Windows 10 articles

Did you know that a full copy of Windows can be installed and run from a USB drive? Microsoft introduced "Windows To Go" with Windows 8 Enterprise and has continued supporting the feature in Windows 10, which can be kept on a pen drive in your pocket as a portable operating system.

Although the Start menu is supposed to be the fastest way to find local files, software and settings, Windows 10's search indexing service is far from the best. It is not uncommon that a simple query won't return any valid results, no matter how simple or precise your query is. Here's how you can turn things around.

Microsoft has made Windows 10's login screen more visually pleasing than ever by displaying high-resolution images in the background. The pictures are of a good enough quality to be used as the wallpaper on your desktop background and if you've seen one recently that's worth adding to your collection, there's a chance the image is still stored locally.

It's only a matter of time before you'll want to change your Windows wallpaper, however applying your own customizations to a copy of Windows 10 that hasn't been activated may not be so straightforward since Microsoft blocks access to the software's personalization settings without a valid product license.

While tabs have been a core part of web browsers for more than a decade, Microsoft is finally in the process of introducing a tabbed interface to the File Explorer and other applications. But if you don't want to wait any longer, there are a few third-party tools that offer the feature by one means or another.

Tweaking Windows settings that are not available in standard menus will commonly require modifications to be made from the registry or Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc). We regularly reference these throughout our tips, so we thought those of you on Windows Home will appreciate being able to use Gpedit like everyone else.

Microsoft slowly started to sneak advertisements into the Windows platform with Windows 8, and they've only crept up further in Windows 10. Thankfully it's easy to shut down most of these annoyances if you know where to look.

As a TechSpot reader you've surely opened software as an admin on Windows before -- maybe as recently as today -- so the function probably isn't foreign to you. However, we were curious to know more about what happens under the hood of Windows when you tell the operating system to run a program as an administrator, and why this process is necessary in the first place.

Windows 10's April 2018 Update (version 1803) brought various new features and removed some others, but also introduced a bug to many systems that caused an extra drive to be listed under "This PC." Most annoying of all, the bug causes Windows to display an error prompt about the drive being nearly full.

Most recently Windows 10 introduced a default "3D Objects" File Explorer shortcut which takes up space if unused. In this article we'll cover how to remove that somewhat annoying shortcut on Windows 10, and along the way see how to remove other such shortcuts (Music, Videos, others), so you can tweak and personalize as you want.