Earlier this week, Windows Insiders who were part of the Fast Ring, got their first glimpse of an isolated desktop environment called Windows Sandbox. Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18305 contains this new capability that will allow users to test out applications, untrusted or otherwise, without the fear of it… Read More »My first look at Windows Sandbox
I actually stumbled across this setting recently, and it reminded me of a Windows “throwback”. It seems to simple, but I forgot that things actually used to be like this.
Somewhere along the way, probably with Windows 7, Microsoft started to try to utilize the taskbar space more efficiently. With that, you saw the use of combined taskbar icons, meaning that if you had three separate documents opened in Word, you’d see a single Word icon in the taskbar, but see that there were icons/instances “combined” underneath it and also the text label for the icon was hidden or collapsed. This saves screen real estate, but can make it harder to know what is open at a glance.
If you’re unable to get the automatic upgrade for Windows 10 to work with your Dell Venue 8 Pro, try using the Microsoft media creation tool to get there. Depending on how much free space you have, an SD card may be required for the download to be stored. The media creation tool will prompt you if you’re short on space for this operation.
For my upgrade, I opted to have the media creation tool and Windows 10 setup wipe everything so I could start fresh. Since all of my important files, pictures, etc. are sync’d online, I wasn’t concerned about the loss of any local content. This is probably not the case for most people, so back up your files before you start. Note that although this was written with the Dell Venue 8 Pro in mind, this process works on an activated Windows 8.1 setup as well. The key is it must be an activated instance of the operating system, or the tool will prompt you for the appropriate product key.
I have a number of machines that synchronize with SkyDrive. Last week, things went sideways and one of my machines was reporting errors and quit synchronizing. After the next reboot (which naturally fixes most issues), the SkyDrive application would initialize, trying to start processing the changes, and then do a… Read More »What to do when SkyDrive takes a faceplant
Quite honestly, having been in the TAP for Windows 8 and having logged a lot of time using the product, I was frustrated because I felt lost when it came to finding something or executing a task. I shy away from the “Start” screen, the screen you see after you’re… Read More »Windows 8 in 3 minutes