Microsoft now offers students and teachers of qualifying organizations a free Office 365 Education subscription. Office 365 Education includes includes Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher, and OneNote. Users can install the software on up to five PCs or Macs and five mobile devices such as an iPad or Android tablet. Users also receive a 1 TB OneDrive online storage drive for the life of the...
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If you are a fan of minimalist desktop experiences, hiding the desktop icons are an easy way to clean up the Windows interface. Instead of saving everything to your desktop, use the default profile folders such as downloads and documents. Actually hiding all the icons on your desktop is a very simple customization hidden in the right-click context menu. Just right-click on the desktop, select View...
Read MoreNow that the Start Menu is back in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, Tweaks.com Start still provides a lot of utility for any power user. Convenient jumplist items help any Windows user quickly access important settings and utilities. New in version 1.9 (February 2015), we included the ability to show the desktop when you click on the taskbar icon, just like the old Show Desktop icon in Windows XP.
Read MoreGroup policy and Active Directory are very important in any organization with more than a few computers. When I loaded Windows 8 on my work PC one of the first tasks I had to do was install the Group Policy Management client (GPMC) and the AD tools such as Active Directory Users and Computers MMC. The two tools that I need to manage our domain based group policies and AD accounts. Installing the...
Read MoreHyper-v is a great free hypervisor that allows you to run virtual machines on Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. I use Hyper-v to power virtual machines that I use for development and testing and recently ran into an issue with very slow network performance on my new system. The host system performed without any issues, but the virtual machines running on top experienced very slow network performance...
Read MoreThe Windows 8 taskbar has a clean appearance, displaying only the icons of pinned and opened applications group together neatly. From a design perspective, it is light-years ahead of the Windows XP taskbar. But when viewed from a usability perspective, some may find the missing labels a step backwards. Hidden in taskbar options, is a setting that can give you the best of both worlds by retaining the...
Read MoreJump lists are a major component of the taskbar in Windows 8. When you right-click on an application icon, you are presented with a number of options relevant to that app. Depending on the app, different items are displayed. Microsoft Word displays recently opened office documents, Internet Explorer and Chrome display recently visited web sites. The number of items that display in the list are easily...
Read MoreIt can be annoying if you are a frequent user of the number pad keys when you log into your PC as by default, NUM lock is turned off on the login screen. This is even more annoying now that Windows 10 is promoting logging in with a PIN when everyone goes through the initial setup.
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Would you like to display an information or legal message to your users before they can login to Windows? "Do not shut down this computer," or how about, "By logging into this computer you are accepting the use policy. Unauthorized use is prohibited. " All of these message can be displayed with the help of a simple security policy edit.
Read MoreMicrosoft built a great interface to customize the colors and lock screen image seen by users after they log in, but they never built an interface to customize the default lock image and color scheme. That is where the Tweaks.com Logon Changer was designed to help. I wrote this free utility to help users of all skills easily change the default logon screen image and customize the color scheme with...
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