12 Windows 8 Starter Tips and Tweaks

Alright, Windows 8 fans. You’ve taken our advice and speed-ran your way through a clean installation (or upgrade!) of Microsoft’s latest OS. You’ve created or attached an existing Windows Live account to your installation, you’ve taken care of the few prompts Microsoft’s asked you to fill out or click through, and you’ve even given a cursory glance to the company’s brief “How to use Windows 8” video during the installation process.

You’re staring at the Start Screen.

Now what do you do?

Before you get confused, scared, or start clicking mindlessly through your desktop in an effort to figure out how to shut down your PC, stay cool for a moment. We have a swath of little tips that will help you ease into Microsoft’s new operating system from Windows 7. With our helpful Windows 8 Tips Guide, you’ll be a Windows 8 master faster than you can say, “SmartGlass.”

Let’s begin.

Manage Your Windows 8 Start Screen

See all those tiles? Some – mostly those representing Microsoft’s core apps or apps you’ve downloaded from the Microsoft Store – can get bigger or smaller. Right click on them to see the Start Screen’s “context menu,” a disappearing bar at the bottom of the Start Screen, and you might have the option to enlarge or shrink certain tiles. This is the same way you’ll launch programs with administrator rights and boot them off the Start Screen as a whole: Look for the “unpin” option.

Uninstall Windows 8 Apps

Same deal. You’ll find a link to uninstall an app when you right-click on any of its tiles that have been placed on your Smart Screen by the app’s installation utility. While Windows 8 will take you to the Desktop-based Programs and Features utility (otherwise found off of the Control Panel), it won’t actually jump you to the exact place on the “to be uninstalled” list where you’d find the app – that would have been a wonderful little touch.

Group Windows 8 Start Screen Icons

It goes without saying, but dumping icons into their own groups — organized by column — is as easy as dragging and dropping. But you can also drag and drop these clusters of columns around as a whole, in case you want to move your “games” chunk before your “apps” chunk or whatnot. Move your mouse to the lower right-hand corner within the Start Screen and click on the icon that looks like a hyphen with a box around it. The Start Screen will zoom out, and you can now move your columns around.

If you want to your columns them a fun name, just right-click on a column and select the “Name Group” option.

Pretty up the Windows 8 Start Screen

The first time you boot into the Start Screen after you log in, Windows 8 fills your colored background with your icons with a pretty left-to-right kind of a “fill” animation. We like that. We like it so much, that we want to see it all the time – Windows just makes your Start Screen boringly “appear” when you open and close it after this first login animation.

Open up the registry (type “regedit” on the Windows 8 Start Screen) and navigate over to this key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\Grid. Right-click on the right-most window pane, hover over “New,” and select the “DWORD” option. Right-click on your new DWORD and rename it to “Launcher_SessionLoginAnimation_OnShow,” and then double-click on it and set its Value data to 1. Voila: Pretty Windows 8 icon animation forevermore! To revert this modification, just delete the DWORD you created.

Condense Your Rows

Before you leave the registry key we just mentioned, there’s one more tweak you can make to lock down the number of icon rows that appear on the Start Screen. Add another DWORD, just like before, and name this one: “Layout_MaximumRowCount.” Double-click on the DWORD and input the number of rows – to a maximum of five – that you want to limit your Start Screen to.

And don’t freak out when you first see that your change had absolutely no effect on your Start Screen. You have to log out and log in before your Start Screen changes.

Charming Shortcuts

If there’s one thing we hate about having to use Windows 8 with a mouse and a keyboard, it’s the fact that we have to drag our mouse all over the place – and wait for that slight delay – to access elements like Windows 8’s Charms Bar. Keyboard shortcuts, here we come.

Tap the following commands to pull up the various sub-menus of the Charms Bar: Your Windows Key and H displays the “Search” sidebar; Windows Key and K displays Devices; Windows Key and I displays Settings — a super-quick way to shut down your PC.

Also, here’s a bonus one – If you right-click on the lower-left-hand icon within Windows 8’s Desktop Mode, the one that would otherwise be where a start button would be, you can access a useful menu of Power User shortcuts: Control Panel, Task Manager, your System configuration screen, and more! If you’re feeling lazy, pressing the Windows Key and X simultaneously will pull up the same menu.

