Windows 8.1

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Windows 8.1: The Complete Guide

Windows 8.1

Essential advice fo Windows r and 8.1 8

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Master the new Windows with 164 pages of in-depth guides for anyone – beginner to expert

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guide to windows 8.1

Everything you need to know about the OS

Contents 08

123

demystify skydrive

Discover how SkyDrive’s file management works in Win 8.1

Speed up your PC

Use ReadyBoost to keep your computer running fast

22

4

Explore 8.1

Get more

8 Why you need Windows 8.1 20 Browse the Windows Store 2.0 22 Demystify SkyDrive 26 Create a feast 29 Get Skypeing 32 Make more of Internet Explorer 11 36 Delve into the redesigned Mail 40 Edit images in Photos 44 Bring back the Start menu

50 Customise Windows 58 Take control of your Lock screen 60 Mastering the desktop 62 Secure your computer 64 50 new things to do with Windows 8.1

72 Exploring Explorer 74 Mastering the ribbon 76 Power up Windows 8.1 84 Improving your audio

restore, refresh, reinstall!

Restore your computer to its former glory

92 the lock screen

Take control of your Lock screen with these helpful hints and tips

social networks

102

Make new connections and get better acquainted

Improve your audio

84

Windows 8.1 makes managing audio easy

58 117

share files

Use HomeGroups to share files between Win 8 and 8.1 devices

Basics 86 Improving security 88 Set up a virtual helpdesk 92 Restore, refresh or reinstall Windows 100 Getting more creative 102 Improving social horizons 104 Take charge of your network

108 Transfer files and settings 111 Slim down your Start screen 114 Master search in Windows 8.1 117 Share files in Windows 8.1 120 Set up Family Safety 123 Speed up your PC 126 Calibrate your monitor 130 Use touchscreen gestures 132 Save files with File History 135 Synchronise your devices

138 Master Media Player 142 Organise your photographs 146 Make Windows tough to crack 150 Keep in contact 154 Get creative with Paint 158 Master Windows 8.1 shortcuts

5

Learn how to…

Create a feast Discover great recipes and turn your PC or tablet into an electronic cookbook

Works with Windows 8 & 8.1 Windows 8 Pro Windows RT

Find a recipe Launch Food & Drink and tap ‘Browse Recipes’. You can either search for a specific recipe using keywords, or use the filters to restrict the recipes shown. You can choose to cook by a specific method, find a particular course, choose a type of cuisine, pick a main ingredient or combine these and other filters to find the recipe you need.

Follow the recipe Tap a recipe to reveal its ingredients and the time it will take to cook. Swipe left to read the cooking instructions. If you plan to follow the recipe in the kitchen, tap ‘Hands-Free Mode’.

The recipe is converted into a series of steps – swipe the screen or use the left and right cursor keys to move between each step as you follow it.

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Create a feast

Go hands-free If you have a webcam or front-facing camera, you’re asked whether you want to use your camera for true hands-free mode – click ‘Allow’ to do so. Follow the advice given to wave your hand across the camera to move backwards and forwards through the recipe – wave to the left to go forwards, and right to move back a step.

Build a collection Bookmark favourite recipes by right-clicking or tapping and holding their recipe tile and choosing ‘Add to a Collection’, or by clicking ‘Add to Collections’ on the recipe’s summary screen. Collections consist of folders in which you can organise your recipes – click ‘Create a new Collection’ to add one, or select an existing folder to file the recipe away.

Add your own You can also store your own collated or created recipes in Food & Drink – unlike the other recipes in your collection, these remain private. From the app’s homescreen, tap ‘Add a recipe’. You can take a photo or add an image, give your recipe a name, and then manually type in the ingredients, steps and any additional notes.

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Learn how to‌

Secure your computer Get to grips with the security tools in Windows 8.1 Works with Windows 8 & 8.1 Windows 8 Pro

M

icrosoft spends a lot of effort improving the security mechanisms in its operating systems. Windows 8.1 builds on the security enhancements of previous releases to protect you against malicious bits of software, such as viruses, spyware and other nasties out there.

