Things you need to know about windows 10

Things you need to know about windows 10

1. Get chatty with Cortana

Cortana arrives on the desktop! As on Windows Phone, you can ask questions about the weather or famous pop stars, get directions home, set reminders, and more besides—you can also get her to turn Windows settings such as wifi and Bluetooth on or off. Click the Cortana button on the Start menu to get started (the “hey Cortana!” voice activation feature is optional).

WINDOWS 10

2. Snap windows to corners

If you’re still restricting your window snapping to either side of the screen, you’re living in the past—Windows is all about quadrants since July 29. Drag open windows into the corners of the screen to pin them to a particular quarter of the display, or use the Windows key+cursor key keyboard shortcuts. You can of course still snap windows side-by-side as well.

3. Use fingerprint:

This is part of the Windows Hello biometric platform, and whether or not you can make use of it depends on the make and model of computer you’re using Windows 10 on. As well as fingerprint sensing, it supports face recognition and even iris scanning, so if computer manufacturers are prepared to build this kind of kit into their systems then Microsoft’s new OS is able to support it.

4. Nanage your notifications:

Windows 10 comes with a revamped Action Center that lives on the right-hand side of the desktop and provides a stream of all the notifications that come in from any application (no more wondering exactly what Dropbox said while you were looking out of the window). Click the notifications icon (a speech bubble) in the system tray to open and configure it.

5. Switch to a Tablet mode:

Windows 8 tried to squash a tablet mode and a desktop mode into one ungainly whole, but everything is far more civilized in the new Windows 10 interface. Open up the aforementioned Action Center to switch manually to tablet mode or get out of it again. In fact you may prefer using the stripped-down tablet mode even when you have a mouse and a keyboard attached.

6. Run Microsoft edge:

Microsoft’s new stripped-down, streamlined browser is a Windows 10 exclusive, and you can’t run it on Windows 8 or below. Only Windows 10 users can take advantage of web page annotations, the clutter-free Reading View and Cortana search integration. Whether it’s enough to oust Chrome or Firefox as your browser-of-choice remains to be seen.