Bring the Start Button back to Windows 8

If you want to bypass the Windows 8 Start Screen, remove your ability to accidentally pull up its sidebars, and restore your Windows Start Button to a place of prominence in the corner of Windows 8’s Desktop Mode, there’s one free app that can perform all this magic: Classic Shell. Give it an install, and you’ll find a wealth of easy-to-manage options for removing some of Windows 8’s more controversial user interface elements.

Ditch the Windows 8 Lock Screen

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of that annoying Lock Screen – a pointless addition to the Windows 8 operating system for those that lack the capability to swipe a finger up their screens and make it go away. Open up Windows 8’s Group Policy Editor (type “gpedit.msc” on your Start Screen) and navigate to the following location: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization. You’ll want to then double-click on the policy called, “Do not display the lock screen.” Change the option to “Enabled,” and then click OK. Goodbye, annoying-but-pretty extra step between you and logging into your operating system.

Take Easy Screenshots with Windows 8

Tech writers everywhere rejoice at this little trick. In previous versions of Windows, taking a screenshot was a multi-step affair: You had to Print Screen the entire desktop, open up your favorite photo manipulation program (or Paint), paste your giant screen capture, crop down to whatever you even wanted to take shot of to begin with, and save your image as a file.

Bleck.

In Windows 8, you merely need to hit the Windows Key and Print Screen on your keyboard. The operating system will automatically take a shot of your full screen and dump an image file into a “Screenshots” folder within the Pictures folder of your account’s User folder. Say that three times fast.

Redo Your New

For whatever reason – and maybe this is just an issue I’m having – but Windows 8 doesn’t populate your right-click context menu’s “New” submenu very well. I’ve installed the Office 2013 preview, but still can’t right-click on a folder and create a new Word or Excel document from scratch.

I’ve also found a way to fix that, and to fix it for any file type that you want to add to your default right-click context menu.

Hit up your registry (again, type “regedit.exe” in your Start Screen), and navigate on over to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Find the folder of the file type you want to add as an option to the “New” submenu previously described. Right click on that folder/file type and hover over “New,” then select “Key.” Right-click on the key and rename it to the phrase, “ShellNew.” Within this “ShellNew” folder, right-click on the right-most pane of the Registry Editor, hover over “New,” and select “String Value.” Rename this String Value “NullFile.” That’s it!

Now, you’ll find this file type as one of the available options under your right-click context menu > New sub-menu.

Automatically Log Into Windows 8

We’re big fans of security at Tecnobits. But if you’re the only one who will ever have physical access to your computer – or you really trust your cat – there’s no need for Windows 8 to mandate that you always type in a password or PIN to log on.

You can instruct the operating system to bypass the password step of your login process by first typing in “netplwiz” on your Start Screen. In the “User Accounts” screen that pops up (once you’ve clicked on the “netplwiz” icon, uncheck the box for, “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.”

Stop Opening My Files

Let’s face it: For a desktop or laptop user, Windows 8’s default applications for multimedia are absolutely horrible. Photos is crap. Video is crap. Music is crap. And it’s annoying that, in some instances, these are the apps that load when you double-click a file within File Explorer.

Let’s change that.

Type “default programs” into your Windows 8 Start Screen and click on the subsequent icon that appears in the search results. Click on the “Set your default programs” option. Now, pick an application on the left that you want to use to open your file types – like Windows Media Player, for example. Or, if you’re fancy, perhaps you have an app like Media Player Classic already installed and waiting.

Once you’ve picked your app, you can either select the “Choose defaults for this program” option to piecemeal together the different file types that the app should pull up. Or you can also do what we do: the nuclear option. Click on the “Set this program as Default” choice, and said app will now open up all the files it can possibly open up. Everything. The whole kit and caboodle, as it were.

So that’s our Windows 8 tweak guide. Did we miss any helpful tips? Let us know in the comments section below!

Share prices for Facebook have dropped another five per cent in the wake of the employee lockout coming to an end. This saw them drop to $20.94, far below its original offering price of $38 per share.

Until now, only executives and investors were allowed to sell off their shares in the social network, but this week – after the NASDAQ was reopened in the wake of hurricane Sandy – certain employees were able to sell off theirs. However not all of them were able to, with the others expected to offer theirs up next month. This will signify the end of the biggest lockup, with some 777 million shares becoming available for trading. While it’s likely that not all of them will be offered, a large portion of them surely will.