Microsoft’s Trustworthy computing team has outlined the security improvements in Windows 8.1, and broken them down into four categories: trustworthy hardware, modern access control, protecting sensitive data, and malware resistance. The first three are focused on enterprise users, and are geared towards BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenarios.

The good news for home users is that Microsoft is also beefing up its built-in malware resistance. For one, Internet Explorer 11 will ship with the Enhanced Protection Mode enabled by default, which is designed to safeguard your data even if an attacker has managed to compromise the browser or one of its add-ons. Secondly, Microsoft has also improved its built-in Windows Defender tool.

Using Windows Defender

Windows Defender was upgraded to become an antivirus program with the release of

1

Download and install

Malwarebytes is available as a free download, so pay a visit to www.malwarebytes.org and grab it from there. When installing the program on your PC, make sure you uncheck the box that enables the free trial of the Pro version.

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Review settings

The program downloads new malware definitions automatically, to keep itself up to date. Switch to the Settings tab to tweak the behaviour of the program, although the default settings should work for most people.

Secure your computer

Windows 8. To bring up the program, type defender on the Windows 8.1 Start screen.

The coloured bar at the top of the Windows Defender interface reflects the protection status of your computer. There are big red warnings if the program is turned off, or your database is out of date. Windows Defender keeps itself updated by automatically downloading new updates to its virus database.

The main interface lists four tabs. From the Home tab, you can run a quick scan or a full scan by selecting the appropriate button and clicking ‘Scan now’. With the custom button, you can scan specific drives, directories, or even individual files.

If Windows Defender finds something objectionable, it moves it into a quarantined area. To view these items, switch to the History tab, select the ‘Quarantined items’ radio button and click the ‘View details’ button. This brings up a list of programs that Windows Defender has taken action on, along with the alert level, and the date. From here you can choose to ‘Remove all quarantined items’, or remove them selectively.

Sometimes Windows Defender might accidentally quarantine a harmless program. In such a case, you can use the ‘Restore’ button to ask Defender to let you continue using the program. This program is now listed as an Allowed item, and Defender will not flag the program in future scans.

Although Windows Defender does a nice job of keeping your system clean, if you are really paranoid about malware, you can use a dedicated anti-malware scanner, such as Malwarebytes (see walkthrough below).

However, there’s a particular type of malware, known as a worm, which specialises in spreading over the network.

Having a well-configured firewall is an essential safeguard against this type of malware. It also protects you against attackers trying to sneak into your computer, who are exploiting the network capabilities of trusted programs.

Tweaking Windows Firewall

Windows Firewall is designed to block unwanted and potentially dangerous connections. Remember how Windows prompts you to choose whether a new network is a home, work or public network? If you choose a public network, where your computer could be a sitting duck for a network attack, the Windows Firewall blocks almost all incoming connections in order to dissuade attackers.

For the most part, there is no need to configure the Windows Firewall. Most programs that need to listen for incoming connections automatically tweak the Windows Firewall to allow such connections during installation. However, Windows does allow users to manually configure the firewall if they want to. To bring up the Windows Firewall controls, type firewall on the Windows 8.1 Start screen. You’ll notice several options in the main interface of the Windows Firewall.

The ‘Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall’ option gives you a list of network-aware programs installed on your PC. Along with these programs are details of whether they’re allowed to communicate over private and public networks. Remember that private From the Security section, you can check on the various Windows 8.1 security tools

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Scan

From the Scanner tab, you can perform either a quick scan of your PC, or a full scan, which is more thorough and takes a fair bit of time to complete. The third type of scan offered, flash scan, is only available to licensed users.

networks are those that allow sharing, while public networks are those over which sharing is restricted.

To change the settings for a program, click ‘Change settings’, then adjust your options.

With ‘Change notification settings’, you can tweak how Windows Firewall alerts you – for example, when a new program is blocked – for both public and private networks. You also get options to either completely block incoming connections, which prevents you from even browsing the internet, or to turn off the firewall altogether.

If you wish to tweak Windows Firewall in greater detail, click on the ‘Advanced settings’ option. Here you can control network traffic in far greater detail by creating firewall rules.

