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Windows 8, with its overhauled interface and rainbow landscape of glittering Live Tiles, turned traditional computing on its head -and the redesign ushered in a new batch of tips and tricks designed to make the most of the operating system’s touch-based user interface. But Microsoft’s UI moves were a bit too bold, and less than a year after the launch of Windows 8, the Windows 8.1 update landed, bringing a ton of new features and a slew of subtle revamps.

   Yes, the old Windows 8 tips and tricks still work, but Windows 8.1 has a profusion of handy new tools of its own. Roll up your sleeves and prepare to become a Windows 8.1.

Let’s start with the basics. Microsoft offers a seemingly endless parade of built-in keyboard shortcuts, but mastering the 10 shortcuts listed right will speed your system surfing.

Windows 8.1 lets you effectively banish the Start screen and boot directly to your desktop, but the option to do so is hidden in an arcane location. Right-click the desktop taskbar and select Properties. In the window that opens select the Navigation tab. The option you want to select is ‘When I sign in or close all applications on a screen, go to the desktop instead of Start’, but take the time to thoroughly explore this ‘Desktop power menu’. It has a ton of desktop-friendly tools, such as the ability to disable Windows 8.1’s upper ‘hot corners’ or to launch the All Apps screen rather than the Start screen when you click the Start button.

All Apps filtering powers

Windows 8.1 seriously levelled-up the All App screen’s usefulness – and changed the way you access it. To find the All Apps screen in Windows 8, you had to wend your way to an obscure right-click menu, but in Windows 8.1 you can find it either by clicking the small downward-pointing arrow at the bottom of the Modern Start screen or by launching it from the desktop’s Start button (if you configured the button to do so using the aforementioned Desktop power menu). Once you’re there, you’ll see that the All Apps screen has new filtering options to help you find your chosen apps in no time. Click the By name field next to the word Apps in the top-left corner of the All Apps screen to reveal a drop-down menu of sorting options. Additionally, the Desktop power menu lets you configure the All Apps screen to display desktop programs first, so that it behaves more like a quasi Start menu.

The All Apps screen is also where you go to stock the Windows 8.1 Start screen with apps. Unlike Windows 8, Windows 8.1 will not automatically dump Live Tiles for newly installed apps on the Start screen. You need to manually do so by going to the All Apps screen, right-clicking on an app, and selecting ‘Pin to Start’.

Hate digging through the Charms bar to shut down your PC? Then use a new option in Windows 8.1’s Quick Access power menu. Right-click the Start button in the lower-right corner of your screen, then hover over Shut down or sign out and choose whether you want to sign out of your user account, put the PC to sleep, shut it down or restart it.

The Bing Smart Search capability baked into Windows 8.1 scours through your local files, the Modern UI apps on your PC, and a Bing web search, and then collates all the results into a single, easy-to-read interface. Bing Smart Search will even drudge up streaming videos and songs via Windows 8.1’s Music and Video apps. It’s a seriously useful tool. But along with all the new and improved search capabilities comes one big downer for the privacy-conscious: Bing’s web results come with ads, and your local searches can be anonymised and sent back to Microsoft. To avoid this, open the Settings charm (in the Charms bar) and head to ‘Change PC settings’, ‘Search and apps’, Search. In the right-hand pane, click the slider that says ‘Get search suggestions and web results from Bing’ to turn off the web and Modern app search components. If you don’t want to remove those completely, you could also consider modifying the personalisation options under ‘Your search experience’.

Speaking of Modern apps, Windows 8’s app management was a bear. Resizing or deleting apps was a tortuous, one-at-a-time process, and you could never see just how much space a Modern app consumed – a major problem on space-constrained devices. Windows 8.1 fixes both those problems. Here’s how it works. Right-click on the Start screen, then select the Customise button at the bottom right of the screen to enter editing mode. While the button is active, you can move, resize, unpin or uninstall Live Tiles in bulk, or kill their ‘live’ aspect to leave them as static app launchers. Alternatively, open the Charms bar on the right side of your screen and select Settings, ‘Change PC Settings’, ‘Search and apps’, App Sizes to see just how much space each of your Modern apps is gobbling up. Clicking an individual app on this screen gives you the option to uninstall it.

