Category: Windows 8

Windows 8 BitLocker is a convenient way to protect your drives from the snooping eyes of other people. You can encrypt not only your hard disks but also the portable disk drives with BitLocker. For added security, you should keep changing the password for a BitLocker encrypted disk from time to time. By changing the password periodically, you can eliminate the possibility of someone, who knows your old password, from accessing the protected drives.

Windows 8 provides an easy way to encrypt your hard disks and other portable disk drives (like USB keys) with inbuilt BitLocker encryption system. BitLocker is drive encryption system that is able to encrypt the contents of your disk drives so that only you can access them. The encrypted contents of a disk drive are accessible only after you enter a password or unlock it using a smart card.

Windows 8 does not allow you to change the guest account picture or the default new user account picture which is assigned to a newly created account by default. These pictures are hardcoded and cannot be changed through any regular settings in Windows. But using our freeware Default Account Picture Changer, you can change the user pictures for the guest account as well as a new user account.

When you create a new user account through the PC Settings in Windows 8, it always creates the account to be a standard user account. This is done keeping the safety in mind, so that you do not accidentally create an administrator level account. But if you want to then you can always change the account type of a user from standard to administrator and vice versa.

Windows 8 comes with Internet Explorer 10 pre-installed, without giving you any options to choose a third party browser like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera. This is partly because Internet Explorer is not only used as a web browser but its various components are also utilized by Windows itself. But if you do not like Internet Explorer, then you can always remove it from Windows 8.

The time zone is a geographical zone throughout which the same standard time is used. For example, CET is the Central European Time zone for many countries in the central Europe (for example, France and Germany) where the time is always UTC+1:00. There are twenty four different time zones in the world. To keep your PC on the correct time it must be configured to have the correct time zone. Fortunately, changing the time zone in Windows 8 is very easy.

Windows 8 like many other operating systems keeps the time correct by synchronizing your local time with the online time servers like the ones served by US government. Windows 8, like its predecessors, uses the Microsoft time server by default. The Microsoft time server works very good but its not as fast as the pool of time servers supplied by the ntp.org site. If you want to change your Windows time servers to the faster and more reliable ones, then follow these steps.

If you install a third party web browser like Firefox or Opera but do not like them very much, then you can set Internet Explorer to be your default web browser again. By making it your default browser, you tell Windows to open all the internet links, HTML files and supported protocols using the Internet Explorer.

The Family Safety feature in Windows 8 is very useful if you have young children in home. It can be used to block unsuitable websites, games, apps and more. You can also use it to limit the amount of time your kids spend on computer. But if you accidentally switch it on for a user then that user will not able to visit the websites he/she wants to. You can turn off the Family Safety filters for any user very easily.