Windows 10 articles

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.

Left unchecked, it doesn't take long for the Windows context menu to become cluttered, and we bet there's at least one program on your context menus that you never use. Conversely, managing the context menu to work in your advantage can be a rewarding tweak to your operating system.

If you've been thinking about reinstalling Windows 10 because of stability issues, driver errors, malware infections, software bloat or any issues with your system, it may come as great news that Microsoft has built in a simple method of reinstalling the operating system without deleting your user settings or data.

Clipboard managers make it much easier to re-enter text or anything else that you've recently copied and pasted, adding an array of new capabilities to the default Windows clipboard. Although they differ in specific features, the typical clipboard manager automatically saves text, images and other items as they are copied to your clipboard, displaying them in a list-style GUI that makes it simple to re-copy or paste something later.

Have you ever been to a presentation, or worse, a high-profile company keynote, it gets started on an empty Windows desktop showing nothing but the Recycle Bin icon? Hideous. Preferring to keep our desktop clean, we remove the Recycle Bin icon from Windows 10 as one of the first tweaks to a fresh installation of the operating system.