In Windows 8, grabbing a Modern app at the top of the screen and dragging it off the bottom closed it completely. In Windows 8.1, doing so leaves the app in its current state–the same as if you minimised a window on the desktop. If you want to restart an app, you’ll need to drag it to the bottom of the screen and hold it there until the picture of the app rotates to reveal its Live Tile icon. Or you can use the <Alt>-<F4> shortcut to close an app with your keyboard alone.

Windows Libraries are a tremendous tool for turning the chaos of far-flung folders into sweet organisation – but by default they’re hidden in Windows 8.1. To drag them back into the light, open File Explorer and click View, Navigation Pane, ‘Show Libraries in the Ribbon menu’.

Note that Windows 8.1 parts company with its forebears by not including Public folders in its libraries. To add those (or any other folder location) to a central library, open File Explorer and right-click the library to which you’d like to add the folder. Click Properties, then click the Add button in the window that appears. From there, just browse to the folder you want to add.

Windows 8.1’s libraries pack a new-to- Windows hidden feature as well: the ability to add removable media, such as USB drives and SD cards. This addition makes sense in an age when Windows often resides on storage-squeezed tablets and hybrids.

Microsoft still doesn’t let you open Modern apps in desktop windows as does Stardock’s ModernMix (www.stardock.com/modernmix/), although rumour has it that the feature could show up in Windows 8.2. You can use Windows 8.1’s Snap multitasking feature to run Modern apps alongside the desktop ‘app’, however. To use Snap to run an app, click and ‘grab’ the app at the top of the screen, and pull it

down until the image shrinks to take up only a portion of the screen. Then drag it to the left- or right edge of the screen, depending on which side of your display you’d like the app snapped.

In Windows 8, Modern apps could snap to occupy only 30 percent of the screen, but Windows 8.1 lets you dynamically allocate screen size to ‘snapped’ apps by dragging the black bar separating them to the left or right. Yes, you can now have two apps each take up 50 percent of the screen, a useful improvement indeed. Computers with a high screen resolution can even ‘snap’ three or more apps

simultaneously.

If you hate the gargantuan Ribbon menu splashed across the top of Windows 8.1’s File Explorer, just dump it. Open File Explorer, right-click anywhere on the Ribbon menu, and select ‘Minimise the Ribbon’. The Ribbon isn’t truly gone, just banished from your sight. You can temporarily recall the Ribbon by selecting any of the text menu items, such as File, Share or View.

Windows 8.1 is jam-packed with a profusion of new apps. Some of them, such as Calculator, Alarms and the Help+Tips tutorial app, are straightforward and do exactly what you’d expect. But others

include some deceptively powerful tools. Take the Food & Drink app: beyond being simply a vessel for recipes, it can also help you manage shopping lists and meal plans, and it includes a helpful hands-free mode that lets you wave your hands in front of your device’s webcam to ‘swipe’ through recipe steps in the kitchen without smudging your tablet or keyboard.

The Health & Fitness app provides detailed workout schedules for all levels of fitness and has a variety of useful tracking capabilities. Want to keep tabs on your daily food intake, your exercise results, or even your weight, cholesterol, blood pressure or vaccinations? Health & Fitness does it all.

Windows 8.1 includes the latest and greatest version of the Modern-style Internet Explorer, and while Internet Explorer 11 looks an awful lot like Internet Explorer 10 on the surface, it has some nifty new features if you look deep enough. By default, Internet Explorer 11 now leans on OneDrive to let you sync your open tabs across multiple Windows 8.1 devices (assuming you’re signed into your Microsoft account, of course). The browser also now lets you open links in a new window if you right-click on them – automatically opening another instance of the browser in Snap view. Perhaps even more handy is Internet Explorer 11’s new Reading View, which strips out ads and website formatting to display pages in a far more reader-friendly fashion. It’s seriously great. To enable Reading View on any web page, just click the open-book icon to the right of the address bar. Speaking of reading, the Modern version of Internet Explorer 11 has a symbiotic relationship with the new Reading List app, which allows you to save web pages for perusing at a later date. To send a page you’re looking at in Internet Explorer 11 to Reading List, open the Charms bar, select Share, then click the Reading List icon.

