When I’m reinstalling Windows

Posted on August 7, 2015 by ewand

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Now that Windows 10 is here, Whether you’ll be waiting for a new machine that comes with Windows 10, or whether you’ll be one of the millions that will upgrade, there’s lots to be thrilled about or to quietly look forward to, depending on your personal level of excitability.

If you’ve been running a preview version of Windows 10 then it may be best to install a clean build of the RTM, just to be sure there’s nothing left behind that might clog your machine up. Some say it’s probably best practice to wipe your PC every year or two, and reinstall only the stuff you need.

clip_image003 Fortunately, with OneDrive and Office365, reinstalling isn’t the major effort it used to be – with a huge mailbox, nobody should need PST files anymore and fret about whether they’re backed up properly. No need to worry about My Documents when OneDrive (on your home machine) can accommodate Terabytes of data, and OneDrive for Business (on your work PC) will sync all of your stuff too.

If you’re linking your MSA (Microsoft Account, ie Hotmail/MSN/Outlook.com etc address) then lots of other settings will be replicated between machines too.

There are a few things that don’t automatically get sorted out – Outlook Signatures being a particular annoyance, though moving them into OneDrive has been covered in ToW #267. Another is the list of notebooks which OneNote is configured to open – you may be able to select from your commonly used notebooks when you start the desktop version of OneNote up, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick shortcut to where they’re all stored, to make it easy to find them again?

OneTastic again

ToW regular contributor Stuart Leeks once again recommends a particularly neat trick, courtesy of the awesome OneTastic suite of extensions and addins to OneNote. OneTastic and OneCalendar come from the hand of Omer Atay, who’s part of the OneNote team but has built these tools on his own. There is form for home-grown extensions making it – more or less – into the product… maybe Omer’s product group will follow suit.
[Outlook Thread Compressor is long dead, btw; don’t bother trying to download it now]

Anyway, if you use OneNote in anything more than a cursory capacity, go to http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/?r=download immediately and download the app.

clip_image005 OneTastic adds loads of functionality, including a macro language and the MacroLand repository of useful extra commands. One such downloadable is the List Notebooks macro which will generate a page at the current section, listing each of the notebooks you currently have open and with a hyperlink to reference the book directly. So when you rebuild your machine, even before reinstalling OneTastic, just click on each link to reopen the notebook.

The genesis of OneTastic was OneCalendar, an amazingly useful applet which shows you each page you’ve visited in OneNote arranged by date – so if you know you took notes on a call last week, you don’t need to navigate to the page or search for it… just go to OneCalendar, and the page will be listed on the day in question. If you’re using shared notebooks, then OneCalendar will even embolden pages that other people have updated – a feature which could be super-handy or super-annoying, depending on how collaborative your co-workers are.

clip_image007 If you use lots of notebooks, there’s a neat feature in OneCalendar, which might help – take a look in Settings clip_image009 and you can specify which notebooks OneCalendar will show you changes from – so you might want to restrict it to the less busy notebooks and all your own personal stuff, or maybe even get into the habit of turning some on & off when required.

There are lots of shortcut keys in OneCalendar, for the power user – CTRL and + / – will make the text larger & smaller, CTRL+ Left / Right arrow moves back and forth between days/weeks/months (depending on what level of zoom you’re viewing), CTRL+ 1 / 2 / 3 switches between the days/weeks/months, and CTRL+ S jumps to settings. CTRL+ 0 jumps to Today, and CTRL+ F lets you “find” so it will filter the view based on keywords.

Tip o’ the Week #289 – Edge, Cortana & Win10 keyboard tips

Posted on July 31, 2015 by ewand

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Assuming everyone has upgraded to Windows 10 by now, it’s a useful time to post some tips that could help the new user get a leg up more quickly. So far, reaction seems to be going well – even some Mac users quite like it (though if you read to the very end, it’s not all a bed of roses) – and if, nothing else, there are some notable improvements over previous Windows versions.

I’m close to the Edge

The new Edge browser is one of the more celebrated bits of Windows 10, at least for now. It’s fast, it’s standards-compliant (and that’s something of a double-edged sword to a degree, as it means legacy plugins and old-layout web pages might not work). Even naysayers admit that Edge is a Good Thing, on the basis that it’ll put a firecracker into the Webkit bonfire, even if it’s not perfect itself.

For new upgraders, the first thing you might decide to do with Edge is to restore your favourites from IE – click on the multi-line icon on the toolbar, then the star (which represents Favourites), and click Import favourites to bring yours from IE. Some degree of username/password history will come across as well, though you may need to select the username on the first visit to a web page (as cookies are not migrated across).