For example, you can restrict traffic to specific ports and from specific IP addresses.

Although incorrect modifications to the Windows Firewall can isolate your computer from the network, don’t be afraid to experiment. You can always select ‘Restore defaults’ to revert the Windows Firewall back to its original settings. ■

Taking action One important component of Windows 8.1 that plays a crucial role in keeping your computer safe and secure is the Windows Action Center. It monitors the most important aspects of the PC and divides them into two broad categories: security and maintenance. You can find the Action Center within the desktop Control Panel, under ‘System and Security’.

When something needs your attention, the Action Center flags up the problem. It colour-codes any warnings that need your attention. Issues flagged with a yellow border could potentially affect the security or performance of the PC, while a red border is used for highlighting critical problems.

In addition to the colour-coding, the Action Center also displays a description of the problem, along with a link to open the configuration window of the relevant tool to resolve the issue.

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Learn how to…

Transfer files and settings It’s easy to move all your documents over from Windows 7

Works with Windows 8 & 8.1 Windows 8 Pro Windows RT

Start Windows Easy Transfer On your old Windows 7 machine, click the ‘Start’ button and in the search box type easy.

From the list that comes up, select ‘Windows Easy Transfer’. Now, from the screen that opens, select ‘Next’ and then choose the method you want to use for transferring your files to your new PC.

Find your documents We’re using ‘An external hard disk or USB flash drive’, because this is the most popular method of transferring files. Select ‘This is my old computer’. and Windows Easy Transfer scans your PC for your files and documents. It lets you know how much space the documents take up, so make sure that your USB drive can handle it.

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Transfer files and settings

Choose what to transfer Windows Easy Transfer is pretty good at guessing what you need to transfer over, but it might include some files that you don’t need, or exclude ones that you do want, so click ‘Customise’ to quickly add or exclude files. You can click ‘Advanced’ for a selection of even more options.

Advanced file selection From the Advanced screen, you can tick or untick any folder you want to move to your new PC. This may seem overwhelming, but it’s a good way to make sure you transfer the essentials. Click the arrow next to any folders you include to get a list of folders and files included. Uncheck any folders you don’t want.

Click ‘Save’ to finish.

Save your files and settings Click ‘Next’ if you want to add a password to protect your files, then click ‘Save’ and select where you want to store the settings. Plug in the USB drive you want to use and select it, then press ‘Save’. Windows Easy Transfer now saves your files to the location you chose.

Depending on the device, this may take a few minutes to complete.

109

Learn how to…

Organise your photographs Use the Photos app to manage your expanding collection of snaps

Works with Windows 8 & 8.1 Windows 8 Pro Windows RT

Find the app The Photos app should be sitting on your Start screen – look for a tile with a blue background. We’ve dragged it into its own column here for ease of identification. Your app might have its Live tile activated, particularly if you’ve added images to your Pictures folder, so look out for a tile with personal images on if you can’t find it.

Your first run If you haven’t added any pictures yet, Photos probably looks a bit bare, there’s just a dark screen and a folder for screenshots. Prove to yourself that it’s working by taking a screenshot. To do this, press [Windows]+[Print Screen] together, or hold the [Windows] button and press the volume rocker if you’re using a tablet.

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Organise your photographs

Find your pictures By default, screenshots are saved to a folder in your Pictures library. You can open the desktop and have a poke around if you’d like to see it for yourself. You should see that the screenshots you’ve taken have been added to the Pictures library section of the Photos app.

Copy more pictures to that folder, and they should follow suit.

Online or offline Within the Photos app once more, hit the ‘Pictures’ link at the top left of the window to switch between your Pictures folder and your online-only SkyDrive folder. To switch to the one you want to use, just click it. The view will remain the same between the two, so it will feel as if you’re browsing seamlessly.

Organise snaps You can add new folders for your main picture folders really easily - just right-click or swipe up from the bottom of the screen and choose ‘New folder’ from the menu. Give it a name, hit ‘Enter’ and then you can go inside the folder to add pictures. You can also copy and paste between folders from the same menu.

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