Despite this drop to just over $20, this isn’t the lowest the stock has fallen. After the first lockup of investors and executives was ended back in August, the stock fell to its lowest level at $19.69, according to TechCrunch. Since then it has recovered somewhat, hitting $21.94 before this latest drop.

Zuckerberg: Putting a brave face on things

To help solidify the stock, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he doesn’t plan to offload any of his 444 million shares over the next year. Of course sceptics would suggest that he did this as a matter of survival. If he had gone ahead and sold even a portion of his stock at such low levels, it could indicate to the rest of the stock holders that the bottom had well and truly dropped out of Facebook.

With Surface RT, you give up a certain amount of flexibility in terms of what types of applications and software you can install, but what about compatibility with third-party devices? Armed with a full-size USB port, microSD card slot, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, Microsoft insists its Surface RT line is compatible with a large number of devices, and now you can see for yourself by visiting the company’s Windows Compatibility Center.

The site lists thousands of items deemed compatible with Windows RT and products like Surface RT that run the OS. There are over 40,000 items by my count, broken down into several categories that include:

• Cameras & Photo
• Printers & Scanners
• MP3 & Media Players
• TV Devices
• Communication Devices
• Mice, Keyboard, & Input Devices
• Displays
• Networking
• Graphics Cards & Components
• Storage Devices

You can also search a product by name, as well as view Windows 8 and Windows 7 compatibility (notice the pull-down menu in the upper-right corner of the website). In addition, incompatible products are listed too (like the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 Webcam), and some are listed as having “Limited Functionality.”

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I don’t think my articles attacking Square Enix’s game tracking practices are entirely to blame for this, but if you guys want to say so that’s very kind. The Final Fantasy publisher, has announced that it expects to take a £42 million hit for the first half of this financial year.

The company expects to make around £475 million in total sales for the period – it’s currently sitting at around £450 million – but there has apparently been big losses in the form of unprecedented operating expenses and lower than predicted HD game sales. The high price of the Japanese Yen hasn’t helped either.

Held hostage by the Yen's high value, Japanese companies have been struggling in recent months

While Square didn’t out which game had been selling worse than expected, considering it’s biggest release so far in 2012 has been Sleeping Dogs, we can guess that that is the title in question. However, it’s also conceivable that with all the clamour for a remake of Final Fantasy VII, perhaps Square thought that it’s PC re-release with micro-transactions would do better than it did. Or maybe it was the poorly reviewed Risen 2: Dark Waters.

Despite the doom and gloom however, CVG reports that by the end of the year, Square Enix expects to be operating at a profit of just under £30 million.

But correlation does not imply causation.

A new as-yet-unpublished study claims that teens who have smartphones are more likely to set up hookups. It may be because smartphones make it simpler.

Specifically, teenagers with Internet access on their phones are two times more likely to have sex with someone they met online, compared with teens who don’t use smartphones. But the study author was quick to point out that smartphones are likely not causing risky teen sex.

Correlation does not always imply causation–these teens might be finding sex partners in different ways if they didn’t have smartphones. Maybe they needed smartphones to manage all their encounters. Or maybe the same factors that make them likely to have a smartphone, with all its attendant social networking, could also make them more likely to be sexually active.

The study also found teens who have Internet access on their phones are more likely to be sexually active, but that may not have a whit to do with the actual phones. Forty-seven percent of teens who owned a smartphone said they were sexually active, compared with 35 percent of those who don’t own a smartphone–not really a huge gap.

Rather, smartphones are an easy avenue for teenagers to set up sexual encounters, according to researcher Eric Rice, of the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. In other words, these teens might set up their sexual encounters in a different way if they didn’t have instant, constant Internet. Smartphones aren’t necessarily making them more promiscuous.

Rice and colleagues queried 1,839 high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, one-third of whom said they had a smartphone. Of those, 5 percent said they used the Internet to seek sex partners, and 17 percent said they had been approached for sex online.

If there’s one key takeaway here, it’s that sex education should start including discussions about the risks of seeking sex online. As Rice points out, parents have lots of ways to monitor and control their kids’ Internet access on home computers, but that doesn’t translate to cellphones. The study was presented at a meeting of the American Public Health Association.

[NBC]