To use Edge on intranet sites when attached to a corporate network, you can force the browser to try the intranet address only by adding a trailing slash to the end of the name – eg msweb/. This will stop it from trying to find that name on the internet, if for any reason it can’t get to the site internally.

If you are find sites that don’t like Edge, you can always click on the ellipsis (…) menu on the top right, and click Open in Internet Explorer, and the page will launch in IE11. Whilst you’re at it, you might want to pin the IE icon to your taskbar by right-clicking on it – then you can always go straight to IE next time.

If you’d like to change your default browser altogether, just type default web browser at the start menu, and that will let you reset to IE or another browser.

Keyboard CTRLs R US

Most of the usual keyboard shortcuts still apply in Windows 10, though there are a few changes & additions – with the removal of the Charms bar,

WindowsKey+C fires up Cortana with voice input, if you’ve already got that working (see below)
WindowsKey+S for everyone else, reduced to typing Cortana search commands or not having Cortana at all
WindowsKey+A for the Action Center – the new notifications area that appears to the right of the screen
WindowsKey+I for Settings of all sorts – very handy
WindowsKey+TAB – quick way of seeing all the running apps, across multiple desktops
WindowsKey+X still brings up the “power user” menu – a great way of getting to otherwise fairly hidden functionality like Device Manager

There have been some keyboard-related tips in recent weeks, and others regarding new apps that come with Windows 10. If you’ve not been using the preview, you might have missed them. See:

#279 – Windows 10’s multiple desktops
#280 – Telling time on Windows 10
#281 – Calculator rebooted
#286 – Windows Explorer tweaks in Win10

Hey Cortana! Oh, you’re not available…

Depending on how your upgrade has gone, Brits who run Windows 10 might find that Cortana isn’t showing up as available in the region, even though she’s supposed to be. The same might be true of other lingos – your mileage may vary.

If you’re having trouble getting old Blue Eyes to play ball and you’re in Blighty, you’ll need to make sure all your language settings are tickety-boo.

Check you’ve got the right country set in the high-level settings, but don’t stop there –make sure the language pack isn’t still searching Windows Update, and that each of the components has been downloaded.

Select the Windows display language shown, and within Options, click on Speech and clip_image005 make sure the language you speak is correct.

If you make sure that you have the correct language pack installed, and that it’s set as the speech language, then you should be allowed to enable Cortana.

If you have a microphone on your PC, then you can also switch on “Hey Cortana”, clip_image009 which will mean she’s listening out for you to say that all the time… and will jump in with a spoken response to your every query. Just make sure your Windows Phone isn’t nearby or you’ll end up cheating on one Cortana with another. Let’s wait for the Cortana vs Cortana Youtube videos.

Tip o’ the Week #286 – Windows Explorer tweaks in Win10

Posted on July 24, 2015 by ewand

Here’s a quick tip on navigating around Windows 10, courtesy of Stuart Leeks, concerning the File Explorer app (now, thanks to Internet Explorer being moved to the background in favour of the Microsoft Edge browser, maybe the name Explorer will be primarily known again as way to get to the file system).

The simplest way of getting the File Explorer running is either to click on the icon that’s pinned to the taskbar by default, or else simply press the WindowsKey+e. Out of the box, you’ll see a couple of changes to simplify File Explorer when compared to Windows 8, namely to show recent files and folders and the Quick Access pane, as the main display of the Explorer window, rather than clip_image006 just showing a list of drive letters or network locations.

If you prefer going back to seeing “My PC” as the default, click on the View menu > Options > Change folder and search options, and modify that behaviour. Quick Access is new in Windows 10, and replaces the previous Win8.x Explorer’s Favorites section.

The original feature that Stuart referred to has been found to partially exist in Windows 8.1 too, so maybe it’s a bit of a hidden gem – when in File Explorer, if you press ALT+d, the cursor & focus jumps to the address bar and you clip_image010 can start typing the name of key folders and recent files, and you’ll see the name show up in autocomplete – so to get to Downloads, just start typing down and then with a single press of the down cursor key then enter, you’ll jump straight there. This may seem trivial but to hardened keyboardistas, any reason to not use the mouse without getting too obscure, is a good one.

clip_image012 If you still like using the pointing doodah, you can click on the caret to the side of the icon that shows whatever folder you’re in (and it will change as you move around), and you’ll get a short cut menu that also includes regularly used folders.

clip_image014 Another neat one, for some at least, is that if you select a folder within Explorer, and go to the File Menu, you’ll get the option of launching a command prompt or PowerShell window with the focus directly on that folder

Capturing a window

3rd party software

HOSTS file manipulation

Find a HOSTS file

OneTastic again

Keyboard CTRLs R US

Hey Cortana! Oh, you’re not available…

3^rd party software