Want your documents to be available to you by default everywhere you go? No problem. Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud-storage service is more deeply integrated into Windows 8.1, so automatically saving all your files to it is easy. Open the Charms bar and go to Settings, ‘Change PC Settings’, OneDrive (this may still show as SkyDrive), File storage. In the right panel, set the ‘Save documents to OneDrive by default’ slider to On to start synching. You can find OneDrive mobile apps in Google Play (https://play.google.com/skydrive) or iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/Skydrive).

But Windows 8.1’s cloud-friendliness doesn’t end there. OneDrive’s cloud-storage- and synching abilities take a more prominent role in Windows 8.1, providing the backbone for Microsoft’s multi-device vision of the future. Beyond merely synching your documents and Internet Explorer tabs, OneDrive can now sync detailed app- and in-app purchase information across devices, along with your Start screen tiles and layout, so that every new PC or tablet you use feels familiar. The service can also automatically save all pictures you’ve taken with your Camera app. Just open the Charms bar and head to Settings, ‘Change PC Settings’, OneDrive, Sync Settings to view your options.

OneDrive is also integrated into Windows 8.1’s File Explorer, removing the need for a discrete OneDrive desktop program. One problem, though: while it looks as if all your cloud-saved files are also stored locally in the OneDrive desktop folder, your files are actually stored in the cloud, with only small symbolic link ‘hooks’ saved directly on your machine. While that arrangement is great for devices with space constraints, PC users probably want to keep a local backup, too. To do so, just right-click on the OneDrive icon in the left pane of the desktop File Explorer, then select the ‘Make available offline’ option. Your precious data will start downloading to your hard drive immediately. You can also right-click individual files and folders and choose to make them online-only or available offline if you want to granularly select files to store locally.

If you’re on a PC, navigating your files is a breeze -just open File Explorer on the desktop. But while Windows tablets also feature the legacy Windows desktop, its small menus weren’t designed to be navigated with fat fingers, which can make local browsing a pain. The lack of a Modern-style File Explorer in Windows 8 only exacerbated the issue. Windows 8.1 still lacks a discrete File Explorer app, but never fear: new capabilities introduced to the baked-in OneDrive app offer finger-friendly file browsing. Just launch the OneDrive Modern app, choose the OneDrive name in the upper-left corner, and select This PC from the resulting drop-down menu to see your device’s files in a touch-ready tiled format.

Newly installed programs have a nasty tendency to intertwine themselves in your PC’s startup process, launching to life as your computer does. Over time, this can severely bog down your boot time. Now you can combat the software-loading slog without resorting to third-party software. Press <Control>-<Shift>-<Esc> to bring up the Task Manager, then open the Startup tab. Windows will tell you the performance impact of each program installed on your PC, explain whether they launch at boot and, if you click on a program, give you the option to enable or disable it from launching at startup.

Windows 8.1 also adds an option to turn your lock screen into a personal slideshow. To show off your pics, open the Charms bar and head to Settings, ‘Change PC Settings’, ‘PC and devices’, Lock screen. Under the selection of lock-screen pictures is a slider labelled ‘Play a slide show on the lock screen’. Slide it to On and use the options to choose where it will grab pictures from and more.

Windows 8.1 now automatically updates your Modern UI apps. It’s even smart enough to know not to update over a mobile-broadband connection. But if the idea of non-sanctioned updates drives you bonkers, you can switch off auto-updates. Open the Charms bar within the Windows Store and go to Settings, App Updates. Move the ‘Automatically update my apps’ slider to No.

If your laptop or tablet packs a cellular connection, a new tethering feature can help your share your mobile data signal with other devices by turning your device into an ad hoc Wi-Fi hotspot. Open the Charms bar, then head to Settings, PC Settings, Network, Connections. If a mobile connection is available, select it and set the ‘Share this connection’ slider to On to start sharing that bandwidth. You can also customise the name and password for your temporary network.

Microsoft made it easy to find the system image backup tool in Windows 8-then dubbed ‘Windows 7 file recovery’ – by simply doing a system search for ‘recovery’. In Windows 8.1 Microsoft has buried it deeper, hiding the feature within the Control Panel’s File History options and changing the feature’s name to System Image Backup. Open the Modern Start screen and type ‘File History’. Click on the File History entry in the search results on the right of your screen to open a Control Panel window. Then, simply click the System Image Backup option in the lower-left corner of the window. From there, the wizard will walk you through the system image creation and backup process.