Microsoft Windows Tweaks, Tips and How-To Articles - Page 3

Attention security professionals and penetration testers, believe it or not, but Kali Linux is now available in the Microsoft App store for Windows 10.  The suite of security assessment and penetration tools can natively run on Windows 10 thanks to the work of the Windows system for Linux, also known as WSL. While there are some limitations, Kali Linux brings a lot of new command line utilities that will be very helpful to the right professional. In addition, it is possible to leverage the XFCE desktop manager for a more "native" Kali Linux experience. 

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If you are a Windows Insider you may have noticed that on the latest Windows 10 fast preview build number 17112 that your Windows Store icon is completely missing.  Not only is the icon missing, but the entire app is broken for many users prompting Microsoft to post a special fix. 

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If you have a touch display and would like more precise control of your mouse cursor you can turn on a hidden virtual touchpad that can be found in the latest versions of Windows 10. This virtual touchpad comes complete with virtual right and left mouse buttons.  Another great use of the virtual touchpad is with legacy games and applications that don’t work well with a touchscreen. 

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How would you like to pin contacts directly to your taskbar so you can easily communicate with them over Skype or email? Included in the latest update to Windows 10 is the capability to pin people directly to the taskbar.  Best of all, you can click on their icon in the taskbar, and communicate instantly with them over skype or email all within the popup window.

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Roaming Profiles were an amazing invention that first appeared back on July 27th, 1993 with the release of Windows NT 3.1. Designed to make it easy for a user to roam from one computer to another, Roaming Profiles provided a synchronization capability that copied user profile information and application settings from the local computer to a central Windows file server. This synchronization would occur upon login and logoff and worked perfectly if you worked for a very small company and sat within 50 feet of the file server. 

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With the release of the Microsoft Edge browser on iOS and Android, you can now easily transition from using the mobile browser over to your Windows 10 PC with an awesome feature called Continue on PC. This is very useful when you are browsing a site on your phone, but would like to move over to your Windows 10 PC without missing a beat. In order to set this up, you need the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (build 16299) or newer and an Android or iOS device that supports the Microsoft Edge mobile app. 

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With the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft switched to a new release cycle with major releases that occur about twice a year. All of these updates are released under the Windows 10 brand which can make it a little confusing to determine which version of Windows 10 you have. But there is a simple trick to identify when your version of Windows 10 was released. 

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It happens every few months.  My operating system drive runs out of space, and I must begin the hunt for things to delete or move to another drive. As a first step using a cleanup utility such as CCleaner is helpful, but it only finds the easy targets such as temporary files. Unfortunately, deleting these files does not typically result in a major impact on free space.  For the more difficult second step, I like to use storage space utilization tools to manually determine what I can delete or move.

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Did you know the NTFS file system used by Windows 10 can transparently compress your files to save disk space? Windows included compression in the NTFS file system for years but the complex options that provide the real value were hidden in a command line utility known as compact.exe. If you are a command line ninja I suggest taking a look at compact.exe /? to learn about the options.  For everyone else, there is a very useful graphical interface called Compact GUI. 

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If you are among the millions of “cord cutters” that are saying goodbye to cable and satellite, or if you just want to gain access to the dozens of free channels broadcast over-the-air then this article is for you.  Similar to tuning in over-the-air channels on a TV you will need an antenna and a tuner to receive local TV channels. In order to watch TV on Windows 10 I like to use HD Homerun network tuners along with the Windows 10 universal app. I prefer the HDHomeRun network tuners made by SiliconDust because they can be used by multiple people within your home, you just need to plug them into your home router.  No need to install any extra hardware in your PC. 

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