Windows 8 Article Categories

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 subscription. 

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, and then Show desktop icons to remove the check. The icons will be hidden instantly. 

Now 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. 

Group 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 Remote Server Administration tools are now just a simple download so let's get started. 

Hyper-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 with sporadic moments of high latency.