Microsoft Windows Tweaks, Tips and How-To Articles - Page 4

Do you use Windows late and night or before bed? Studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light before bed can make it harder to fall asleep.  And if you are working in a dark room, this bright blue light can cause eye strain. Windows 10 Creators Update includes a new feature called Night Light to solve this problem. Night light automatically adjusts the amount of blue light your screen displays in the evening.

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Microsoft released the Windows 10 Creators Update (AKA version 1703, build 15063) to the public on April 5th, 2017. The fully automated update via Windows Update is not yet available (you must wait until April 10th), but you can trigger the update manually now.  In addition, you can create bootable USB media or a DVD ISO file for a fresh install. 

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I previously wrote about building the ultimate micro PC that performed great in just about every benchmark except for graphics. At that time, graphics performance was not very important to me, my Xbox One was my primary gaming device.  But as of today, that is no longer the case.  I have returned to the world of PC gaming and will take you step-by-step through building the ultimate Windows 10 micro gaming PC!

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Shopping for a hard to find item on Amazon.com that is always sold out? I was recently on the hunt for an external GPU enclosure that would show up in small quantities on Amazon.  After failing to snag one by randomly checking periodically, I figured there must be a better way. Microsoft Flow to the rescue!

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The Windows 10 "Creators" update (spring 2017) delivers a number of advancements and new benefits, but many believe the amount of ads are starting to get out of control. I previously wrote about how to disable Start Menu ads in earlier versions of Windows 10, but with the Creators Update you may notice ads on the lock screen, app tiles, action center, and even in file explorer. If you have had enough of these "suggestive" ads, then this article is for you. I'm going to show you how to quickly disable these ads for good. 

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If you use Storage Spaces in Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 you may have to perform maintenance on the pool when you add or remove drives to a storage pool. Shortly after adding a third drive to my storage pool I started receiving insufficient disk space errors when trying to copy files to the storage space virtual drive. 

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I have grown to be a fan of Hyper-V over the years.  It has broad hardware support, costs nothing extra,  and can easily be enabled on Windows Server.  This makes it a prime candidate for anyone with a home lab.  My setup is built on Windows Server 2016 and I use Hyper-V to host a number of virtual servers and workstations for testing.  But like most home labs, and the rest of the PCs in my house, they are not joined to a domain which can make remotely managing Hyper-V difficult. To work around the problem I would typically RDP to the server to use the Hyper-V Manager on the server.  But this is not the best solution. 

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I always set my network location to public when Windows prompts me to classify a network the first time my PC is connected.  This works well most of the time but there are certain Windows features that require the network location to be set to private to function such as PowerShell Remoting.  If you need to change your network location setting from public to private, the easiest method is to use the HomeGroup settings window. 

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Every day we use more and more data.  I’m talking about all the messages, documents and pictures we create or receive from others. A lot of this data is highly valuable, such as family videos and pictures or even your tax documents. All of this must be stored securely and safely. After all, we don’t want a disk drive issue to result in a loss of this valuable data. So how do we protect it?

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Want more control over each app that is playing sound on Windows 10? With the help an easy registry tweak, you can restore the volume mixer from Windows 7 that provide more flexibility than the simplified control that replaced it in Windows 10. 

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