Category: Windows 8

The open source project Classic Shell was originally started to provide the classic Start Menu for Windows Vista and 7 users, but now that the Start Menu has totally disappeared from Windows 8, it has been updated to give the Start Menu for Windows 8 users too. It can provide you all flavors of Start Menu – classic Windows 2000 style, Windows XP style, Windows Vista style or Windows 7 style. There are many many settings to choose from. You can even choose various skins for the Start Menu.

Windows 8 comes with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explore (version 10) pre-installed. Internet Explorer 10 has many new features and is primarily designed for the new Modern interface (previously called Metro interface) of Windows 8. It has a new feature to send the DNT (do not track) header to all websites. What this DNT feature does is asks all websites not to track your website usage which they can use to provide you with improved user experience.

Windows 8 has an automatic updates feature like its predecessors which automatically downloads and installs updates for Windows. This is a great thing as you always stay up-to-date and fully patched against Windows system vulnerabilities. But the default setting in Windows 8 for automatic updates is very annoying. It downloads the updates by itself without asking the user first. Fortunately, you can configure Automatic Updates and let Windows ask you to download updates when they are available.

If your computer becomes infected with malware, then you must first turn off System Restore in order to scan your system with an antivirus scanner like McAfee Stinger. This is because some of the malware can stay redundant in System Restore points even after malware removal. If you want to scan your system for malware with a tool like McAfee Stinger, then you should first turn off System Restore in Windows 8 using these simple instructions.

Activating Windows 8 is a piece of cake. But sometimes when you have to reinstall Windows, you need to re-activate it and re-activation is not always so easy. This is why it is a good idea to keep a backup copy of Windows activation ready at hand. A freeware tool called Advanced Tokens Manager can help you backup your Windows 8 activation and restore it whenever needed.

Windows 8 is set to automatically install drivers from Windows Update service by default. By the time you put in the driver CD that comes with motherboard after installing Windows 8, it is already downloading hundreds of megabytes of drivers from Microsoft. If you do not want this to happen, then you can disable Windows 8 from automatically installing device drivers using Windows Update

The standard package of Windows 8 comes on a DVD disk. So if you do not have an optical drive that supports booting from DVD on your computer, then you cannot install Windows 8 on it. The same is true if for some reason your DVD drive is malfunctioning and it cannot really read from DVD disks. Then there are people who have downloaded Windows 8 ISO online from Microsoft, but they do not want to burn it on a DVD. In all these cases, you can try installing Windows 8 from a USB disk.

Windows 8 boots much faster than the previous versions of Windows. Windows 8 shows a graphical screen when it boots up and shows the welcome message. But not everyone wants to spend time looking at the Windows 8 logo. If you want to disable the Windows boot logo, then you can use the free Boot UI Tuner. It is a freeware application designed for Windows 8 and allows you to change various Boot UI settings for Windows 8.

While Windows 8 has everything that you would expect from an operating system, there are third-party programs that you would prefer to use instead. For example, Chrome browser, Thunderbird email client, Irfanview image viewer etc. To use them as your default media player, you have to set it as your default program for all the file types it supports.